BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: August 2007
Friday, August 31, 2007
Misc Stuff
I keep telling myself to post something here every day, but real life things keep eating my hours and energy. This is unlikely to change before December, unfortunately. I hadn't even logged onto the Hellgate: London alpha in two weeks until I vegged out and played a few hours last night. I've got a bunch of cool blog topics to write about, but I don't know when I'll find the time, so in lieu of something good, here's something quick. (The motto of most of the Internet. And sexual encounters.)
I saw a link to this from Pharyngula, and enjoyed it enough to repeat it. It's got to be the best Popeye-related artwork ever created, and while that was formerly not a real steep mountain to ascend, it's now gotten a lot higher.
Click this link to see it full sized and read the artist's comments. It's a real painting, and a pretty large one; the online version is a photo of it. I'd buy that, if I had money and somewhere to hang it.
Elsewhere, I saw a link to an amusing tale of M&M natural selection, Highlander style. I don't remember where I saw it, and a Google on it reveals hundreds of mirrored sources, so it's clearly not new, and has become public domain at this point, whoever the original author was. I laughed, at least.
Survival Of The Fittest
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."
This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.
There can be only one.
Oh, and there's this. It's not new, and I've probably watched it a dozen times in the past year, but it never fails to make me laugh in semi-horrified admiration.
Yes, he said it. "People like him should be wearing cardboard signs and selling pencils from cups." As well as, "pinching his chubby little flanks." The balls to break that out, on national TV, the day after Falwell died, when every news program was kissing his dead white ass and rolling belly up for the supposedly large and powerful right wing Christian demographic, is just breathtaking.
I've been watching videos of various free thinkers from Google videos and YouTube for months, usually playing them while I'm doing some housework, or cooking, or other activities when I an enjoy the spoken word audio. (I can not read or do productive work while listening to someone talking, at least not if I want to absorb the content of their words, or get anything done on the work I'm trying to multitask.) The better speakers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for instance, are wildly entertaining in their blasphemy and often quite informative as well. Dawkins is a biologist who speaks with great lucidity and authority on issues of biology and religion. Hitchens is a writer and much sought-after commentator with the articulateness and vocabulary to demonstrate his brilliant, steel trap of a mind. He's also utterly fearless when it comes to pissing people off and moreover, he's got enough asshole in him that he clearly relishes the opportunity, as the hundreds of videos of his frequent news appearances and public speeches demonstrate.
The irony with Hitchens is that he seems so lucid and well thought out and logical when it comes to most issues of public policy and culture and religion, and yet he's still 100% behind the Iraqi occupation and thinks it's a great thing that Dubya pushed for war, and that the world is far better off with the US squatting atop a burgeoning/ongoing civil war in Iraq. The weird part is that Hitchens isn't delusional about it; he's not your typical neocon who thought the Iraqi people would greet the foreign soldiers with rose petals, and Hitchens doesn't ignore reality and claim all is well, that the surge is working, etc. He's quite pragmatic about the horrible situation in the country and the quagmire the US armed forces are stuck in; he just thinks anything is better than Iraq having nukes, and thinks Iran should be next on the agenda, and that the invasion and occupation of that country that Bush is clearly pushing for would be an equally good idea. (And I think he's right on that last part, with "equally good" being the keyword.)
The difficulty for me, and I assume for others who admire Hitchens' speaking ability and his opinions on culture and religion, is how to reconcile my general agreement with his opinions on religion and culture and faith, with his neocon-leaning policies in the Middle East. Even that's too broad a term, since he's not a neocon. He's not at all sympathetic to Israel, and thinks the right wing Israelis are the ones ruining any chance for peace in their country. Furthermore, Hitchens violently disagrees with and opposes the US Christian fundamentalists who support every bit of violence and war in Israel, since their interpretation of the Bible says that the Holy Land must be united under the Jewish people in order for the rapture and the Second Coming to proceed on schedule. Yet those are precisely the people who are most in agreement with Hitchens on his approval of US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Iran.
My take, after giving it thought on and off during the months I've been watching these clips on Google Videos, is that Hitchens is so vehemently opposed to religious fundamentalism, especially of the overly murderous Arab/Islamic stripe, that he's willing to do just about anything to keep such people from obtaining nuclear weapons, and will believe any claims about those aims, no matter how far fetched. I've even heard Hitchens defend/propound the generally laughable argument that Saddam actually had bombs 'o plenty, and that they were not found by US inspectors since they were smuggled into Syria or Iran or other bordering countries before/during the early days of the US invasion. (Never mind the fact that Saddam hated and had waged outright or covert wars against those countries.)
I don't really agree with Hitchens on that issue, but I can see his point, and I guess I would agree with him if I took a very worst case scenario approach to things, and thought the dam could be kept from bursting with enough fingers in enough leaky holes. What's most interesting to me about it is the bedfellows he ends up with through his views. People like, for instance, Jerry Falwell. Someone Hitchens clearly despised, yet someone who would probably cite Hitchens' support on the Iraq/Iran invasion front, in an, "Even the atheists/leftists agree with this policy!" sort of way. If he (Falwell) weren't dead, I mean.
This is a measure of Hitchens' integrity and the strength of his opinions (or possibly his belligerence); that he will stick to what he believes even when they put him in the same camp with people he loathes in every other way. Few of us are that resolute in our beliefs; I know I'd give something a lot of second and third thought if it turned out that my opinion on it was doctrinally identical to the fundamental principles of oh, Neo Nazis, or fanatical terrorists, or Paris Hilton. Not that I'd change my mind on an issue just because people I disliked and held no respect for agreed with me, but more in terms of "If they like it, there must be something wrong with it." Knowing Hitchens as I do (from watching his TV appearances) I think he probably gets a kick out of it, in some perverse fashion.
Has everyone's 15 minutes of fame been simultaneously broadened and shortened by the Internet? That blonde bubble of a Miss South Carolina, with her YouTube-spread, 45 seconds of geographically-challenged infamy, has returned just days later with a video geography pop quiz on People.com.
As you might expect, the questions are really difficult; mountain ranges in Antarctica, minor rivers in South America, etc. A sample:
Which of the seven Canary Islands is located closest to Africa?
1) Fuerteventura 2) La Palma 3) Gran Canaria
I got 5 out of 7, but I honestly only knew 2; I got 2 more on semi-educated guesses and blind luck for the 5th. I don't think anyone even considers the possibility that Miss. Blonde there knows a single one of the answers, but she's perky and cute (if you like 17 y/o blondes), and they had to pick hard questions just to play against the idiocy that is the source of her infamy. She's really annoying, though. I mean "someone slap her" annoying. Way too sure of herself, but that's what happens when you're a teen beauty queen and you've had everyone kissing your ass and paying attention to what you say as though it were interesting for the past 10 years. This is why ugly or shy or otherwise socially-disadvantaged people almost always have far more interesting personalities, while the pretty end up working in entertainment or as TV newscasters; professions where they can be pretty and put their fake smiling skills to full use, while reading words other people wrote for them.
A far more interesting 7 question quiz would be questions for Miss. Teen Blonde USA. Easy questions of course, of the common-knowledge type that Howard Stern asks homeless people and porn stars:
How many states are in the US?
What continent is Germany part of?
What's the capital of the US?
What country did Hong Kong reunify with in 1999?
...and so forth. I'd give her 50% on those. Maybe.
Michael Vick pled guilty to some of the charges against him on Monday, and he'll be sentenced on October 10th. He could get up to 5 years in jail, though prosecutors are asking for 12-18 months. His plea was actually to some kind of interstate commerce racketeering charge, not to brutally killing pit bulls with his bare hands, or to betting on them. As it turns out, the betting is the real problem for him in terms of his football career, since all pro sports in the US have very stringent regulations about not allowing their players to bet on any sports, for "get in debt to bookies and start throwing games" reasons. An NBA referee got caught doing that just a few months ago, so Vick was sure to avoid admitting to betting since he's hoping to return to the league after his jail time.
Estimates are that he's going to lose around $100,000,000 dollars as a result of this, counting salary and endorsements. Hope you really, really enjoyed the dog fights, Mike. They were expensive.
In other news, Vick's former team (though they haven't cut him yet for salary cap reasons) played on Monday night, and this is an actual line from the official wire service game recap. I'm quoting it since I suspect it might be edited out in future versions. I groaned and laughed. Graughed?
Outside, about a dozen picketers waved signs such as "Ban Vick Permanently" and "Bad Newz Vick Shames Atlanta." Across the street, a similar number of Vick supporters barked out a much different sentiment, aided by a megaphone: "We love Mike! We love Mike!"
YouTube clips of people unable to answer the simplest questions are quite common, and often good for a painful laugh. This one might be the worst yet, though. I'm just glad it wasn't an American making a mockery of our public education system. For once.
I'm just amazed that the host could keep a straight face throughout the entire incident. I'd never have made it without cracking up. The real debate is whether or not 56% of the audience really doesn't know that our, and all, solar systems are heliocentric. I'd like to believe they were just giving bad advice to screw with the guy for not knowing the answer to what had to be one of the easiest questions ever posed on that program, but I'm not willing to bet on that, in this day and age.
Update: Malaya pointed out that I should probably credit Copernicus as well, since he was credited with heliocentrism long before Galileo came along. The big G did landmark work with telescopes though, confirmed that Earth orbited the sun, that there were other planets, discovered some of Jupiter's moons, disproved epicycles, and then famously had to abjure it all on threat of excommunication from the Pope. A slight scientific error the Church required only 500 years to rectify.
Update #2: So now people are sending me links with other incredibly dumb people on video tape. This one, with Miss South Carolina from the Miss Teen USA pageant explaining why so many Americans can't find the USA on a world map, is my favorite thus far. It's 48 seconds of jaw dropping blondage, and an excellent reminder of why I'd prefer to live out of a dumpster rather than teaching high school students.
Deryni Rising is the first book in Katherine Kurtz' long-running Chronicles of Deryni series. This book was published in 1970, and the series is still going, with over a dozen titles now in print. The most recent was published in 2004, though I've got no idea how well it, or any of them, have sold. They must be somewhat popular, given that the first book is still in print nearly 40 years after being published. Buy (or not) your copy here; it's got a 4 star rating on Amazon, but from only 24 reviews.
Kurtz has an official site, which Google told me was appropriately located at Dernyni.net. So yeah, this is her big series. I clicked the link, and after I recovered from the eye-injury her home page inflicted upon my unsuspecting eyeballs (Deryni.net = best page design on Geocities, circa 1998), I browsed through the lifeless forums and wound up on her Deryni FAQ. It seems to be out of date, since the most recent Deryni novel listed on Amazon is In the King's Service, from 2004. That one's not listed on Kurtz' FAQ, but one as recent as 2002 is, and there are more than a dozen titles in total, along with a few short story collections and other assorted tie-ins. Including one that looks like it's half fan fiction, half Kurtz' original. Interesting concept.
So she's chugging along, and good for her. I'm not too down on any author who can earn a living with their words. It's certainly more than I've done thus far, and no, another blog entry/book review choking full of snarky criticism isn't real likely to change that. To the scores!
Deryni Rising, 1970, by Katherine Kurtz Plot: 3 Concept: 6 Writing Quality/Flow: 4/6 Characters: 4 Horror: NA Humor: NA Fun Factor: 3 Page Turner: 6 Re-readability: 5 Overall: 4
I don't know how fair it is to judge Kurtz and her whole series just from the first book; after all, even Shanarra improved greatly after book one, but unless/until I read another Deryni book this one is all I've got to go on. And it wasn't very good. It wasn't horrible, and I've read worse, but it's nothing special. It's not an adult novel, and must have been marketed in what they used to call the "Young Adult" category. That's not because it stars children, though the main character is a young prince, but because it's simple and formulaic. Bad guys are entirely bad, good guys are noble and honest and valorous, and who do you think triumphs in the end? Go on, take a wild guess...
More curious than the novel itself is the way I came to read it, since my copy of the book has been in my possession longer than some of you have been alive. The book has a used bookstore stamp inside, proclaiming that it came from Larry's Discount Books in Arlington, Texas. Arlington is a glorified suburb of Dallas, Texas, and home to the new Dallas Cowboys stadium. It's also where I lived with my dad during 6th and 7th grade, back in the 1980s. So yes, I'd been carrying this book around for over two decades, and had never gotten around to reading it until a few weeks ago.
Well, I hadn't actually been carrying it; it was in my bookshelf at my dad's house in San Diego, where I'd left it when I combined the books from my apartment with books I'd left at his and my mom's house, when I moved up north to live with Malaya in summer 2003. I was browsing that bookshelf this summer while visiting the folks, saw this book, and two others in the Deryni series, remembered I'd had them forever without ever reading them, and stuck them into my suitcase on a whim. I read it on a similar whim, and it wasn't good, but it wasn't horrible.
I picked the book up all those years ago since other kids I knew in junior high were always reading it, and the Elfstones of Shannara books. I never got into either of them then, and since I read my first Shanarra novel a couple of years ago, it's fitting that I have now read one of the Deryni books too. Kurtz is better than Brooks, at least judging her first book against his first two, but neither of them are going on my recommend list.
The world of Deryni Rising is basically England, circa 1300, if the Druids could actually work magic. They're not called Druids in the book, nor is their land called England, but it's any generic middle ages kingdom, with a brave king, potential enemies on the borders, traitors in the court, and a powerful and corrupt clergy. The magic comes from the Deryni, a race who appear to be exactly like humans, but who possess magic that humans do not. They used to be part of the main kingdom, but there was a war and all of the Deryni moved away or went into hiding. They and magic in general are now thought to be evil, and the priests condemn it.
The book starts with the noble king on a hunt, most of which he spends thinking about his half-Deryni bestest friend and General who's off in some distant outpost. The king is promptly murdered by some sort of witch, and his 15 y/o son the prince is in command. His first act is to call home General half-mage. He arrives two weeks later, and the rest of the story takes place in about 12 hours, as the General does stuff to help the prince ready himself to become king, and to regain or somehow tap into some form of magic; the kind his human father had and used to fight off enemies while he ruled the kingdom.
The Queen is hysterically opposed to magic though, the priests hate it too (though they never say why, or mention Satan, in kind of a wimpy cop out on Kurtz' part), and almost the entire court hates and fears the half-mage General, simply because he's a Deryni. The fact that the beloved late king used magic constantly to save the kingdom isn't really discussed.
None of this is awful, but it's all very formulaic. The scheming traitor noble is one-dimensional, as are the disapproving priests. We're told right away that the prince must regain his father's magic to survive, but it's not made clear why, until coronation the next morning, when the witch who murdered the king marches into the royal hall with about fifty of her enemy soldiers, and demands to fight a magical duel, to the death, for the right to rule, against the young prince.
Why this is allowed is never explained. Why the city guards didn't stop them from entering, why the royal guards didn't fight them off, and why anyone expects the prince to have a chance against a super powerful sorceress, when he's never shown any kind of magical ability at all. The clergy vanish entirely from the book come the last 50 pages and the magical showdown, presumably because after Kurtz spent most of the short book portraying them as eager to arrest or execute anyone with any magical ability, there's no way to justify them allowing it to happen.
There's also no way to justify why the evil witch would be allowed to challenge for the throne. Can anyone just waltz in and throw down? Doesn't she have to be in the royal line of succession, hated/feared magic or not? The best part is after the prince miraculously regains his father's magical powers (which he does just in the nick of time, if you can believe it), and uses them to defeat the evil witch (yeah, I was surprised too), all of the witch's soldiers just sort of melt into the crowd while everyone else is applauding the former prince/new king's victory. Because you know, when a regicidal usurper challenges the new king to a magical death match, and brings fifty of her bodyguard, all of whom are sworn enemies of the kingdom with her, it's only natural to let them all go once you defeat her in combat. Including the ones who were attendants of the scheming, traitorous noble who just got defeated by the king's champion. No hard feelings, guys. And the priests are fine with you using magic too; it's only the prince and his best friend/protector who they object to casting fire serpents.
In addition to this book I possess book 3 in the series, and another book from later on. I might skim that one at some point to see if it's any better than this one was. I'll probably have to read it to say for sure though, since this book wasn't written poorly, and there weren't an abundance of LOL-bad moments (unlike Brooks' Shanarra series). Fortunately, the Deryni stuff reads really fast. I got through all 280 pages of this book in around 90 minutes, and yeah, I was kind of skimming, but not really, since it's written on such a simple level and all the characters are so straightforward and unambiguous that I don't think I missed anything. There's not really anything to miss, other than kid's cartoon-level plot twisting.
Atlanta Falcons' quarterback Michael Vick plead guilty to some of the charges in his dog fighting case, and the prosecutor is recommending 12-18 months prison time, and a fine of absolutely no consequence to a man who (used to) earn over $15m a year in salary and endorsements.
His football career is over for at least a couple of years, and even if it recovers to some extent (unlikely), Vick's marketing potential and endorsements are gone forever. Here's where it gets ironic. As aforeblogged, it took me a while to realize it, but people were evidently upset by the dog fighting, but most upset by the fact that Vick and his friends/former business partners/current snitches were, as part of their animal husbandry and selective breeding, culling dogs that lacked the requisite fighting spirit.
Since this is exactly what animals breeders have done since the dawn of animal domestication, I'm still kind of confused why this was the apparent tipping point in public disapproval of Vick's actions. What do people think happens to all those millions of goats and steers and sheeps and every other kind of animal that's bred for certain characteristics, when offspring turn out not to have those characteristics? So it's okay with livestock that we eat, but wrong to kill dogs who were certain to be killed, sooner or later, in the course of their dogfighting activities?
At any rate, there were more than fifty dogs in Vick's kennels at the time of the FBI raid, and as required by law, the animals had to be held at the pound for thirty days, to give any rightful owners a chance to come forward and claim them. If this sounds ridiculous to you, you're not alone. Even PETA agrees:
"There's no dispute over who owns the dogs," said Daphna Nachminovitch, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "Obviously this is not going to be a process where someone steps forward and says, 'This is my dog, can I have her back, please?' "
Though Hudson, who also is handling Vick's criminal case, will determine what becomes of the pit bulls, Nachminovitch said that it's likely that they will be euthanized because they're not adoptable as pets. "These dogs are a ticking time bomb," she said. "Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It's widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them."
This is just common sense; obviously you can't adopt out vicious dogs that have been trained to fight. Probably no one would want them anyway, right?
The locations of the shelters holding the dogs haven't been disclosed out of concern that the animals could be stolen, Nachminovitch said.
"They are a hot commodity in the world of dogfighting," she said.
Hmm. So Michael Vick was a horrible person for euthanizing dogs who wouldn't fight, but all the dogs he had that would fight were stolen by the FBI, and are now going to be euthanized so other dog fighters won't get them and allow them to live and keep doing what fighting dogs love to do; fight other dogs. But killing dogs was Vick's worst sin? Apparently his error was in doing the job himself, rather than paying off a veterinarian to give his weak dogs lethal injections. Who knew?
The fact that much of the mainstream media, especially old school reporters, regards the rise of the "blogosphere" with a mixture of confusion, suspicion, and loathing, is not news. A recent LA Times editorial by a long time journalist and J-school professor provides an excellent example of this, and a funny one too. Not funny on purpose, but because the entire editorial appears to be carved from one solid, glistening block of fail.
It's clear that the guy has no idea what blogs do, that he is not at all familiar with even the most popular and influential blogs, and that he did approximately zero research for his column. If the whole thing is meant to be some kind of meta-example of what's wrong with blogging, demonstrated by an editorial written in the style of a lazy blog post, it's brilliant. Otherwise, not so much.
Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.
Now, I get criticized plenty. And that's fair since I do plenty of criticizing. And I wouldn't raise any of this here if it weren't for what came up in Skube's response.
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. So to that extent I'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..."
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example -- along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn't seem to remember what he'd written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he'd never read.
To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... "
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?>
Worse (or better, if you're reading for entertainment rather than enlightenment) yet is the fact that Skube (snacks?) seems to be making a late-life career of this, as evidenced by this discussion of an editorial he wrote in 2005, also about how blogs suck.
I asked him what blogs he had read to prepare for his column. He told me he found that to be a very strange question. "I scanned a bunch of blogs," he said, but was able to summon only one (Andrew Sullivan's) by name.
Given his statement that blogs don't do real journalism, I asked him what he thought about Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. He remembered Marshall as a magazine writer, but was unfamiliar with his blog, or its new investigative-reporting plan.
I asked him to compare the original reporting model promised by Pajamas Media with the commentary-oriented approach of the Huffington Post. He told me he didn't know either site.
Since he wanted to talk about the time factor, I asked him if he didn't find sites like Instapundit convenient ways to gain access to more information in less time. He had heard of Glenn Reynolds, and visited the site. Once.
Perhaps most incredible, he published in the Greensboro paper a column that says, "At local levels, one can imagine bloggers spurring more comprehensive coverage by mainstream media. But we are not there yet."
He did not know that Greensboro is a hotbed of local blogging, and its paper has received national acclaim (including articles in the New York Times and LA Times) for its interaction with those bloggers. I asked him what he thought of Sandy Carmany's blog. "Who?," he said.
He was uncomfortable with the lack of editors at blogs. I asked if he was familiar with the concept of peer editing, which is how blogs correct each other. He said he'd heard of it, as used by students in public schools, where "the peers who edit are the people least suited to do it."
I did more reporting about Skube's column than he did to write it.
Specific journalistic failings aside, Skube has a (misconstrued) point. Obviously, the vast majority of blogs (this one included) aren't valid sources for news or informational reporting, and aren't written with journalistic standards. Whether real news is, given the "opinions on shape of the Earth differ" style of reporting that leaves most lies (such as those promulgated by politicians) unchallenged, is another question. But whatever standards you hold up for journalism to aspire to, most blogs don't meet them. Of course the vast majority of blogs make no effort to, since they (we?) are usually more about commentary or entertainment or titty pictures than news. Which is fine; there's news on TV, but there's also a lot of entertainment, and even newspapers cover the arts, sports, currents, movie reviews, etc.
What the better political/news blogs do well is collection and (sometimes) analysis. I read, and/or read about, dozens of news articles (by real journalists) every day, largely thanks to bloggers who post links to them. I find it ironic that Skube complains in his new editorial that no one has time to read blogs for news. I'd say that's exactly backwards; who has time to wade through hundreds of news items a day to remain informed? Skimming the ever-updating headlines on CNN or BBC or local papers, then slogging through dozens of articles to find out what's going on would take hours. Instead of that a person can just read half a dozen good bloggers who provide links to and commentary/analysis on the day's big and small news, and get the same job done in a fraction of the time.
The time investment difference there seems pretty clear, and sure, you'd learn more from reading the original articles, time permitting, but that's only provided you could remember and retain it all, and you knew enough to put it into context. I regularly read bloggers who specialize in constitutional law, or science, or politics, since they know a great deal about their areas of specialty, and can put some new news item into context, while providing links and background information I do not possess.
Remember when there used to be outbreaks of new viruses and trojans and they were spread by emails with attachments like, "Britney Spears Nude!" Those of us who know what we're doing on a computer never considered opening those attachments, and most of the infected were poor victims stuck with Outlook Express and automatic attachment viewing, but at least the come on lines were attractive. (I saw "were" since Mrs. Spears has selflessly taken steps to ensure those virus come ons will never again use her name in vain.)
I got this one today, and it's just such a half-hearted effort I almost want to click the link out of pity:
Good day.
Your Daughter has sent you holiday card from dgreetings.com.
Click on your holiday card link below:
http://130.236.23.41/
Copyright (c) 1993-2007 dgreetings.com All Rights Reserved
Aside from the fact that I have no daughter, and that if I did her first contact with me would more likely be through a lawyer than an online greeting card... holiday season? It's August! Or perhaps I'm underestimating the growing appeal of Air Conditioner Appreciation and National Dance Week?
Saw this link on Perez Hilton and laughed, and when I started ICQ a friend about it, I realized I had enough to say to turn it into a blog entry.
It's absurdly campy and gay (obviously), but I didn't think the music was that bad. I'll never listen to it again, but I watched most of the video (jaw slightly agape) and let the song run on while I clicked to another tab, and it was kinda catchy. My praise might sound rather faint, but I last about 30 seconds with most random musical links I see, and considerably less than that with most pop songs, so I'm damn near raving on this one.
More substantially, the underlying "bear" concept bemuses me. That men are into objectifying and categorizing themselves and the objects of their sexual desires is not news to anyone. It is interesting to compare how gay men create and adopt these various "types" and how it's (apparently, to my outsider POV) not a big deal. My impression is that women are far less willing to be subdivided in such fashion, and if a heterosexual man says he's only attracted to Japanese women, or aerobics instructors, or busty redheads, etc, he's likely to offend most women within, and nearly all women without, his target demographic. Men, gay men especially, are more accepting of this kind of behavior since they're men themselves, and know how the male mind works. Not all of us lock in so specifically on a type, but quite a few of us do, either positively or negatively. I like all types of women, and personality/intellect/wit is far more important than looks, but just going by a "type," I much prefer thin, athletic women with longish hair, usually of a darker/ethnic complexion. Conversely, I have never been attracted to the busty "blonde bombshell" look that most guys seem to adore. Pam Anderson, Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Monroe, etc... do nothing for me. Actively disinterested. Why? No idea.
Returning to the gay issue though, I have never felt less gay than I did after watching that Bear4ce video. I'm not repulsed by gay activity (and what a strange world we live in that I feel a need to disclaimer that up front?), and like most straight men I'm rather an aficionado of lesbians (the hot, lipstick kind who also like men and exist only in porn, on the Howard Stern show, and at colleges you do not attend), but I simply can not imagine how anyone would want to have sex with one of the guys on the "Bear4ce," talented singers and dancers though they may be. I don't mean I am confused by gay attraction either; I never understand how women are interested in men either. I have come to realize that they do, and that it's even possible that some women are attracted to me, but that's an entirely intellectual appreciation, and I have to remind myself of it regularly. I don't understand why and I can not empathize, but trust me, never a day goes by when some typical male behavior doesn't cause me to thank Darwin for natural selection and the biological reproductive urges that somehow make women willing to spend time in our loathsome, sausage-fingered presence.
As for those gay dudes, I find them unbearable. They're all pudgy and hairy and bearded, and in no possible world can I imagine being sexually attracted to that. I think a beard (the kind that grows on a man's face, not the kind that costars in Batman Begins) is a true test of man's latent homosexuality. It's not something I spend much time thinking about, but if I had to do something gay with a guy, to save the world or whatever, I can almost envision it with a Clay Aiken or Zack Elfron type. They're hairless and delicate and non-threatening and practically women already, which is why they are so beloved by young/emerging gay men and tween-aged girls, two groups whose sexual preferences are undergoing an evolution between innocent youthful attraction and adult sexual desires.
The logic for straight men forced to contemplate gay sex is something like, "I don't want to do a guy, but if I had to..." A bear though? A big sweaty, hairy, smelly guy with a beard? *shudder* If you can in any way entertain that notion, you are gay. Not even bi-curious. Gay. Or Bi, perhaps, but even then, if your girlfriend wears a lot of cargo pants and flannel shirts, or she looks like Rosie O'Donnell, it's probably time to quit sitting on the fence and officially switch teams.
As for the women who like men, and especially bearded, bear types, congrats. Your double XX chromosomes are in full working order, you are a true credit to your gender. It is only through your sacrifice that the human race still exists to foul this otherwise pristine globe.
It's autumn (sort of) and once again the NFL seasons is upon us. And by "us" I mean United States citizens, since no one else on earth gives a shit about our misnomered, heavily-padded, overly-regulated version of rugby.
As has been the case for most of my adult life, I've been looking forward to football season, but not enough to actually read previews or pay attention to off season trades or free agent signings. As a result I have no more than the foggiest notion of which teams have improved and which have regressed, but that's not all bad since it makes the actual games more suspenseful.
So far it's just preseason, and I think this is the second week of the five week preseason, but I wouldn't swear to that. I wasn't actually aware it had begun until I saw part of SportsCenter on Saturday and they showed NFL highlights. I then checked the listings and saw that there were games on TV Sunday and Monday night, and through the miracle of a semi-functional VCR, and the fact that I am way too impatient/blessed with better things to do to sit through a 3.5 hour live sporting event, I was able to watch both games in about an hour each.
It's a good thing it is preseason, since I was unprepared. I hadn't used the VCR since like, January, so it took me some experimentation to discover how to actually set it to record, and I was so distracted by that that I choked on the timing. Inexcusably, I forgot that the first 8-10 minutes of any NFL telecast are bullshit pregame crap filled partially by personality pieces on whichever player most recently suffered a personal tragedy, and mostly by the first volley of commercials for unnecessary pharmaceuticals and large-wheeled vehicles with the sort of fuel efficiency that makes Osama bin Laden giggle in his cave. On top of my starting time error, I was rusty with the fast forward, and quite often stopped too soon, forcing myself to listen to several seconds of inane announcer chatter before each play, or worse, I ran over and saw the play in high speed, then had to hear a few seconds of inane announcer chatter before I was able to click the FF button again to zip on to the next play. It was a humbling experience, but well illustrated the critical need for preseason games for both players and fans.
I was able to successfully FF through all commercials, but the tape doesn't run so quickly that I couldn't tell what they were for, and honestly, it's a little embarrassing to be a football fan. The target audience of the games is clearly demonstrated by the ad purchases, and by all evidence, preseason games are viewed by me and several million middle aged men with circulatory and penis issues. If the commercials weren't for symbolic penile substitutes; pick up trucks with the most size and power in their class; they were for actual penile substitutes; Viagra and Cialis, and topping those off were a steady stream of ads for junk food and beer. I felt kind of like I'd been Amazon'ed; as if I'd searched for a few books to get more information on them, and then found my recommended titles were all about bestiality, or crocheting, or by Ann Coulter, or something equally-shameful.
It can be disconcerting to realize the depths of the water you've swum (or waded) into, while watching a program. Flicking channels you will sometimes find yourself enjoying a movie or TV show, and then come the next commercial break you realize every ad is for something that would appeal a harried housewife, or a four year old. It's enough to make you question your viewing choices, or start to invent excuses in your head; "This show is fine; it must be something different than this channel usually programs, and that's why the ads are all for tampons and floor waxes."
A new werewolf movie opened this weekend in the US. Skinwalkers, a low-budget, crappy one that was kept from the critics and universally-loathed by the few who did see it. (Only 17 reviews on RT, and only 1 positive.) I didn't see it and didn't want to, but I skimmed a couple of reviews and thought this one summed things up pretty well.
No subset of the horror genre has created a higher percentage of dogs than the werewolf movie. Since The Wolf Man reached screens in 1941, it has become possible to count the number of good films about lycanthropy on the fingers of one hand. The problem with most werewolf movies isn't that they're derivative - that's pretty much a given when one considers the inherent limitations - but that they're badly written, badly acted, or just plain silly. Skinwalkers hits the trifecta: all three apply.
...
The impact of the PG-13 rating is evident everywhere. The bad guys inflict PG-13 torture on their victims then have PG-13 sex. There's PG-13 cursing and PG-13 gore. Everything is carefully sanitized so that teenage boys can see this movie without having to worry about adult supervision. Never mind that it's pretty much impossible to tell a werewolf story with anything less aggressive than an R. I don't claim that the rating is the reason why Skinwalkers fails, but it certainly doesn't help. Shots of horrific wolf attacks and an unobscured view of Malthe's body would at least have made the film seem less juvenile, if no more intelligent.
So it's poorly written, has bad actors, bad special effects, poor direction, and the back story/mythology isn't any good. Not much left, is there?
The tragic thing is that there's a perpetual audience appetite for horror movies, and monster movies, and worse, that almost all of them suck. Reading about Skinwalkers, I was reminded of my initial reaction to Underworld. That wasn't a good movie either, but it had the clever marketing angle of a hot chick in latex as the hero, and the (relatively) interesting world fiction of vampires warring against werewolves. And it made money. Skinwalkers isn't like to do so, (opening weekend half a million is a disaster), but it cost nothing to make and they'll do decent business on rentals and DVDs, as all horror movies do, so I'm sure it'll be profitable, in a minor sort of way.
Skinwalkers looks like a B-movie that's about as good (bad) as anyone involved could have hoped. Underworld, on the other hand, had a decent budget and some actual acting/directing talent, but it undermined itself with a horrible script in which every opportunity was missed and most things made no sense. I belabor those points in my rather overlong review.
I concluded my Underworld review by remarking that crap like this makes me want to write my own monster movies. I still plan to, but honestly, why do most action/horror movies suck so hard? What prevents the vast collection of theoretically-talented screen writers in Hollywood from putting together a decent 90 minutes of action? It wouldn't seem that difficult, but judging by the results on screen, it must be. Maybe it's interference from studio executives and bad directorial choices, but so often the errors in the film and script are glaringly evident to virtually everyone who sees the film. Some character is painfully stupid or annoying, there's no continuity in the action sequences, there's an excessive focus on some unimportant element that distracts from the main focus of the film, etc. (Transformers hit that trifecta.) The problems seem correctable, but they so seldom are that I'm left puzzled.
Why can't movie studios even get the basic stuff right? They sometimes do on big budget films, or at least come close enough that viewers are willing to overlook the misses, but the medium and low budget action movies seem quite incompetent. Action fans aren't looking for a masterpiece. All we need are the basic elements of story; an interesting protagonist, tolerable sidekick, clearly-defined struggle, a few action sequences, maybe a love interest, and a big finale where the good guys triumph. How hard is that? Polish and shine are just details, and it obviously helps if the action sequences are exciting, the acting is good, the characters are believable and sympathetic, etc. Those help, but they're not required, so long as the film doesn't suck at the key elements.
I think a lot of it is about the writers (or else the sausage assembly line that mutilates their original scripts into what we see on the screen). Good writers don't write formulaic action movies. They want to be Tarentino-esque and reinvent film with time flow trickery, a dozen quirky characters, unconventional stories, original concepts, etc. All of which are great if they work, but most of the time they do not, which is why we end up with neither fish nor fowl pictures like Domino and Smokin' Aces, which are meant to appeal to action fans, but are too clever by half with artsy film making techniques and crazy writing, and end up appealing to basically no one. Or overly-intelligent action films like Firefox which are loved, but only by the sliver of audience that knows about/is interested in them.
It makes you wonder what would happen if the talented writers had quotas to meet. Lots of old time movie critics lament the passing of the "studio system" where directors and actors had to do what the studios told them to do, and as a result they turned out far more quantity, that some think was also of a higher quality. What if we had that today? Instead of Tarentino (trying to) produce a masterpiece every 6 years, what if he had to turn out a movie every 12-14 months? He couldn't make films with as many inventive things as he does now, but if he were on a deadline he wouldn't have time to fool around with all the reinventions of cinema, and while his movies wouldn't be as different and unique, there would be 5x more of them. Apply the same situation to other good writers, like the interchangeably-named/talented JJ Whedon and Josh Abrahams. Take away the pet projects like Serenity and make them punch up mainstream studio action films!
Looking at their body of work on IMDB I am reminded that one of them wrote Mission Impossible III, which I enjoyed, thus my point is proven. Of course they also wrote the sucktastic Armageddon and Aliens 4, and mostly work on TV shows I've never seen and have no interest in, and it occurs to me that writing a TV show is the ultimate expression of "doing mainstream work on a tight schedule," so I might have to rethink my solution.
As long time readers will recall, I kept pet rats for years, before moving from San Diego up to Northern California to to live with Malaya. I moved in summer 2003, and left my giant rat cage in my old apartment (stuffed into/filling up the dumpster outside, actually) since it was gross and dirty and ugly and huge. Also I was kind of over owning lots of rats, and Malaya was okay with a few but not a herd, and she had a cat, etc. So I whittled down my flock over the month before I moved, and gave away the 3m boa constrictor I'd been feeding the (frozen) adult rats to, and moved north with just two remaining sister rats, and my 1m ball python. (Who I had to begin buying frozen small rats for, since I wasn't breeding rats anymore.)
Once settled into Malaya's condo, I put the rats into a large aquarium and left them there for a while, until their obvious boredom and unhappiness in a simple rectangle, after living their whole lives in a huge, sprawling, multi-level wire mesh complex, grew quite obvious. So I built a stovepipe climbing ramp straight up to the top of the old bookshelf we had their cage on, and put a small observatory on the roof. Plant-obscured photos of this can be seen on the very outdated Back Patio photo page.
The two rats were nearly a year old when I moved, and since rats very seldom live to even 2 years, it wasn't a surprise that they both died in early 2004. (I just hunted through the archives and added links to my R.I.P. posts to the three rat photo pages.) I had hoped they might live longer, but no such luck, though at nearly 2 they were two of the longer lived rats I ever owned. Male rats might live longer, but I always preferred females for pets since they were softer, not musk-smelling, smaller, more social, and obviously enough, capable of having lots of babies with only minimal interaction with a rented/short term owned male rat. Females have a high mortality rate though, often dying while pregnant or shortly after giving birth/nursing a litter that will literally outweigh them by three weeks. The ones who survived that quite often developed huge breast tumors and had to be euthanized for it, and I always assumed that was related to the massive quantities of milk they had to produce.
I've gone nearly three years without handling any rats that weren't frozen as snake chow, and while I occasionally miss the little squeakers, especially the fun of a new litter of a dozen as they learn to climb and start to scamper everywhere, I'm okay not having any. Dusty and Jinx are more interactive than rats, and they make better lap sitters. Plus they're housebroken and don't chew through every type of plastic cord they can get hold of.
I bring all this up since I've received a number of semi-obsessive emails from rat lovers over the past few years, and one came in yesterday that's worth mention. It's odd; I never heard from any rat owners while I owned rats, despite my unfortunate habit of blogging about them at great length on a very regular basis. (See links to some of the many, many, too many blog entries about them atop the three rat photo pages.) Now that I no longer own rats, I keep getting discovered by rat lover email lists or forums, and receive a small cluster of angry/misguided emails over the course of a week or two. It first happened a couple of years ago, and while providing Malaya and me with some amusement, I don't believe I ever got around to blogging about it. I can't now, since those emails are long gone thanks to several email client crashes, but I do have this new one.
Tragically, it's not crazy, and neither is the sender. She's not crazy or hateful or unbalanced, like some of the past rat mails were. She's just kind of scolding and sincere, while being completely uninformed about my rat husbandry experience -- and where's the fun in snarking on that? Here's a partial quote:
I just saw your webpage. I'm sure you'll hear from a zillion other people soon (if you haven't already)--it was floating around the ratties list on livejournal.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that it's really, really sad how you take care of your rats (or cared for your rats--I'm not sure how out of date your site is). Rats live 3-4 years (although I've heard of a few that have lasted 6-7), not 18 months, if you actually take care of them. That means:
A cage that's big enough. The one on your website (which may, admittedly, be five years old--I'm really not sure) doesn't look big enough for one rat, let alone three. Although, maybe it's a ledge of a really big, nice cage that just happens to look a little lopsided. Here's a good cage calculator.
Feed them a reasonable diet. Just because they can technically live off of corn doesn't mean you should feed them that crap. Can you live off of canned corn? Sure, but it'll lower your immune system and probably make you stupid from the lack of nutrients. Try Harland Teklad lab blocks, or Mazuri. If you give them a healthy diet and don't breed them haphazardly, you won't have an "ant farm" anymore. Rats are not insects.
I don't mean to pick on you, but I saw the site and it made me sad. If you ever have rats again, please please PLEASE take better care of them. Don't breed them. Give them healthy food and big cages and lots of toys. Get the girls fixed, at the very least--you know they tend to get tumors if you don't.
I snipped out some longer stuff, but it's all heartfelt advice, even if it doesn't seem really first hand informed. Maybe it is, I dunno, but most of the mails I got in the past from rat lovers were from people who'd owned like, 2 rats, for about 6 months. And I found it kind of amusing they were lecturing me on rat maintenance and care when I'd owned upwards of 100 rats over a decade, had read numerous books and websites on rat care, and had extensive experience with nearly every permutation of rat interaction/behavior. The emailers are also always full of all sorts of advice that was completely inapplicable, since they all seemed to have read just one page and lept to erroneous conclusions from it. Like this one thinking I only fed them canned corn, or others assuming I had them on cedar shavings (which give rats respiratory problems), or in too small a cage, or males/females all mixed together, etc.
It's not reasonable to expect a random person happening upon my website to read through six years and thousands of updates to fully understand my disparate and evolving views on a given subject, but when they come to complain about rats, and quote the "furry ant farm" bit which is taken from the intro to the rat photos pages, is it too much for me to expect them to make it one paragraph further, and encounter the part where I say:
(The two sisters I brought up with me from San Diego got old and died a few months apart in early 2004, and have not been replaced. I may get some more rats someday, when we've got a bigger place to house them, or when we need breeders to feed our future tegus. Or both. I do miss the little furry scurriers, at times.)
On the other hand, I do not have any centralized section of rat info/commentary. I talked about bits and pieces of raising them, and told amusing stories about this or that, but I don't have it all on one page, and, for obvious reasons (primarily: wanting to be less boring), I never wrote about every last day to day detail of rat raising.
The problem with most rat lovers, judging from their emails (not so much the one quoted above, though) is that they all skim one or two pages, pick out the sarcastic quotes and comments, and assume they know everything about me and my rat rearing. I mention how much rats like corn = I only feed them corn and they're malnourished. I talk about some dying while pregnant = I breed them constantly until they die. I don't specifically state how large their cage is = I have them crammed into a tiny enclosure. It's as if you read about a blogger who took his dog to the park for a jog and gave the animal some ice cream as a treat, and you were moved to send an angry email about how he's overexercising his poor dog and how he's a bad owner for making the poor animal live on dairy products alone.
If you're wondering, I put the dimensions of my old cage into the cage calculators she sent, and it told me, "This cage will hold up to 20 rats if the space is used wisely." I usually had 4-6 adults in it, and it had 4 partionable sections with multiple levels/ramps/perches in each section, so um... overcrowding: not so much.
All of that said... it's all beside the point. The real key issues are as follows:
1) I'm a man. 2) I own snakes. 3) I write honestly about rat behavior and longevity and make jokes about them being a fuzzy, diseased plague.
I do not know every rat owner alive, and not every rat owner fits into a neat stereotype. However, there are a few general types.
1) Young males who think rats are cool and evil and get some on a lark from a pet store and feed them junk food and let them run around a lot and eventually lose/kill them. 2) Breeders, who raise rats for sale or to feed their own reptiles and treat them like the cash crop they are, rather than pets. These often overlap somewhat with type #1. 3) Rat ladies, who are almost exclusively white, single women in their 40s or 50s who adore their rats and take wonderful, spoiling, doting care of the creatures. Most rat ladies are stable and realistic and own just a few, but some get delusional and cat lady-like and start adopting unwanted rats from pet stores, or make some mistakes in housing accommodations and suddenly find themselves dealing with several pregnant females, who produce a dozen babies each in just a couple of weeks, which the rat ladies or course can not sell to a pet store, since they'd just end up in a reptile's tummy.
These descriptions and stereotypes are far from unjustified. Every time I took rats in to a pet store, or went to buy a new male for breeding, the people working there were surprised or shocked that I kept them as pets. Especially if there were female clerks, and they saw how expertly I handled rats, and how socialized and tame mine were (on the rare occasions I took adults in for sale or show). It was not what they expected from a man, or a rat breeder, and those were just the store clerks. The Rat Ladies were far more set in their prejudices and stereotypes about how men and breeders treated rats. Guess who sends me emails about rats?
Every email I've ever received, perhaps a dozen in total, have come from women, and from the tone none of them are exactly teenagers. They see the rat photos, and see links to snake photos, and see links to pictures of me, or judge from my tone that I'm male, and that's it. I don't take care of the rats, I don't love the rats, I don't think of them as pets, I'm only growing them to feed to a snake, etc. Adding to this, most of the rat ladies have idealized, romanticized views of rat behavior and biology, and while some are quite experienced, lots of them are very new to it. Many have had rats for years, but only one or two at a time, and as a result they tend to be "forgetful" about exactly when they got a rat and how old it is, and even if their dates are kept accurately, they haven't raised enough rodents to have a sufficient sample size to really know what they're talking about.
They've read a book or two, and lots of rose-tinted website info, and think they know something. Sure, rats can live 3 or 4 years. Humans can live to be 110, but it's the exception, not the rule. And a doctor who's worked in a nursing home for fifteen years and watched countless people die at 55 and 60 will know a great deal more about human longevity, caring for the elderly, the process of death, etc, than a kid fresh of medical school who's all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of visions of everyone living to 95 with the proper diet and exercise.
With any luck this emailer is correct and the URL to some page of my site has been posted by some outraged Rat Lady, and that will garner me a few more emails. If so, and if they're more amusingly-furious than this one, I'll follow up on this in a few days.
Since everyone (except for people who don't) loves online surveys that can also be used to diagnose serious mental illnesses, here's a fun link. I saw it from a post on Pharyngula, whose atheist, biologist, Phd proprietor scored in the antisocial obsessive range, but well below the borderline-autistic borderline.
Coincidentally, I scored the same as PZ did. A 24, which the test labels as an average math contest winner. You can see what the test is driving at by the clusters of thematically-linked questions. People with Autism/Asperger's are generally obsessed with numbers and patterns and minor details, they make routines they hate to deviate from, they have little/no empathy for or insight into the feelings of others, and they do not enjoy spontaneity or new situations or human interaction/chit chat.
If you answers skew towards antisocial and obsessive, and you'll come in pretty high up the test. The overlap between simply being antisocial or unconcerned with others can be kind of high, though. I think I hit the Asperger's range pretty well on a lot of the social issues and routines and such, but for me it's a conscious choice, rather than a biological determinism. (At least that's what I tell myself.) I'm not good at chit chat since I feel it's a waste of time. I can do it, but I don't want to. I very much enjoy conversation and dialogue, but it has to be about something and be of some substance. I'd much rather have a long conversation with someone I disagree with about X or Y, than spend 5 minutes sharing insubstantial gripes with someone who feels as I do about X or Y. I don't mind talking to new people, so long as they're intelligent and able to you know... talk. And think.
That and I am well out of practice at math and don't pay much attention to numbers, or my social tendencies would have put me well into Rainman range.
Hot Fuzz. An intentionally absurd action comedy by the guys who did Sean of the Dead. It's not the type of movie I usually see, but the wacky trailer made me laugh and won me over, and I enjoyed it. It's not any kind of masterpiece, and the ending action sequences get predictable when they go on way too long, but I feel safe recommending it.
To the scores:
Hot Fuzz Script/Story: 7 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: 7 Humor: 7 Horror: NA Eye Candy: 4 Fun Factor: 7 Replayability: 7 Overall: 7
It's noting spectacular, but it's fun and funny and has enough of a plot to keep your interest. The theory is that our hero is the best cop on the force in London. He's very by the book, very industrious and serious, and is entirely humorless, but very effective. So effective that his slacker bosses and coworkers can't stand him, and he gets transferred to some tiny hamlet in the English countryside, where there's no crime at all. All the locals on the police force are clueless and resentful of the big city guy, except for one fat slacker who idolizes action movies and thinks big city police work is like what he sees in bad action movies like Bad Boys, Point Break, etc.
"Do you ever leap through the air while firing two guns at the same time?" he asks, amongst other similar questions.
Of course the plot begins to turn and bodies begin to pile up in the small town, but they're just accidents, right? Mr. Big City Cop is imagining things. The locals are as sweet and kind and naïve as they seem. Or are they? If you've seen the trailer or any of the current commercials for the DVD you'll know that they are not, and that wild action movie hijinks ensue.
Those are where the guys who made the film clearly have their fun, as every action movie cliche and classic scene is recreated and lampooned. The film reminded me of Team America, since it was so over the top with crazy car chases and hundreds of rounds fired (that hit no one) and bombs going off and climactic fist fight scenes in the rain, etc. It's all totally absurd though, honoring the formula conventions while skewering them in countless humorous ways. Like Team America, I think Hot Fuzz might be a lot funnier the second time. Seeing it in the theater I was disengaged from the story since I was taking in all of the parodies and trying to guess which scene from Lethal Weapon they were going to recreate next. I enjoyed Team America more the second time, since I didn't spend the whole film muttering, "I can't believe they just went there."
Hot Fuzz would probably be a similar experience, upon a second viewing, which would be nice, since I enjoyed it the first time.
Rather a bold tone in the title of this one, but let's hear what they have to say:
100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know
BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.
"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."
Malaya sent me the link and said she knew most but not all, and she's got like, a PhD. In a field that involves heavy usage of words. With that in mind I had to try it myself. Bring on the words!
So, yeah... I suppose their premise is fundamentally sound; I mean most of these are basically "SAT words," the type you're supposed to study and know to do well on that ubiquitous (not a word on the list!) test that US colleges consult while considering if they'll admit you to their august halls, but there's a reason most high school students study furiously for the SAT. Because they don't know the words. My dad does SAT tutoring part time, and he reports that most of the kids he works with scored in the 1000 range (average), and are trying to improve, and that very few of them know more than a handful of the vocabulary words on the SAT.
One of the SAT's infamous features are the A is to B as X is to Y questions. Things like, "Sheep are to Flock, as Fish are to ________." That one's easy, and of course the SAT uses far less common words, but you can see the trouble you'd be in trying to answer that sort of thing if you didn't know all the words in the example, and at least most of the words offered for multiple choice answers. Kids these days (and adults too, quite often) simply do not read, or if they do it's nothing but gossip blogs, myspace pages, LOLcats, and other stuff that does nothing to boost your vocabulary. Go google "ur site:myspace.com" vs. "quotidian site:myspace.com" and see where that gets you.
I wanted to play along though, so I read the whole list and wasn't too displeased with my vocabulary. Here are the words I had on familiarity whatsoever with, along with their dictionary-provided definitions.
abjure -- to renounce upon oath. abstemious -- marked by restraint esp. in the consumption of food or alcohol moiety -- one of two equal parts; HALF
Upon looking them up, abjure and abstemious rang a mental bell, but I can't ever really hearing or reading the word "moiety." I was worried starting off too, since 3 or the first 4 I didn't know or wasn't real sure about. Maybe I just have a thing against A-words, since I was pretty solid on most of the rest of the first column.
Other than these three, there were another 8 or 10 that I was familiar enough with to understand/remember if I saw them in a sentence, but that I didn't know well enough to write a definition of. Abrogate, gamete, jejune, orthography, pecuniary, and supercilious, for example. I looked them up to be sure, and yeah, I was kind of close on all of them. I knew abrogate was something to do with official abolition of a law. Gamete was some part of the fundamental properties of human reproduction/chromosomes. Jejune is an adjective used to insult stupid things. Orthography has something to do with the study of words and language. Pecuniary a word used when talking about bankers or finance. Supercilious I thought meant irrelevant or unnecessary, but the definition is "coolly and patronizingly haughty" which makes sense. I had the meaning backwards. A supercilious nature is generally expressed by treating other people/things are irrelevant and useless.
Give the list a read and try it yourself. You might learn something, but don't worry; you can always spend an hour later mainlining on Perez Hilton and sports forums and burn away the outer layer of your hippocampus, thus returning you to your former monosyllabic state.
I found time and motivation over the weekend to write up some movie reviews, so I'll be posting them this week. Hopefully they will be spaced out by some other blog topics, lest I become a one-man Rotten Tomatoes, but today there's just this. I was busy running errands and working on some real life stuff, and then I spent a few hours alpha testing with some urgency, for a release date has been announced (October 31st), and now I'm posting this before I spend a few more hours on RL work stuff.
Jet Li is Fearless! Or so said the trailers. And he was, though it's debatable whether his fearlessness stems from an internal conviction, or simply a complete lack of emotional range. A hint; far and away Jet's best acting performance to date was in Unleashed, when he played an emotionally stunted man who basically had the mind of a canine and spent 90% of the film staring blankly out windows, at pianos, etc. It's a pity they can't change the Terminator robot to a short, pock-marked Chinese man, since that would really be Jet's ideal role.
I saw this pic with Malaya and another friend of ours: three Jet Li fans, three martial arts fans; who exited the theater, stood in the daylight, and stood silently for a moment. Finally, someone, probably me, said, "So that sucked... right?" That comment opened the floodgates, and we spent the next ten minutes in a mutual gripe fest about how stupid the plot was, how unintentionally humorous acting was, how many laws of physics were broken in every fight scene, how painful the dialogue was, etc.
Malaya and I were very disappointed in this film, and coming after the disappointing Hero and House of Flying Daggers, we basically gave up on wuxia for the time being, and didn't even consider buying tickets to Curse of the Golden Flower, the next/most recent gorgeous martial arts themed epic to emerge from China.
In retrospect, nearly a decade later, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which I have got to add a review for some day) was quite the outlier. It was a huge success and showed that martial arts movies didn't have to be chop sockey, or low budget Steven Segal/Chuck Norris Hollywood crap, and it introduced the high production values style wuxia that we see in the US. It was also a really good movie, with great marital arts and special effects, but also with a good story that was driven by strong, flawed, realistic characters. Hero and Fearless and House of Flying Daggers and others all look just as good, and they've got martial arts and good actors in them, but as movies, they've sucked. They are pretty, but the characters and performances have been mediocre, and the stories have been romance fiction junk, laced with creepy amounts of propaganda, all of it Chinese nationalism and very pro-emperor.
For instance, the whole point of Hero was that the evil, conquering emperor was actually right in killing millions in his wars of conquest since the country could only be strong if it was united under one ruler, and if that meant destroying countless smaller cultures and cities, then so be it. China isn't ruled by an Emperor anymore, but the logical connection was that it's best if it's ruled by a strong central party.
Fearless isn't quite the same plot, but it's set in the early 1900s when China was occupied by the English, and Jet Li is the one Chinese man who is good enough at combat to beat the evil representatives of the US, England, Japan, etc. By doing so, in noble, heroic fashion, Jet Li can encourage his poor, downtrodden countrymen to rise up and overthrow their corrupt, capitalist oppressors and usher in a glorious era of mass starvation and ethnic cleaning.
I could overlook the silly propaganda of the storyline if the characters in the actual movie were any good. They are not. Here's the story, with spoilers, and yes, it really is this painful a cliché:
Jet Li's character is a child in the beginning. After his martial arts master father gets beaten by some asshole from a rival school Jet trains furiously, and becomes a master.
A montage of Jet beating up all challengers and becoming famous and corrupted by the adulation.
Eventually Jet picks a fight with the head of another school and beats him to death on his wedding night.
After the fight Jet discovers the other guy was not at fault in an earlier incident.
Wracked by guilt Jet wanders off into the countryside, where he wanders in a daze and grows a ZZ Top beard in like, a week.
Lost and penniless and dirty, Jet ends up in a pastoral village where a saintly blind woman nurses him back to health.
While living there and planting rice and eating simple food Jet rediscovers his soul and decency. The farmers are quite happy and content working 14 hours a day just to grow enough food not to starve to death, since once in a while the wind blows through the trees and they can stand up and stretch their aching, rice-planting backs and breath deeply while the bamboo leaves rustle.
Healthy again, Jet returns to civilization, vowing never to fight again.
Thirty seconds after he returns the evil and powerful men controlling China force him to fight to save his family and friends.
He defeats all challengers, even though they cheat and fight with as much honor as the heel in a pro wrestling match.
Just when it seems Jet will be triumphant, he's poisoned during a fight by a scheming capitalist Chinese businessman who is the only evil Chinese person in the entire film.
Jet grows dizzy and weak and his vision blurs, but he's still able to defeat the last fighter, a Japanese samurai.
The minute the fight ends Jet staggers theatrically into the arms of his countrymen and dies, a perfect inspiring martyr.
Everyone lives happily ever after, except for the imperialist invaders, and the tens of millions purged, executed or starved during the various nationalist and communist upheavals of the 20th century.
Yes, it's a dumb action movie and yes, you almost expect this sort of "seen it a hundred times" hero journey, but it was so obvious and handled in such hamhanded a fashion in Fearless that Malaya, me, and a martial arts movie friend of ours were audibly groaning as the dreadful plot creaked through its predestined, telegraphed, machinations.
"Gee, I wonder if his dad will die and he'll be inspired to avenge him?" "Oh, he's guilt-stricken and in exile. I sure wonder if he'll find some noble savage to heal his broken heart?" "Wow, he's back and vowing never to fight again. I just don't know if there will be some crisis to force him back into the ring." "Oooh, evil imperialists. I just have no idea if Jet Li will smite them down in noble fashion."
We wanted to like it, and the martial arts sections were pretty good, if a bit too obviously wire-fu and defying of the laws of physics. (Which is fine if the movie's magical and everyone can fly, ala Crouching Tiger. But when it's realistic in every way, until people start jumping five meters straight up and changing direction in mid-air, or a tiny Chinese man seesaw lifts a giant white wrestler who clearly weighs three times what he does, it breaks the illusion.)
All that said, I'd probably buy this one for $6 as a used DVD, if only to fast forward over all the plot and just watch the action scenes.
Malaya and I got out to see Bourne 3, AKA The Bourne Ultimatum, Sunday evening. I was pretty eager to see it, since my appreciation of Bourne 1 and 2 has grown steadily with additional viewings. Also, Bourne 3 has a great trailer and the reviews are through the roof. It's at 94% on RT, and not just from a bunch of 3-star, mildly-recommending review. Check out Bourne 3 on Metacritic; there are enough 4-star reviews to do some Elizabethian costume drama proud.
Sadly, my review will not be joining them. Not by fame, nor by score. I enjoyed the film, but thought it was good, not great. I enjoyed Bourne 1 and 2 more than 3, and while it's possible this sad state is due to my expectations being so high for the threequel, I'm pretty sure it was more about the movie than what I wanted the movie to be.
To the scores.
The Bourne Ultimatum Script/Story: 6 Acting/Casting: 8 Action: 8 Eye Candy: 4 Fun Factor: 6 Replayability: 7 Overall: 6.5
As I often point out, reactions are mostly about expectations. I wanted this movie to be awesome. I wanted to believe all those overheated reviews that talked about how this film redefined the action movie genre, and how the tension and pace were almost unrelenting for the whole 2 hours. I'm sorry, but it doesn't, and it's not. It's a better than the average action movie, and if I had never seen Bourne 1 and 2, or had only seen them once, years ago, I would probably have given this one an 8. Having seen the other two, and having given them a 7.5 and a 7, I can't give this one a better score, and since I remember liking both the others more than this one on a first viewing, I have to rank this one below them. I'm still recommending it to anyone who enjoys action films or who liked Bourne 1 and/or 2, but it's not some kind of breakthrough in the thriller genre, as some reviewers would have you believe.
I gave Bourne 1 a 7.5 and Bourne 2 a 7 based upon my initial viewings. After seeing each several more times on DVD and cable, I'd upgrade those original scores to oh... 9s each. It's entirely possible that Bourne 3 will appreciate equally in my appreciation, but I don't think so. Even if I were sure it would, I'd still have to score this review on my reaction to seeing it this firs time. And it was good... but not great.
I think my primary dissatisfaction with Bourne 3 stemmed from the plot and the character development/behavior. I'll be vague to avoid being spoilery, (the trailer does enough of that), but Bourne is much less the lone wolf in this movie. He's no longer lone; he gets help on several occasions, and he's not even very much of a wolf, since he now regularly leaves people alive rather than finishing them when he has the chance. It's a plot device to clue us in to his continuing efforts to recover his humanity/soul, which is paralleled by his ongoing efforts to discover his true identity and origin, and that's fine, but Bourne struggling to not kill people who want to kill him is kind of aggravating for the viewer. I'd rather see him kick ass and survive against impossible odds. I don't care if he's occasionally merciful, not do I especially want him to be.
We're supposed to root for him to recover his humanity and decency and such, and maybe other people did, but I liked him better as the ruthless antihero from the last two films. Not that he was ever that ruthless or antihero anyway, what with his sentimental behavior towards women and children, and his highly-selective murders. For a trained killer with a lengthy resume, Bourne's always been remarkably good at leaving survivors. He's never shot anyone by accident, he never throws a bomb into a crowd to distract his pursuers with mass death, he never runs anyone over during the car chases, etc.
Which is not to say that Bourne 3 doesn't often kick ass. There aren't enough car chases, and the ones we do see are more demolition derby than the brilliant, scientific "memorize a map in 10 seconds and then use that info to humiliate pursuers" stuff we got in the first two movies. The human chases are better, and the smartness remains very evident in them, but they are entertaining without being amazing. The fight scenes are fast paced and hard hitting, but the editing as gotten choppier in each movie, and while there is one longer fight that's pretty cool, several shorter scenes are just a blur of guys in dark clothing, all of which end with Bourne standing over unconscious heaps.
My favorite action scene in the movie featured Bourne being pursued by literally dozens of cops, while he's trying to locate a friend in a massive crowd, while the friend is being tracked by a hit man. As the scene unfolds I was thinking, "Bourne can't possibly evade/avoid all those cops and find his friend and stop the killer all at the same time. Can he?" I won't answer that question here, but you can probably hazard a guess with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Besides Bourne's growing sentimentality, the other thing I disliked about the movie was the somewhat cliched plot twists and character developments. There's no real surprise or suspense about who the bad guys are, and by the time Bourne's unraveling his past history, it's not much of a surprise either. The ending is a bit of a let down as well, since it goes macro, with a change in the world and politics, rather than being more focused in a micro way on Bourne himself. Bourne 1 and 2 ended with Bourne overcoming tremendous odds and personally taking out the main bad guy who deserved to be taken out. Bourne 3 doesn't really do that, and it doesn't really have bad guys to take out, as the plot unfolds with institutions and governments as the enemy, rather than individual evil men. Bourne 3 is almost certainly more realistic in its depiction of society and government and the nature of evil (corporate, rather than personal), but it's a lot less satisfying when "the system" is the villain, rather than some guy you can put a bullet in and thereby affect direct change and results.
Anyway, it's a good movie, and it's well worth seeing, but it's not the masterpiece the critics may be leading you to expect. So don't expect that, and you'll probably like it more than I did.
As the banner atop every page on this website should attest, I am a fan of Vincent van Gogh's art. So it was with some interest that I read this news item, about a lost van Gogh being found... underneath a not-lost van Gogh.
Art expert and historians in Boston and Amsterdam announced Friday that they have discovered a valuable lost work by the painter Vincent Van Gogh hidden under an existing canvas at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, discovered the Van Gogh painting underneath the artist's painting entitled "Ravine," which is owned by the MFA.
MFA conservator Meta Chavannes was conducting a technical examination of "Ravine" and discovered the existence of the second painting below the paint surface of the work.
So they had an existing, well-known van Gogh, and while poking at it they discovered that he painted it over another of his own works. Which is interesting... but now what? If the painting on top was some kind of Dogs Playing Poker they could chip it off and have a new irreplaceable and nearly priceless van Gogh. But they've got a classic Van Gogh over a long lost less-classic Van Gogh. I don't think there's any way for them to remove the top version and preserve it, thus doubling their van Goghage, so what's the point in this? Just art historian satisfaction, I guess.
The lost work was known from mentions Vincent made in letters to his brother/benefactor Theo, so that's one mystery solved. Vincent painted a tremendous amount of canvases in a short time, and they were not valued during his life time, so lots were lost, reused, destroyed, etc. The fact that Vincent produced a lot of them while trekking across provincial Europe, and often gave away paintings, or traded them for food, means there are almost certainly a few still tucked away in dusty attics in French and Belgian farmhouses. Finding one or more of those is the Holy Grail of art collectors, and one turns up every few years, though there are always issues of authenticity. In fact, plenty of art scholars think quite a few of the known, identified, museum-displayed, hundred million dollar van Goghs are forgeries, though this is a highly contentious issue, given the prestige and tens of millions of dollars involved.
It's been big news in the US for a couple of months that one of the better known players in America's most popular sport, Atlanta Falcons NFL quarterback Michael Vick, is implicated in running a dog fighting business out of one of his many Georgia properties. Vick has steadfastly denied any involvement, even as the investigation has proceeded and evidence and eyewitness reports have mounted. It's pretty unquestionable that there was dog fighting going on, the only issue is whether Vick can convince anyone that he didn't know about someone raising hundreds of pit bulls and hosting regular dogfights at one of his houses. Most people are assuming he's guilty, and now that one of his co-defendants has rolled over and pled guilty, expectations are that he's singing like the proverbial canary, and that Vick is screwed. Michael is almost certain to miss at least this season on suspension for bad behavior, and that's assuming he doesn't get serious jail time for multiple felony charges.
I'm probably leaving a lot out of my summary since I haven't really been following events. Football is my favorite sport and I enjoy watching it on TV, but it's been many years since I've taken a personal interest in the players. I do follow some teams, and overall trends in the league, but I don't really pay attention to any individual players or their stats, and I don't care at all about their personalities or private lives, except in terms of how it might affect their on field performance. Vick's not a very good quarterback, but he's an exciting player since he runs very well -- exceptionally well for a quarterback. He's got all the athletic talent in the world, but he's never shown any discipline or ability to learn an offense and execute it as pro football requires, and a lot of that was presumed to be due to his young coach being somewhat star struck, and the team's owner coddling Michael since he was a fan favorite. Fed up with mediocrity, the team fired the coach after last season and hired a supposed offensive genius from the college ranks, and fans such as myself were curious to see how his renowned system would work in the pros, if Vick had any chance of playing within it rather than just scrambling around and hoping for the best, etc.
I'm not really a fan of Atlanta, and I honestly find it more fun when they lose since then their fans and Vick's apologists in the media bemoan things and confuse flash for talent. However, I am disappointed that Vick's out for the season since I wanted to see how the new offense worked, and if Vick's actual game utility could ever approach the godlike status his physical gifts grant him in football video games. Not that I play those either.
What did not occur to me until weeks into the news coverage of the dog fighting scandal, probably because I never read any sports blogs or forums, is that people were really upset about the nature of the charges against Vick. Sure, PETA was protesting, but they protest everything, and they weren't doing it with topless models painted with leopard spots, so no one cared. Real people though, were outraged that Vick had (allegedly) fought dogs, killed off dogs that lost fights, and conducted the whole thing as a business. Every news item I saw about it mentioned the alleged ways in which losing dogs were disposed of; drowning, choking, electrocution, and when one of the few sports writers I do read regularly mentioned it in a recent column, I gave the whole thing some thought.
Vick: It's been strangely entertaining to see so many people express shock and outrage that he could have done something so horrible. Um, he has the same DNA as Marcus Vick! That's like being shocked in 2012 when Lindsay Lohan's little sister gets her first DUI. Plus, Vick could have been accused of murdering a stripper, blowing up a shopping mall or funneling his Nike money to Al Qaeda, and people wouldn't have been even 1% as outraged as they are about the dogfighting allegations. You can get away with just about anything these days; just don't tick off dog lovers.
(And by the way, I'm one of them. I wish we could pay Roy Williams to horse-collar Vick from behind 200 times in a row. How could anyone cause pain to a dog? How could anyone want to be affiliated with a "sport" where dogs are electrocuted and you have to buy items with names like "rape stands"? Hopefully, this leads to a real-life Longest Yard sequel where Vick gets jailed and eventually leads a team of convicts against the guards, who summarily kick the living crap out of him for four quarters and turn his ACLs into fusilli. The end.)
I guess I see his point, I mean if you care about dogs and think of them as quadrupedal teddy bears who wuv you and are part of the family, etc, it must be upsetting to know that other people are using them in a blood sport. I'd be upset if Vick had been feeding his animals cats, or puppies, or infant children, or if he'd been torturing the dogs for fun, but from the reports I've heard he was just training them to do what their genetics instruct.
They're fighting dogs, and he was letting them fight. It's what they've been bred (designer evolved) to do, and they love to do it. They're made for it. Look at that animal. Massive head and jaws, blunt face, broad chest, massive musculature. It's beautiful, but it's obviously designed to fight, and to kill.
Dog fighting's not like a rodeo, where the steers and horses are whipped and shot up with speed and strapped into ball-crushing leashes to make them jump and put on a better show. Pit bulls and other fighting dogs like to fight, and if trained to do so are quite eager to get it on. Video clips I've seen of pit bull fights in the past (the media dig some up every time enough owners/random small children get mauled in a week to make the dangerous pets issue news again) are primarily memorable for the effort it takes the handlers to pry the dogs apart once they lock up.
Vick was letting fighting dogs fight, and doing what he could to run a successful business. An illegal business, one he'll probably do some prison time over and one that's apparently ruined his life and ended his multimillion dollar apparel sponsorships, but he was handling fighting dogs as they must be handled. Of course he and his associates were culling the weak and the non-performing. If they weren't good at their purpose they were of no use to him, there was no point in feeding them and keeping them around. Besides, what would you have had him do with the dogs? These aren't greyhounds to be adopted after their brief running career ends. You can not take in a trained fighting dog as a family pet. The ones the FBI seized in their raid are all going to be euthanized anyway..
I don't support the existence of dog fighting nor do I want to watch it, but I'm not particularly shocked that some people enjoy it. Humans have a strong appetite for cruelty and violence. Cock-fighting, mongoose vs. cobra fighting, bear baiting, and so on, down to dueling preying mantises, have been human institutions since we've had the cogitative abilities to dominate other animals and bend them to our will/amusement.
Honestly, I find the concept of pit bull fighting somewhat less appalling than the fetishization of absurd, useless little rat dogs. (As two useless celebrities are here seen engaged in, courtesy of pictures I grabbed from Perez Hilton since I was too lazy to dig them up elsewhere without his silly writing on them.)
At least a pit bull has some purpose; guarding your junk yard or whatever, and so long as you know what you're doing and handle them properly and keep them away from children and make sure the dogs understand their beta place in the pack, they can be owned safely. As they say, it's not the dog, it's the owner. Unfortunately, lots of owners suck, especially ones who are drawn to big, powerful, potentially dangerous dogs, and that's why we get a steady stream of news stories about two year olds having their noses bitten off. Or forty year old personal assistants with their throats torn out. Ving's dogs of choice were not pit bulls, but they obviously had similar genetics and training. Happily, an anonymous Samaritan from Georgia has volunteered to take them in, and put them to good use, so that's nice. Besides, Ving's assistant should have known better than to give Mrs. Rhames a foot massage.
Update: Reports are that the guy may have dropped dead of a heart attack while running from the dogs, and that they simply nibbled a bit on the cooling meat, as carnivores are wont. Malaya and I used to wonder how long the cats would wait before they started eating us, if we died in our sleep and they were running low on Friskies. I gave Jinx a week and said Dusty would just starve to death.
Update #2: This is the 666th post I've made via the Blogger script (give or take a couple of posts saved as notes that I never actually finished/put online). Pity I couldn't work in a mention of Satanism, or at least Atheism.
