Sunday, April 30, 2006
Outmaneuvered Again
There's always that moment; you find yourself awake at 4am, hanging off the side of the bed, cold, and with a knot in your back nearly big enough to replace the covers you're positive you went to sleep beneath. It's then that you experience the humbling that is sleeping with cats; the realization that you've been outwitted and outpositioned, albeit in your sleep, by a pair of animals with less than 30 pounds and 20 points of IQ between them.
Sleep lethargy is usually sufficient to complete your humiliation, when you scootch back over as best you can, without disturbing the cats, and try to make due with a tiny slip of sheet and just enough mattress to keep your knees from falling off.
Labels: cats
Friday, April 28, 2006
Fatter than ever.
So
it turns out that we (meaning, Americans) really are all fat. Who knew?
The prevalence of obesity in the US states has been under-estimated by as much as 50 percent, according to a study.
In 2002, 28.7 percent of adult American men and 34.5 percent of American women were clinically obese, compared to the conventional estimates for that year of 21.9 percent and 21.2 percent respectively, it says.
The research, published in Britain's Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine by Harvard School of Public Health specialists, blames the discrepancy on low-cost data-collection -- and human nature.
They say that women were under-reporting their weight, and young men were overestimating. That seems odd, but in retrospect it might be true. I weighed maybe 140-145 from about 15-22 and could not gain weight, no matter what I ate. (I was very physically active too, just not in weight-lifting ways.) And at the time, I always wished I were heavier than I was. I don't recall actually lying about it, but if some nosy health researcher had cornered me, I might have been driven to desperate measures.
Using the NHANES to correct the distortions in the broader BRFSS surveys, they found that the incidence of obesity has been greatly under-estimated since 1988, the starting year for the comparison. These corrected figures suggest that true obesity prevalence rose from 16 percent to 28.7 percent from 1988-2002 among men, and from 21.5 percent to 34.5 percent among women.
...
Ezzati expressed particular concern for a swathe of southern US states, where more than a third of the adult population is obese. In 2000, Mississippi (31 percent) and Texas (30 percent) had the highest prevalence of obesity in men. That same year, Mississippi (37 percent), Texas (37 percent), Louisiana (37 percent), District of Columbia (37 percent), Alabama (37 percent) and South Carolina (36 percent) had the most incidence of obesity among women.
As the article points out, this is just obesity, which corresponds to a BMI of 30+, a level of tonnage is more commonly referred to as "land whale." And yes, that's probably an insult to whales, but I don't invent the definitions, I just apply them cruelly and with a very broad brush (more like a roller, in this case).
If you're curious, here's
a BMI calculator where you can simulate yourself, gripe about the results, claim it undercounts your substantial muscle mass (which it does), and then add 20 pounds (9 kilos) just to see if that would push you over the "no more cookies, ever" threshold.
Labels: obesity
Saturday, April 22, 2006
It made me laugh, at least.
I don't normally read this blog and I haven't paid any attention to the campaign in question, but I saw a link to this item and as I said, it made me laugh. So here's a quote
from the post, which quotes a passage from the
Orlando Sentinel. Apparently Katherine Harris, that grotesquely-mascared creature who did all she could to block an accurate recount of the presidential vote in Florida back in 2000, is now running for senate, and it's been a bit of a train wreck. Bad speeches, disastrous public appearances, scandals, and more. Most of her campaign staff has abandoned the sinking ship, and her latest problem is a $3000 lunch she had with a convicted felon lobbyist, then lied about. The punchine:
In her interview Wednesday, Harris acknowledged for the first time that Wade had paid for the dinner at Citronelle, reversing a statement from her congressional spokeswoman earlier this year.
But in the interview, Harris also said her campaign had, at some point, "reimbursed" the restaurant.
When asked how she could have reimbursed a business that was owed no money -- Wade paid the bill that evening -- she abruptly ended the interview and walked off.
Her spokesman called back an hour later and asked a reporter not to publish anything Harris had said Wednesday night about the dinner.
It gets even funnier, if you go read some of the
more recent updates. Harris claims the bill was so high because the guy bought a bunch of expensive wine, which he didn't open and took home with him, and that since all she had was a beverage and appetizers, she'd donated $100 to a charity to make up for taking a meal from a convicted felon during her Senate campaign. Predictably enough, she's got no proof of that donation, nor what she drank or didn't drink during that meal. Better yet, when reporters looked into the charity, they found it was some nuthouse church that claims to have brought people back from the dead, saved babies from being sold to demons, and so on. Ahh, politians; if they didn't exist we'd have to invent them.
Labels: kathleen harris, politics
Dual-tasking.
Somewhat to my surprise, it's actually working. After
years months of dicking around and not writing nearly enough, I'm now getting a lot more writing done during the 3 or 4 or 5 hours I'm spending on fiction a night, afte spending 4 or 6 or 8 hours working on the (totally unrelated) gaming website during the day. I sort of thought/hoped this would happen, like I might come to life and really work with two projects, when just one wasn't spurring me on.
I've always marvelled at those writer stories, where you hear about someone rising at 4am every day to write for 3 hours before their kid wakes up, and that's their only writing time. Stephen King legendarily wrote his first couple of novels in short snatches, working late at night, on just a few hours of sleep, after working double shifts in an industrial laundry, while he and his wife were raising Irish twins. As I always tell myself, "Well, he had plenty of motivation." Other writers talk about how they turned out their novel by doing 1 hour every day on their lunch break, holed up in a stairwell somewhere for some privacy. Or it came together in 15 minute snatches while their baby was napping and their clothes were washing.
I didn't think I could do that, since I generally need long, multi-hour blocks to feel I'm making any progress and to really get mentally into the fiction I'm writing. Most of my better (a very relative term, since I'm never happy with any of them) short stories were written in one sitting, as I rapidly struck the heated iron, and while I can't write a 1200 page novel in one sitting, I usually feel like I might as well not even bother working on it if I've only got an hour to do so, since I'd just be getting into the flow when I had to quit.
And contrary to what I was thinking three paragraphs ago, I haven't disproven that during the past two weeks. After all, I'm still writing in long, uninterrupted stretches of the sort most writers with real lives would kill for. I'm just doing them from 2-7am, after working on the website stuff from 3-5pm, and 6-9pm, and 11pm-1am, spaced around going to the gym, making/eating dinner, hanging out with Malaya, etc. And no, there's been no (or very little) leaving the house or running errands or anything. Not during the past week+ of total work.
It's not the novel I can do in snatches, when I've got time -- it's the website stuff. I can sit down for 10 or 20 minutes, or even less while dinner is cooking, and do useful work for as long as I've got. I don't need to devote a solid hour at a time, at least not for the sort of content building work I'm doing now. (Mostly writing screenshot captions, sorting quotes from the game designers, organizing pages, inserting links to relevant screenshots, writing/answering FAQ questions, etc.)
So yeah, I'm getting both done, and getting a lot done on the novel, even though I'm not working on it at all in the day or early evening. I've had far more productive days in the past, days when I've spent 10 or 12 hours on fiction and edited 50 pages at once, or written 10 or 12k words at once. But those days were spaced around all too many unproductive days. I'm definitely doing better with my regular, uninterrupted time blocks each night, even if my per day output is far from my past record days.
It's hard to stop working on the website stuff too; every night I'm all in the middle of doing content pages, with like 8 pages open in Dreamweaver, browsers open to reference stuff, a .doc of notes to paste from, etc. But I'll see that it's 2am, tell myself I can close all the gaming stuff, take a little snack break, maybe play a game of
Munchy Mole to clear my head, and that's it; I've got to start on the fiction. And amazingly, it's working.
Apparently I'm the one they're talking about in the old, "If you've got all day to get something done, that's how long it's likely to take you." truism. I'm better with 2 big projects, instead of just one, since I then balance and manage my time, instead of thinking I've got hours yet, and I can surf just another site or two, or I'll still have all night to write.
Happily (I guess) this cycle has no end in sight before my San Diego/E3 trip sets sail (figuratively speaking) on the 6th, since though I'm really closing in on finishing the novel (maybe by this time tomorrow, if I keep up my 4-7k words a day pace), the website is nowhere near done. Not that a website is ever really done, especially not one I'm going to have to massively update the minute I get back from E3 on the 11th, but done enough to launch, at least. And even if I do finish the novel tomorrow, that just means I've got to go back and edit the 80-90k words that make up Chapters 7, 8, and the epilogue, since that's got to be done before I can in good conscience print out the last bit to let my mom and Malaya read it and give me some feedback.
And once that's done and I've had my little SD vacation, I'm going to have to really kick it in on redoing all the website stuff with new E3 info, and then I'll also (probably late at night) be working on editing the early, wandering, bloated novel chapters down to a more reasonable size, while we're also going through Writer's Market, sending out query letters, contacting agents and publishers, etc.
It's a good thing I enjoy both projects I'm toiling on, or this whole, "no end in sight" thing would be sort of a downer. Much like my last few blog entries have been, I guess. But when I'm writing them at 9am, while yawning constantly, after a very busy day of mentally-draining work... eh. I guess you get what you pay for. Except for the one of you who is actually paying for this, and hell, what do you want for $.33 cents a day? You know you'll get a priceless autographed copy of the novel when it's done... you probably planned it this wall all along, you libertarian schemer!
Labels: Hellgate: London, the fantasy novel, writing
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Say something.
Just to check in, since it seems days since I've blogged. Work continues apace; I've spent about 6 hours a day on the upcoming website and 4 hours a day on the novel for the past week, and progress is being made in both areas. I'm enjoying them both too; I don't want to stop working on the gaming website stuff when the time (around 1am, AKA Malaya's bedtime) comes to start on the novel, and I don't want to stop writing fiction to go to bed. I don't even like sleeping, since I've got so much work I want/need to do that just lying there seems a waste. After all, isn't that what caffeine's for?
It's been years, and, Blizzard-style, I've taken flying leaps at unrealistic release dates in the past; but I really think the novel will be finished this week. My deadline was early May, since I vowed to get the last chapter(s) finished and printed out to take down to San Diego with me so my mom could read them. (She's read the rest as they've come off the presses. I'd also like to thank President Bush for spending the past few weeks talking about nuking Iran, sending
gas prices skyrocketing just weeks before I plan to drive over 1000 miles.)
Keep in mind that this is the rough draft of the novel, and that I'll need at least a week just to go over and edit the last chapter (which will eventually turn into multiple chapters, since it covers a lot of ground and is going to run around 125k words). After that I'll go over the whole book again, and make major, massive changes and edits, since I need to remove literally hundreds of thousands of superfluous words. So it's far from actually being done, but we're going to get the whole "find an agent/publisher" carousel spinning this summer, while I'm working on finalizing the book(s).
In other deadline news, the website needs to be done, or at least done enough to put online before I leave for E3 in early May. And while I've been finishing the novel, I've also been working on content, posting/captioning/keywording hundreds of screenshots and images, learning to use Dreamweaver, learning to use CSS, and basically creating a large game-related website from scratch. On the bright side, the website is at least guaranteed to earn me some money, some day, though Internet ad revenues are far from a living wage, these days.
So yeah, two huge projects with identical short term deadlines, and both promising hundreds of hours more work over the summer. Good thing I enjoy them both. And have Malaya to help on them both.
In other news, I'd enjoy
commenting at length on this, and a lot of other news items of late, but it's nearly 9am and I'm way overdue for bed so I can get up by 3 and get to work on the website again. Hell, I was just surfing a bit to clear my mind of the battle scene and shocking character death I spent the last 3 hours writing. I'd had the scene outlined for months, but now that I've actually written it (unsatisfactorily) I have to say that it's a pain. I'm trying to write about a character dying, from their very surprised POV, while keeping the reader in their head, feeling their shock and confusion, while also putting in enough description that the reader realizes what's happening and is shocked at this turn of events, while also feeling horrified that a character they know well appears to be doomed.
Yes, detour. Anyway, as I was going to say about the news of
further resignations and replacements in Bush's cabinet:
Deck chairs. Titanic. Rearranging. And if anyone seriously believes that Karl Rove is giving up any power or influence inside the White House, you don't really know very much about these people.
In related news, I hear Dracula's resigning his advisory position at your local blood bank. Give today.
Labels: bush, Hellgate: London, politics, the fantasy novel, writing
Friday, April 14, 2006
Band Names continues to bear fruit.
Back in 2002 I toiled many hours on
the Band Names section, researched the bands listed, enjoyed writing it, cracked myself up repeatedly working on it... and then pretty much forgot it the minute I finally got through the Zs and got it online. While writing it I had planned to add a lot of bands I overlooked the first time, to add updates as bands evolved or fell apart over time, etc. I never did though, and now that it's been like 4 years since I finished that section, and with so much else to work on in my life, online and off, I can't see ever getting back to it.
Unfortunately. (The only thing I might be drawn to is if I'm ever reworking this site in CSS or something modern, and I could break up the band names section into a database, so they could be sorted by music type, ranked by scores, reader commented on and ranked, and so forth.)
One of my main goals when working on Band Names, or at least one of the carrots I dangled to keep myself working, was the promise of furious emails. Flames from people who had one favorite band and no perspective on life, savage rants from teenagers who loved a new band and thought their group had invented everything in rock and roll, and perhaps even coordinated flame campaigns from band fansite forums. I never got as many of those mails as I'd hoped for (the fact that I never got around to writing an appropriately-scathing entry for Insane Clown Posse probably had something to do with that), and I'm forever depressed at the frequent mails from people who somehow fail to grasp the fact that that section is based in humor and sarcasm, and is in fact rating the band's
name, not so much the band itself.
That being said, I still receive semi-regular emails about that section of the site, and since this funny one came in last night, I thought I'd share it. I liked it, anyway. The odd spacing and formatting is all quoted verbatim:
Just reading a few of your "comments" you know nothing
about music! You just state your un-educated opinion!
Knocking my favorite band "RUSH" you have absolutely
no clue wnen it comes to their music...........I am a drum
player! Neil Peart is a living legend! Geddy Lee who you
make fun of with his vocals. Plays bass guitar, keyboards, foot pedals, and he sings ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!!!Alex Lifeson is the lead guitarist! One of the most unerated in the industry! Remember Rush consists of only three guys! You probably did not even know that! How many 3 pc bands have had as much success as RUSH??? ANSWER......GOOSE EGG!!!!!!!! Rush has abeen around for over 30 freakin' years!!! They have recorded over 20 studio albums and 5 live albums! If they were as bad as you suggest how come they have been making so many albums of which most ot them have gone platinum of better!!! You are a dimwited, numbnuts ifiot!!
SO GO F____ YOURSELF YOU
INBRED MORON................
ps let me guess.....culture club is your favorite band....what a homo...........
corvette1
I think my favorite aspect of Band Names hate mail is that they almost always close by calling me some synonym for "homosexual," and saying I must be a fan of a boy band, or a wimpy band. Yes, that's how angry teenage boys think, from their hormone-driven perch atop Mt. Homophobia, and it clearly says more about them than they mean it to, if "gay" or "faggot" is on the highest branch of their insult tree. It's all perspecive too; back when I was his age and into the heaviest metal I could find, I might have insulted someone by saying they were a "pussy Rush fan," since that band itself is quite wimpy, compared to heavier stuff. (And to fans of really heavy underground death metal, I was just some Slayer/Metallica faggot. And on, and on...)
I also liked how his defense of Rush's squeaky vocalist is to point out that he also plays keyboards and bass. Okay, bonus points for Mr. One Man Band on the mic, but is that really praise? I could (hypothetically) keep the car on the road while receiving a hand job, talking on my cell phone, and changing a CD, but would that make me a good driver?
I'm not even going to get into the guy's writing. Seriously, why bother? Anyone could spend an entire update slagging on his punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc. Fish in a barrel. (My favorite part is when he calls me an "ifiot!!" shortly after informing me that one of the guys in Rush is "unerated" in the industry. I also like when people defend their favorite band by listing record sales, when there is, if anything, a great deal of evidence for ain inverse relationship between quality and sale. Britney Spears? Milli Vanilli? Spice Girls? N'Synch? Boy bands? American Idol winners? You see my point.)
The emailer does have some argument about Rush, though. After all, I gave them
a very low score (-5) because I don't like their music. (Well, it's more about the vocals than the music, really. I just could never stand that guy's screechy voice.) I've stated my opinion on Rush, he strongly disagrees (in something resembling English), and here we are, smack in the middle of an intractible disagreement. And I'm perfectly okay with that. In fact, isn't this pretty much what the Internet is for? The unbalanced statement of biased opinion, and the subsequent backlash and disagreement that opinion generates?
Labels: band-names, music
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Overeaten and eatin' over.
Days since an update again, and I can but apologize. True, it's not like any of you are paying to read this (well, the one faithful monthly site hosting expense donor is, but the rest of you; not so much), but I would like to update at least daily, to make it worth your bookmark check. Still, I've been very busy, and though I don't run this site in anything approaching a professional manner, I'd rather not post at all than just throw up some pointless bit about a wacky news item (eg:
yet another incident in which Bush lied or distorted intelligence to boost the fever for his preordained Iraq Attack... what a surprise!)
So I've been working on another website, 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day, to be honest, and while there's nothing yet online I can link to, I assure you that it's coming and that it should be worth the wait/lack of updates here. Well, if you're a computer game fan, anyway. (Probably a pretty safe bet, with this crowd.)
In other news, on Wednesday I finally got to meet Malaya's new dog, Darwin. He currently lives with her mom, over by the Bay, but will theoretically come to live with us once we're in a house with a yard and enough space for a dog to be happy. Well, happier. Our downstairs neighbor has one of those miniature collies here, and it seems to be happy, or at least surviving. Well, we think so, though we've not seen it or its owner for a few days, and there's been a godawful mystery stink in the vicinity of our kitchen/dining room lately, a stench we can find no source of and that may well be wafting up through the floorboards.
As for Darwin, he's a beagle mix and is one of those "always seems happy" type of dogs. And as far as I can tell from one day, he always is happy. He's about twenty pounds (9kg) and is just perpetual motion. Tail-wagging, head turning, nose sniffing, feet scampering, and so eager to play or go for a walk or hop in the car. He got to do all of those things on Wednesday, and even had a spirited game of "run furiously between Flux and Malaya while they throw his favorite chew toy back and forth and forever keep it just out of his reach." Darwin's no Jinxie, when it comes to leaping and intercepting aerial targets, but once he started to get tired (after maybe 50 throws back and forth) he started to anticipate our throws and leap up to bite the toy out of the air. And while he never quite managed that, he did successfully body block it a few times, like an enthusiastic but not very skilled goalie. Or a really inept bodyguard.
He is extremely skilled as snatching a moving/bouncing chew toy off the floor though, since the same vestigal forelimbs that keep him from getting much height or pawing at anything while in midair serve him very well in his role as high speed dustpan. As far as we could tell, Darwin would have run back and forth between us forever, and he hardly slowed down even after at least 150 throws, despite the fact that he was panting, his tongue was dangling, and he was almost walking normally, rather than scampering and skidding around as he usually (always) does.
I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of dogs, and having one Darwin in the house would be the noise and rambunctiousness equivalent of about a dozen more
Dusters and
Jinxies, but he wasn't a bad companion, for the day. Plus he settles down at night and doesn't climb on the desks and doesn't vomit up hairballs (very often) and won't find a mousie and walk around the house with it, howling to wake the severely-injured, at 5am, the way Dusty does. I'm not sure if that makes two or three walks a day, walks with the requisite baggage (a plastic bag or two with which to pick up his steaming turds) a fair trade off, but it's a start.
To belatedly address the title of this post though, (forgotten it by now, haven't you?) in addition to the Darwin walking and playing, I drove Malaya and her mom (and Darwin) a couple of hundred miles, for which I was recompensed with a painful excess of nourishment. We had to take a trip up north to get Malaya measured for her cap and gown (she's graduating grad school and receiving her doctorate in a couple of months), but first we inhaled five turkey tacos each, fresh from her mom's kitchen. Ground turkey, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and real sour cream. Five each.
After the long trip we returned to do some local shopping, picking up a huge sack of dog chow and numerous miscellaneous grocery-type items, mostly for Malaya's mom. Our adventures ended at a Round Table Pizzeria, where mom ordered up an extra large chicken supreme, a recipe for disaster which Malaya inexplicably seasoned with a bonus order of spicy buffalo wings. We ate them anyway, washed our meal down with an excess of carbonated, caramel-colored sugar water, (I had Dr. Pepper, Root Beer, and Pepsi. Not all at once, though.) and waddled back to mom's house, where the only one capable of movement was the quadruped.
So while Malaya and I played with Darwin, her mom got busy packing up food to go, and we left there with the rest of the pizza, the rest of the turkey taco meat, lots of taco ingredients, tortillas, a six pack of Pepsi and Coke, about 60 frozen lumpia rolls (turkey and shrimp), a pound of green grapes, frozen fish, a loaf of bread, miniature Snickers bars, a bag of honey-roasted almonds, a big chocolate rabbit, and more stuff I can't even remember. And yes, that's pretty much how it always goes when we visit Malaya's mom; it's like reverse Little Red Riding Hood, with the new addition of Darwin perfectly-completing the analogy.
On the whole, while we only had two meals on the day, (not counting the 2 slices of pizza and additional Pepsi I had around midnight, to get some energy to stay up long enough to write this) I'd say we took in at least 4000 calories total, and with that motivation, 9pm or not, there was no way we could stay away from the gym when we got back here; once we let the cats inhale all of the Darwin aroma off of our clothing, of course. I burned 530 calories in 35 minutes on the elliptical, did a session of free weights, and then stretched and practiced handstands for a bit in the back aerobics room, which means I might only have gained two pounds on the day, intead of half a dozen.
It was fun though, and it made Malaya's mom happy, and since she's going to be my mom, one day, it's all good.
Labels: darwin, food
Book Review: Media Poodles, by James Wolcott
Another book review from my archive. At some point I've got to find time to write some more too; I've got just the scores and a paragraph or two on half a dozen books and at least that many films, and I should flesh them out (the reviews) before I forget them (the films/books).
Today's book review is a nonfiction, political book by the man who maintains what I would unhesitatingly call "the best written blog on the internet." The book is by James Wolcott, his
eponymous blog is here, and the book is
Attack Poodles and other Media Mutants.
I've been reading Wolcott's blog for a few months, since seeing a link from somewhere or other, have since read through a substantial portion of his archives, and while he doesn't update all that often, and I seldom learn anything reading his entries, (I've almost always already read about the news he posts about.) I still savor his every update simply for the brilliance with which he manipulates the English language.
I knew nothing about Wolcott before I stumbled upon his blog, but he's apparently a writer of some note. He covers politics at times, but more often writes about media and entertainment, from the best sort of elitist, "this is all trash but I still enjoy some of it," attitude. Wolcott is currently a senior writer for Vanity Fair magazine, a publication I have never so much as held in my hands. I love his blog though, since even when he's talking about things I know/care nothing about, he write so cleverly that I'm carried along, as though shanghied by the crew of a luxury yacht.
In light of my opinion of his work, my anticipation was quite a-simmer when I picked up his book from the library. What did I think? To the scores:
Attack Poodles, and other media mutants, by James Wolcott
Concept: 6
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 8
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 4
Entertainment Value: 6
Rereadability: 2
Overall: 5
As I said, I've been reading Wolcott's blog for some months, and enjoying it because he's such a good writer. He does politics, but also a lot of pop culture stuff, entries in which he talks about movies and books and tv shows, while also sparring the time to take down idiots in politics or blogging or other fields, and doing so in very entertaining fashion.
I was disappointed with this book, though. The writing was solid, but (at least with this material) Wolcott's not really a writer suited to book-length. He's brilliant in article length, or blog post length, since he communicates well and invariably gets in at least one or two ripostes that would make anyone proud. One of my favorite lines of his was when he characterized someone's utterances as, "fruit bat screechings." I don't recall who, though my un-googled memory leans towards Ann Coulter, but it hardly matters. It was the turn of the phrase that grabbed me.
Looking at his blog now, (April 13, 2006) here are two lines from just the first paragraph of
his most recent entry that I love. "That's when I think the rightwing carousel began to break down and the painted horses lost their rhythm, pawing the air to no avail... That they could get it so wrong was a sign that they had lost touch and couldn't mold public opinion on every issue as if it were the mashed-potatoes mountain in Close Encounters of the Third [Kind]." Lovely allusion, and ethereal simile, virtually back to back. Seriously, when's the last time you heard anyone make any sort of analogue to the mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters? Is there an award for this sort of thing?
I'm off topic, though. His book has numerous lines like that, and there was at least one on every page that made me pause with a self-reflective, "damn that was a good one." Unfortunately, the subject matter of the book was far from engrossing, and it went on much too long.
The book is about what it says it's about. Attack poodles, the pampered, fangless lapdogs who make up much of the mass media, pets who gladly roll over for any authority figure while begging treats from the sausage-fingered hands of their spokesmen. Lap dogs who happily take any table scrap they're given rather than living as they should, as vicious media wolves, eager to bring down big game and rip out its steaming entrails for the benefit of their audience. Or at least as stray dogs, roaming the mean streets and taking what they can.
Okay, I'm straining metaphors here, inspired by Wolcott's style, but his book is essentially a summary of the worst media outrages of the last few years, as so many supposedly-independent reporters lost all spine and adversarial instinct as they were charmed and tamed by George Bush's dubious virility.
Attack Poodles is a survey and a summation of Bush lackeys in the media, reporters and pundits who back up Dubya and his administration on everything, even if the Administration's goals and methods contradict everything that reporter previously believed in. The book does a fine job of that, but perhaps too fine, since it goes on and on, delving into far more detail about far less important media figures than I felt any need to be informed about.
Long chapters talk about the gutless coverage at CNN during and during the prelude to Bush's Iraq Attack, and there are similarly-exhaustive passages about MSNBC's flirtations with right wing nuts like Michael Savage. Those sections are fun when the target is someone famous and deserving of puncturing, like Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. But when Wolcott spent pages on unknown and long-forgotten reporters on cable news networks, I found my eyes glazing. I don't watch those channels and don't spend much time thinking about them, so while I'm interested in the skew of their reporting in the large scale of things, the individuals, especially the very non-famous ones, do not interest me. Cable news junkies like Wolcott will obviously enjoy them a lot more than I did.
On the whole, the book has a lot of good paragraphs and pages, but I've read dozens of blog entries on this subject, so very little of it was news to me. And reading old news, no matter how cleverly-written, grows tedious. I've seen similar material covered in other books, including recent ones by Molly Ivins, Eric Alterman, and others, and I realize in retrospect that I didn't finish those books either. So who knows, maybe it's just me.
I am certain that any reader who hasn't read much about the rightward skew of opinion in American media will find this book more interesting than I did, and since you'll likely enjoy Wolcott's writing as well, I'm recommending it for you. Despite the fact that it ultimately bored me.
Labels: book review, the media
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Wednesday Night.
No, I couldn't think of anything catchy for a post title.
So, scuba back. It fades, eventually, but damn it lingers like dog farts. I'm still a bit sore from nearly 10 days ago, and as recently as last night I was hobbled by the soreness. Initially I had a huge knot on my left side, right between the shoulder blade and my spine. Hurt when I breathed, even. Malaya had one in just about the same place on her right side, and her neck was super tight too. We traded more massage the week after scuba than we had all year, and finally the aches began to subside.
As my sore spot began to fade up high though, I got a new one on the lower right, just about over my lowest rib. You know, the one God removed to make woman. Anyway, that was really bothering me for the past few days, to the point that I had to take a really hot shower and stretch a lot just to get out of bed. It loosened up during the day; I've been going to the gym every day and doing Kali and such, but it was sort of a constant ache, and I couldn't bend over; I had to tie my shoes standing, with one foot up on a chair or something.
It was really bad yesterday, for unknown reasons, and after about an hour of Kali class I was really hurting. Kept having to stop and bend over to loosen up, and finally I just sort of sat down and stretched for the last 15 minutes of class, since it was hurting too much to keep standing and doing the stick fighting we were working on. Happily, that might have overstressed and stretched it enough that it got better, since I woke up Wednesday and felt the best I have since last Friday, before the scuba weekend.
In other news, Malaya got a new camera and has been happily snapping away. Hers is an SLR model, Single Lens Reflex, and it's one of the better digital types, in that you can control the focal length yourself if you like, and you can make it take a damn picture as soon as you hit the button. That's what drives most people insane about digital cameras (mine included), when you've got a good shot and click it... and the camera thinks things over for 5 seconds before taking the photo, by which time whatever you were aiming at is long gone. She's even taking a photo class at the local community center, and hoping to learn about film speeds and apature settings and all that other technical stuff that real photographers know about and that most digital cameras now automate so the vast unwashed horde can take pictures that are actually in focus.
At any rate, I'll likely be posting more photos of our uninspiring pets and condo in the immediate future, and I'm sure the difference in image quality will be almost noticeable, in my inexpert hands. I doubt anyone has noticed, but I've not posted any photos on here in forever. I hadn't really noticed, until I tried to offload some from my camera today, and couldn't put them in the main photos folder (since there were others with the same automatically-generated "P1010001.JPG" name already there). So I went to put them in the emergency backup folder... and it was full too. I had to create a 3rd level temporary folder just to get to the photo of my driver's license I had to send to Rush so he could send it to the E3 press people so I could get a media pass for this year's show, and wouldn't you know it; there were 18 more pointless feline/redwood stump photos already on the camera, from god knows when. And now they're on my computer, just as unsorted and willfully forgotten as their predecessors. Let's overlook the fact that Malaya's new camera is currently holding about 200 more just like them.
Firefly! Malaya and I both really enjoyed Serenity, both on the big screen and then again a couple of weeks ago when we bought the DVD (3 for $25 at Blockbuster, you know). So she up and bought crap! (I got 5%.) and now we've got the DVD box set of the original TV series, seen by several hundred fans during its initial airing on UPN. Or possibly FOX. And don't act like you know; you'd never heard of it until the movie came out either, or if you had it was entirely through the magic of illicit file sharing.
Anyway, we watched first first 100 minute episode, and I've gotta admit that it was damn good. Just like the movie in tone and look, and while having seen the film too some of the surprises out of the series (we know all the crew is going to survive for a few years, at least), it was fun to see how the characters were introduced, and how they interacted in less-stressful situations than they faced in the more action-packed film. I also much preferred the movie version of how the doc stole his sister away from the evil military dudes, and I liked her character in the film better; she was just completely cringing and sleeping and useless in the first episode of the TV show. She was that way at the start of the movie too, but there were nice hints that she was more than just a wispy victim psychic, and of course the hints became reality quite soon in the film.
I've got no idea if she'll become the same sort of unbalanced psycho weapon in the TV series, but I'm certainly hoping so, since that was the best thing about the film. Logically she shouldn't, since they had no inkling of her combat prowess in the film until she freaked out, and the film is chronologically after the TV series. However, the movie wasn't just a condensed season two of the show; it rewrote and tweaked the original events to suit a new purpose, such as changing how the doc rescued his sister in the first place, so it's entirely possible that she starts to come unglued in the series long before she did in the film, chronologically speaking.
And if you've seen the series already and know the answer to this question, please keep it to yourself.
Speaking of reviews, as I was looking over the chop socky one I posted tonight, I found myself thinking about Charlie's Angels 2. I watched it this week (literally, in about 4 blocks of 20 minutes each, since that's as much as I could take of it at one time and that's how long I needed visual entertainment while eating breakfast or lunch), thanks to the free library-based DVD rental, and while it wasn't any good, ir wasn't awful. I didn't expect to watch it, after all, I
concluded my coverage of the first film by saying I wouldn't see the second one because, "that's still 90 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back." I was wrong about that, though. It was more like 100 minutes.
On the chop socky angle though, how was CA2 really any better? Compared to a good chop socky film, CA2 had better visuals and music, equivalent acting, and worse figght scenes. I'd even give the edge in plot quality to most chop socky films, since at least things more or less make sense in those old kung fu theater efforts. CA2 feels like a movie made by an ADD 8y/o boy on a six pack of Red Bull. Every scene is in a totally different place, the actresses are always in different costumes, and the scenes have only the slightest connection to each other or to the movie as a whole.
Even with that said, I think CA2 was better than the first one. Perhaps I'm just misremembering it, since I watched and reviewed the first one nearly 2 years ago, but this one seemed a little more grounded in physical reality. Every fight scene didn't feature triple spinning flips and video game style fatality moves (none of which actually injured anyone), and while the efforts at comedy and drama fell pancake-flat, at least they were quickly dispensed with.
Like CA1, CA2 wasn't so much a movie as a long series of music video vignettes, and while I'm glad that style of not-really-a-movie didn't catch on, it was sort of interesting to see as a learning experience. I didn't keep count, but there had to be 40 or 50 different sets in the film, many of which were onscreen for no more than half a minute. I have never seen so much work by a movie crew for so little return. Several times the varous Angels had flashbacks to their earlier lives, and each time the full sequence would run hardly long enough to blink, yet you could see they had built entire gynastic competition sets, rented arenas to stage wrestling matches in, etc. They probably did as much work on all of those mini-movies as most films do on 30 minute sequences, and there was a new one onscreen every 2 or 3 minutes. I have no idea what CA2 cost, but damn they had to spend a lot of money and time setting all those sketches up, for so minimal a reward.
I'll write a review of the film in the next few days, though I suspect my scores won't be much different than the ones I gave the first movie.
Lastly, if you ever get a free sample of flonase, a nasal spray/decongestant, I recommend that you toss it out and resign yourself to continuing to sniffle. Malaya got a sample bottle of the stuff at the doctor's the other day, when she went in to get her swimmer's ear checked out, and while she hasn't had any cause to use it, I have. I don't know why, but I woke up Monday morning with a leaky faucet, and could not get rid of it. I hate to take chemicals/medicines of any type, but when my dripping stopped at the gym, then started up again once I returned home and showered off, my resistance began to weaken. I'd been awake like 6 hours, and the sides of my nose were already going red and raw from all the sniffing and blowing and wiping. So I tried the stuff.
It's prescription medicine, and I'd never sprayed anything up my nose before, so I followed the directions. Not that they were complicated; I just had to squirt the bottle a few times to prime the pump, blow my nose, and then give each side a couple of squirts, while inhaling steadily. There was one benefit; the stuff smelled good. Very synthetic flower, but not displeasing. Unfortunately, it didn't work to stop my nose running and it gave me a splitting headache.
Maybe five minutes after I took it I started to feel like someone had bolted a clamp onto the top of my nose, like up between my eyes, almost. It got tighter and tighter, and while my nose kept dripping it also began to itch. The sinus passages were swelling and shutting, and when I blew my nose it felt like squeezing a packet of relish through a pinhole. Felt about that good too, not that your average packet of sandwich condiments possesses a central nervous system.
An hour after taking the nasal spray I was sailing. Light-headed, congested but still drippy, and woozy; I had to brace myself against the walls to walk down the hall. Thankfully it began to wear off around that point, and after about four hours the headache was pretty much gone, though my nose was back to dripping as it had that morning. I almost welcomed it though, after the stoned feeling the drug had given me. Ironically, it wasn't until a couple of hours later that I realized my nose was no longer running, and by the time I went to bed I felt fine and pretty much normal. So maybe the stuff did work; it just needed eight hours to sink in, and it came at the price of making me feel like shit for the first four? Better than nothing, but I don't think that's quite the claim they'll be including in their promotional literature.
Labels: firefly, fitness, medical, photography, scuba
Chop Socky Review: Chase Step by Step
Still busy with work on other things, but I can at least take a few minutes to post a movie review I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it's more chop socky fun...
Chase Step by Step is another cheesy Hong Kong-produced chop socky film from
the 50-pack I received for Xmas. It's cheesy and fake, but still better than most of its kind. The two heroes are usually worth rooting for, the bad guys are hissable, and the plot holds together, providing you can overlook numerous physical impossibilities. The martial arts aren't very good, but there are a ton of fight scenes, so at least you get your money's worth.
To the scores, which as always, are meant to be compared only to other chop socky films.
Chase Step by Step, 1982)
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 4
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 5
Overall: 7.5
I'm giving this one the highest overall score of any chop socky yet, but of course that's on the chop socky scale. Compared to real movies, this one wouldn't get more than a 3 or 4. Then again, considering the budget and production values, that's not too bad. Plenty of hundred million dollar action films have fared worse, by my metric.
Production ValuesNot bad. The dubbing isn't a disaster, it's in focus, it's lit well enough to see all of the scenes, and the camera angles aren't horrible. The worst visuals are right at the start, with some unwatchable scenes filmed in a Chinese circus. In those the camera is focused in very tightly from a distance, aimed almost straight up, and in poor lighting. After that 90% of the scenes are outdoors in sunlight, so they all look pretty okay.
The pan and scan treatment is awful, as always, and in most scenes of conversation one or the other of the two actors is cut off to the left or the right of the screen. Why they don't just leave these wide screen with letter boxing I will never understand. Why they didn't make TV screens rectangles with aspect ratios similar to those in movie theaters all along I will never understand, since movies came first. But that's an issue for another day.
The other production value problem are the incredibly cheesy special effects. There aren't many of them, but at least half a dozen times in the film the female lead does a magical tumbling technique that lets her travel oh... twenty to thirty meters in about two flips and three seconds. It's never less than laugh out loud fake, as you see her looking way up a hill or across a gorge at some bad guys, then the film suddenly cuts to a very tight close up of her doing some sort of flip on a trampoline, and then cuts back to her suddenly landing on a wagon, or in front of the bad guys, who are always shocked to see her there, as if her tumbling was actually some sort of teleportation technique.
StoryThis is the part I usually have the most fun with in these reviews, as I get a kick out of retelling and laughing at the ridiculous plots of these chop socky films. In this case though, I can't. It's a simple plot, and almost interesting. Some poor province of China is locked in a drought, people are starving and dying, and when word somehow gets to the capital city, a benevolent ruler wants to send gold to help relieve the suffering. The gold must be delivered and protected along the way, and for some reason two kung fu experts who are also circus performers are sent along to guard it.
Of course the greedy bad guys in the province (none of whom seem to be starving or suffering from a drought) somehow get word that the gold is coming, and set out to ambush the circus guards and take the gold. The guards, a man and a woman, are the heroes and main characters, and they fight off dozens and dozens of bad guys.
I'm unclear on how exactly a huge chest of gold is going to help people dying in a drought/famine. Where are they going to buy food/water, when everything has to be transported by wagon? Overlooking that, the funniest story problem was the bad guys. They keep sending out two or three henchmen to kill the good guys and take the gold, and each day the henchmen come back all beaten up and the boss curses at them. Why doesn't he just send out all of his goons at once and get the job done quickly? Furthermore, the heroes are traveling on foot, and so are the bad guys. Yet the new batch of bad guys get ahead of them on the road every day, for like a week, when the bad guys always go back to their same base each time. Are the heroes walking in a big circle, or what? How are the bad guys all coming out from a central location, and continuing to get ahead of the heroes who do nothing all day but walk in a straight line?
Eventually the gold gets to the province, and after a last betrayal where the leaders of the province try to take it for themselves, the heroes kick their asses and walk off with the treasure, still happily in asexual comradery with each other.
Speaking of asexual comradery; the female lead is far and away the worst thing about this film. She spends the entire movie scolding her male companion for being male, for looking at girls, for wanting to stop and rest, etc. The two of them are constantly splitting up after she pitches a fit about something irrelevant, they're always attacked the minute they separate, before rejoining just in time to save the gold. Again. Her character acts like she's about seven, and bratty. It's embarrassing to women, it's shrill and annoying, and it serves no purpose.
Martial ArtsNot bad, but nothing special. There's a good variety of techniques and styles here, but almost all of them are very non-lethal. Everyone takes fifty hits to get knocked out, and the good guys never use any weapons, even though the bad guys constantly try to kill them with swords, knives, staves, and anything else that comes to hand. It's frustrating to watch, as like four murderous thieves swing at the hero man while he ducks and dodges and kicks at them, but never finishes anyone off when he grabs them, and never disarms them, and never uses their weapons against them. I guess it's a morality play, where the good guys are so heroic they don't need to use weapons to defend themselves, but it just makes them seem so dumb and naïve and inefficient.
During numerous fight scenes the good guy starts beating up the bad guy, who resorts to pulling a knife/sword, and then it's always the same. Two or three wild slashes before the good guy steps in close enough to block or grab the attacker's hand. But they never do more than kick or punch them once, before they let go and return to dodging sword swings. If you're in a fight with a person holding a deadly bladed weapon, and you get a hold of their wrist, you'd better break their f'ing arm, at a minimum.
Un-opportunistic weapon counters aside, the martial arts fights aren't horrible, and the choreography isn't always painfully apparent, but you're never in doubt that it's just a big dance. Most attacks do a high-low-high series of moves, or a left-right-left series of punches, and quite often the person being targeted moves well before each punch/kick is on the way. Why it's almost as if they know exactly where the punch is going before it's even thrown! This is most obvious in the weapon scenes, where the person with the sword or staff is swinging a good half meter over the head of the target -- who ducked before they even swung anyway.
Happily, the actors all know how to move and punch and kick, though no one in the film is good enough to look impressive, and they're all so slow and deliberate. And cooperative. Every punch is this straight-armed thing where the puncher misses, and then leaves their arm straight out so that the punchee can parry, back off a step, and then counter. Try that in a real fight, where any competent opponent will snatch back their hand the instant it hits or misses the target.
My main gripe, as it usually is with chop socky combat, is how non-lethal everything is. The hits never seem very hard, the punches are not fast enough to be scary, and there are no throws or joint locks or arm breaks or much of anything other than weak kicks and snappy but powerless punches. Comparing the typical chop socky fight to a more modern and brutal movie fight style (such as the endless arm breaks
in this scene from a Tony Jaa film) makes the chop socky look like a damn puppet show.
OverallIt's not exactly an involving story, and I had no problem watching it in 10 or 15 minute blocks, but the fight scenes aren't bad and there is a nice variety of weapons on display, even though no one particularly knows how to use them. The very linear plot works too, since the heroes are on a road, we know where they're going, we know bad guys are trying to stop them, and there aren't too many stupid detours. It's certainly not a good movie, but it's pretty good for chop socky.
Labels: movie review
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Film Review: V is for Vendetta
After a very busy week, Malaya put forth the idea of Saturday being a date night. I liked the idea, and while it turned into more of a date afternoon, featuring lunch, some errands/shopping, and then an early evening movie, we enjoyed our time together. And we even enjoyed the film, as you're about to find out.
V is for Vendetta is yet another movie made from a comic book no one has ever heard of. It was written in the 1970s, set 20 years in the future in a fascist, Orwellian England. The film is very much the same as the comic book, but the time frame has been moved up 30 years, so that it's now set a couple of decades in our future. It's still in England, and most of the plot elements remain the same, though.
To my approving scores, the categories of which are
explained here.
V is for Vendetta
Script/Story: 7
Characters: 7
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 4
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 8
Overall: 8.5
Malaya and me were each surprised how much we enjoyed the film, and how well-made it was. I knew a fair amount about the plot thanks to several spoilery-reviews I tripped over, but there were still a few nice surprises, and more than that, it was just a real quality film. Nice performances all around, good plot, nicely-paced, good-looking, and while it's very much a propaganda piece, it's not grossly exaggerated or outrageous in it's portrayal of a contemporary, largely-democratic fascism.
What it's not is an action picture. Though the screenplay was written by the W-bros of The Matrix fame, and directed by one of their assistants, it's not an action movie. It's got a few nice action scenes, and some awesome explosion porn, but if you're expecting Neo-esque fight scenes and action sequences, you're going to be disappointed, since they are few and far between.
Vendetta is more of a political thriller and a future history lesson, with an intelligent, complicated plot, lots of good dialogue, and nice performances all around.
Natalie Portman does a nice job in her role, and she really carries the film; Valena, the masked "hero" is the key figure, but the film follows Portman's character, Evey, much more than it follows V. As is usually the case in fantastic fiction, our POV is with the confused outsider (just as it was with Neo in the Matrix, rather than say Morpheus or someone else who knew what was going on all along) and we figure out what's happening along with them.
As the film proceeds we follow the present action with Evey, meet the mysterious and vengeance-driven "V," and learn how fascists control England with propaganda through the news, salivating evangelists, and all sorts of wartime measures, such as curfews, food rationing, and constant terror alerts. We also learn V's back history, get a hint of what he's doing on his path to vengeance, learn more about the controlling politicians, and much more. The film paints a wide picture of the state of the world, and makes a lot of obvious and some not-so-obvious parallels to happenings today, in America. And that's what most of the controversy about this film has addressed.
I went in without an opinion on the story or the way it showed events; I'd never heard of the comic before publicity for the film began, and honestly, I was expecting something a great deal more ham-handed. Overt moralizing and amateurishly-drawn parallels between evil Dubya-like politicians and real life politicians. You know,
like in Episode III. Happily, it wasn't like that, and aside from the second in command of the fascist government looking rather like a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Carl Rove (complete with Rush's disturbing hot water bottle neck), there weren't any obvious Dubya-administration parallels.
I thought the conservative backlash over this film was suspect before I saw Vendetta -- after all, if a portrait of a controlling fascist state makes you instantly think it's about Bush's Administration, doesn't that say more about you and the Administration than the portrait? Now that I've seen it though, I'm sure it's ridiculous. You could take the exact same film, change the ruling Christian theocracy into a Muslim one, or Nazi one, or Communist one, and the same self-proclaimed conservatives complaining about Vendetta's skewed view of totalitarianism would line up to applaud its brave stance against the sort of evil dictatorship Dubya toppled in Iraq.
The film shows how the fascists came to power, and I didn't have any argument with it. Tell the people only you can protect them, fake a few attacks if need be, find some scapegoats to blame, disappear your political enemies, etc. Everyone's heard Goering's famous quote, right?
"It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
-- Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe-Chief
It's hard to agree with a Nazi, but he certainly hit that nail on the head, and it's not the fault of this film that the current US president is working from the shallow end of that playbook, or that this Administration's cheerleaders so dislike that fact being pointed out.
The film wasn't perfect; there's a lot of suspension of disbelief required, the plot is too neat and tidy, the population is too cowed and controlled to be so cynical and independent, and the holes in the technology of the controlling government are a bit convenient. But for the most part the film worked, and was enjoyable. We'll definitely get the DVD, when that time comes, and I don't have a problem highly recommending
V for Vendetta.
Labels: movie review, v for vendetta
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Weekend Stuff
So, another week of sparse blog posting. I have no excuse, really. Just doing other things. Working on the novel, gym every day, social activities with Malaya, and
doing a bunch of prep work on an upcoming website. It's not online yet, and much work remains to be done but I think it will be pretty cool when it's ready. It's a lot of work to get things ready though, and I'd forgotten how brain-fried and eye-tired you can get from 8 or 10 straight hours of work on something that's supposed to be an amusement. Reading previews/interviews and looking at screenshots of a video game, in this case.
I am not a college basketball fan, and I haven't seen a moment of any of the games in the NCAA tournament, other than a few bits and pieces on the TV at the gym, but looking at the sports news tonight, I see that the final two are set. Like most idle fans I always root for the underdogs, though how much "rooting" I can lay claim to, having not intentionally watched even a second of the games, is open to debate. That aside, I was overjoyed (mildly interested) to see so many big teams were upset in this year's tourney. None of the #1 seeds made it into the final four for just the second time in 30 years, or something like that. Unfortunately for underdog backers, all those upstarts vanished past the cloyingly-named "Sweet 16" round.
Looking
at the bracket, I see that of the needlessly-aliterative "Elite Eight," seven were #1-#4 seeds, and five of them were the expected #1 or #2 seeds. Not exactly upset specials there. There was one exception; the previously and future-ly unknown #11 seed George Mason University. Tragically, their glass slippers were shattered by the leaden-hooves of #3 seed Florida, while #2 UCLA Katrina'ed #4 LSU.
I can't imagine I'll remember the game is on, or care enough to turn on the set for Monday's championship game, but if I did I can't imagine who I'd root for. Neither team is especially loathesome, but neither do they have any compelling storylines, or famous players to watch for future NBA interest. Is there any sort of national concensus on the sentimental favorite? With them both being highly-seeded there's no underdog angle, and since LSU lost to UCLA, I can't even do what most people do, and root for the team that beat Duke. I'd personally be more likely to root for the team that beat UNC, my life-long least favorite college sporting team (thanks to legendary UNC coach Dean Smith's Jerry Fallwell tendencies and his invention of the worst tactic in the history of sport; the "four corners" stalling tactic) but that was George Mason, and they lost Saturday too.
So anyway, having seen nothing of either team this year (or millenium), and having no ability to name a single player on either team, I'm going to throw my completely random prediction to UCLA. They'll win 57-54 in an ugly, painfully-low scoring matchup, since that seems to be how they win all of their games.
It's ironic too, since the only game in the entire tournament I saw more than 2 minutes of was Gonzaga vs. UCLA, since it was on at the gym one night while I was on the elliptical machine. In that game the Zags were wiping the floor with UCLA, beating them by like 15 in the second half. The guy at the gym actually changed the channel to another, more-competitive game, so imagine my surprise when I saw the scores online hours later, and found that UCLA had scored like the last 13 points to win by 2. And here they are a week later, just days from a national championship. Or perhaps not. Like I care.
Elsewhere, I would have blogged about this a couple of days ago, but I was lazy. Read the
whole LA Times article if you want, but it's basically about how high school students are showing up in 10th and 11th grade biology and pretty much heckling the teachers with the anti-evolution nonsense their parents have filled their heads with. It's depressing, and I feel quite a bit of sympathy for the underpaid and overworked biology teachers, having to tolerate the smug and utterly-clueless comments of the children.
LIBERTY, Mo. — Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.
As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.
The challenges begin at once.
"Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore Chris Willett demands." 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't."
Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn't listening. "I feel a tail growing!" he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.
Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: "How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon."
As if I needed another reminder of why I would never, in a billion years, survive a week as a high school teacher.
It occurred to me, after reading the article, what the teacher's real difficulty is. He's got to try and defend evolution to kids who don't know the first thing about science, and who have an active distaste for learning it. It's like a math prof trying to teach trigonometry to people who can't even add, and who have been taught that numbers are magical and beyond human understanding. Even worse, the teacher has to try and defend scientific knowledge against a cartoonish alternative, and he's handcuffed by not being able to counter attack.
He can try to explain geology and the history of the earth and random mutations and all of that, yet he can't say a word about Christian cosmology, because the kids would run yelping to their parents about how he was attacking their religion. So the kids can cherry-pick their targets and argue from stunning ignorance ("I feel a tail growing!"), yet it's not a real argument, since they do not have to defend their alternative explanation against what would be a withering cross examination of the laughable "science" upon which modern day creationism rests.
I say we add a humanities class that compares and contrasts the
top ten creation myths, and be done with it. The kids would have more fun there than they do studying the fossil record, and for added payback they could let the biology teachers grade their papers. Imagine the fun Mr. Frisby would have going over argumentative essays in which his students attempted to prove that the earth was created from nothing in six days, after which woman was created from a man's rib -- while disproving the theory that Ymir's giant children turned his bones into mountains and his hollowed out skull into the starry heavens above?
Labels: basketball, evolution
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