BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: March 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Ugg Not Understand Non-Verbal Clues. Ugg Smash!
Quick article about the 5000000th study or survey showing the same thing; that (generally speaking) men can't intuit the emotional state behind a human expression as well as women can, and that men judge virtually any response from a woman short of spitting at them and telling them to "fuck off and die!" as a sign of sexual interest.
Farris and her colleagues examined non-verbal communication in a group of 280 undergraduates, both men and women with an average age of 20 years old.
The students viewed images of women on a computer screen and had to categorize each as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Each student reported on 280 photographs, which had been sorted previously into one of the categories based on surveys completed by different groups of students.
Overall, women categorized more images correctly than men did. When it came to friendly gestures, men were more likely than women to interpret these to mean sexual interest.
More surprising, the researchers found guys were also confused by sexual cues. When images of gals meant to show allure flashed onto the screen, male students mistook the allure as amicable signals.
I wasn't going to bother posting about the article, since I thought the survey findings about as surprising and controversial as "water is wet," but after I skimmed it and got to the comments, I began to grow very depressed. The amount of misogynistic idiocy being spilled in the thread is literally painful. I have seldom been as embarrassed to be a man as I was while skimming over the posts about that article. A few have some nuance, and a few aren't caveman in their reasoning, but the vast majority essentially boil down to, "It's not my fault I can't understand women, because the bitches refuse to make clear how they're feeling at all times!" I really hope this article was linked from some right wing blogs, since that would at least account for the preponderance of stupidity and misogyny demonstrated by most of the commenters. If they weren't sent by some Kim du Toit-esque crank, but are actually representative of the usual readers of LiveScience.com, then we're pretty much doomed to further incompetent, ineffective, war-mongering as a means of penis-compensation, freely-elected political leadership for the foreseeable future.
It's a shame too, since the issue of male perceptions of female actions is such an interesting one. It's one of the main animating issues in evolutionary psychology, and comes up continually in all sorts of male/female psychology, gender studies, human interaction studies, etc. I've read and discussed/reviewed a few books on the issue, and with such a highly non-qualified background, I shall now regale you with a quick overview of the issue, much as I presented in email to Malaya, who forwarded me the article link in the first place.
The fact that, on the whole, men are far more likely than women to want casual sexual contact, and to interpret friendliness as sexual interest, is not open to debate. It's been conclusively demonstrated in countless studies and experiments, such as the one cited in the afore-linked article. Even the commenters on that article don't dispute that fact. They just blame women for being subtle and hard to read and deceptive. (Which is perfectly fair, since men are always and at all times open and forthright about their feelings when dealing with women. Right?) This is pretty ironic, since the guys complaining about that would what, prefer that 99% of the women they meet outright told them, "I do not find you attractive and would prefer to never see you again, while the thought of engaging in sexual activity with you is gives me the sensation as would immersing my face in spider eggs." Not so much, I think. Still want openness and non-subtlety, boys?
No one's arguing that men have trouble reading women. More trouble than women have reading men (or other women, in theory), at least. Why this is was not addressed in the article, and it's not really the point at hand anyway. One can speculate, and there are many competing and overlapping theories, all of which are some parts truth and some parts fail. Women work harder at it and get better over time, women are naturally more empathic and better able to predict what other people are feeling, men are naturally disinclined to want to know/care what other people feel, etc. Those are general theories, though. Of more interest to me, and I suspect to most of the angry, defensive commenters on the article itself, is how this male non-insight factors into sexual relations.
The explanation in The Evolution of Desire was that over time, if men benefited by misinterpreting all signals as sexual ones, since if even a small % of the time that resulted in sex (whether because the woman gave in, or the woman's signals were very subtle and might have been missed) that was a reproductive advantage and the man's genes would pass on more successfully. Maybe or maybe not, but it's a theory, though a fairly iffy one, as is usually the case with evo psych. Supporting/relating theories from the same field include stuff like; women who could more accurately intuit the moods of their offspring had more surviving young, women who could better anticipate threats from angry people survived more often, etc.
To move away from evolutionary theories for human psychology and abilities, how does this sort of thing translate into behavior in the modern world? Why do men believe any sort of female friendliness advertises sexual interest, despite countless incidents arguing to the contrary?
My theory/analysis is this: When men get to know women, men look for reasons not to have sex, since the default is "Do her, if possible." For a man to immediately rule that interest out, she has to be unattractive, unavailable, way out of acceptable age range, etc. There's a gray area, of course. A woman can (and most women are) borderline on any or all of those categories, and in that case it's a matter of degrees. The man figures how much effort it would take to win over that woman, and if the effort would be worth it. Availability is a huge factor; a man will take home anything with a pulse at closing time, (beer goggles = drunk + dwindling options) but will only spend time/money/energy trying to win over a woman that he really desires. Clearly that's true of anything; no one saves up money to buy things they don't much want/need, but it's magnified with sex/dating.
Women, conversely, have a default of not having sex, and therefore look for reasons to have sex with a guy. They must be won over by looks, personality, resources, etc. This also varies by individual and situation, of course. Women in a singles bar are looking harder and effectively lowering their standards for a man.
In both cases, the ultimate purpose effects the judgment quite a bit, and again, these are somewhat reversed between the genders. Especially when you consider what's valued for different types of relationships. Superficial things are more valued for short term flings, but aren't what people value as highly for LTRs.
Men have lower standards of attractiveness or personality for short term relationships than they do for long term. Men will fuck any girl for a one night stand, but are much pickier about who they'll marry. Women, conversely, tend to have higher standards for short term relationships (they'll go groupie on highly desirable men, such as rock stars or athletes, in ways they'd never do for ugly losers), but will marry less attractive men, since in an LTR qualities such as income/resources, patience, kindness, loving nature, etc, are more important than flashy traits like good looks, hot body, etc.
This, I think, largely sums up the "nice guys" typical complaint about how women are always their friends, and then go and fuck some asshole frat guy who inevitably cheats on and/or dumps them. Nice guys often handicap themselves with a poor appearance or lack of social skills, but even when they're more suitable, they're never going to project a rock star/most eligible bachelor vibe, which is what draws women into casual sexual encounters. Such a vibe is an active deterrent to LTR success though, and many women are scared away by it, once they stop fooling themselves that they can get the guy to settle down or change his ways. Witness all the charismatic, unrepentant multiple baby daddies on The Maury Show, and all the sad sack, devoted, broken hearted, cuckolded husbands sharing the stage with them and their weeping, remorseful wives.
The Evolution of Desire used this as part of a "beautiful sons" hypothesis, theorizing that women had a biological urge to cheat with gorgeous men, for the likely appearance improvement it would confer on their children, who would then have higher reproductive success, and thus widely propagate the mother's genes. Needless to say, this theory requires that the woman's husband not know he's been cheated on, since he's being counted on to provide for the children as if they were his own. This sort of thing isn't just a theory; various medical studies have shown at least a 10% illegitimacy rate in general populations. Your mom is almost certainly your mom, since it's pretty clearly which woman a baby emerges from. Your dad is quite possibly not your dad, though, for equally obvious reasons. I'm skimming very quickly here, and The Evolution of Desire, and my review of it, goes into far more detail on these issues.
So, yes, men aren't as good at judging signals from women, and yes, women could possibly make their signals more obvious. But men could also work to improve their perception, or ask (difficult) questions that would elicit more direct responses, obviating the need to try to read subtle body language signals that the man has repeatedly proven himself unable to grasp. In any case, posting angry, defensive, semi-pathetic replies to scientific articles isn't going to bring any progress or improvement.
I've been joking with the IG about boobs lately. Well, more about moobs, since I've been growing a pair with all the weight lifting I've been doing the past few months. Here's the theory of b/moobs:
Men lift things to get them. Women lift them to get things.
True, it's mostly a play on the word reversal, and no, wonderbras don't provide for all of a woman's needs (neither directly nor indirectly). But it's not a bad coin of the phrase, eh?
I am of course allowing for the "things" men lift to be weights, cheeseburgers, or both, depending on whether the desired moob composition is fat or muscle. Additional verses can be added as needed; for instance, one might figure how male and female breast augmentation surgeons fit into this equation.
I don't follow college basketball so I hadn't heard anything about it until today, but it looks like UCLA narrowly beat Texas A&M earlier in this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament, largely by virtue of getting away with a foul in the closing seconds of the game. Since that was it for the Aggies' hopes and dreams, and since UCLA went on to win their regional bracket and advance to the Final Four, resentment continues to fester in the hearts of Texas A&M fans. They've apparently been making YouTube videos to spotlight the foul, writing online petitions (and we all know those are invariably effective!), holding public rallies, etc.
The UCLA fans now have a beautifully-produced YouTube retort, one that essentially acknowledges that UCLA got away with a foul in the big moment, and that essentially ignores that fact in preference for hitting Texas A&M where it hurts. Everywhere else. The video starts off slow, but becomes LOL about 40 seconds in, when comparisons between the Hollywood sign and seedy backroad Hooters start popping up. I enjoyed it, at any rate, and I care very little for the sport or the controversy itself.
The headline first, since it's timely (I guess) and amusing. Here's what it said in the navigation space on ESPN.com this afternoon. I glanced at it, blinked, and looked again, wondering how I'd wound up on ESPN Europe, or Desportes, or something. My best guess was that this headline was about a UK football transaction, but I couldn't imagine why that would be news on ESPN.com, when adult Americans care nothing for US soccer, much less European soccer.
I clicked the link out of curiosity, and laughed when it was some NASCAR news. I don't "get" NASCAR in any way. It's guys driving modified sedans in a circle for 4 hours. It seems impossible to me that this could be a major sport in entertainment attention span deficit America, but somehow it is. ESPN pays a lot of money to show the races, so of course they're going to headline news developments in it, but the races actually do attract 100,000+ spectators every weekend, and it's not just in the south anymore; real states like California and New York now host these events.
I had a long blog post half-written about NASCAR many months ago, with a bunch of links to a photo gallery of NASCAR fans I'd seen on SportsIllustrated.com. In that post I was going to try to derive some logic to the popularity of the sport, since it baffles me, and was going to point to racism as a contributing factor. Of the crowd shots on SI.com, 85% were fat men, 99% were white people, many had Confederate flags on their vehicles or flying over the grandstands, etc. Plus the drivers and crews and owners and sponsors of NASCAR are almost entirely whitewashed. It's not that NASCAR fans are necessarily bigots or racists, but it's certainly a sport that racist whites can follow without ever being perturbed by the site of any frighteningly dark skin. Plus, getting involved in NASCAR requires one to have a family background in racing, and the fact that there's no athletic ability required of the competitors means that the "sport" is not, and never will be, dominated by non-whites.
I never published that post since blogger crashed and ate it before I was done, and I was losing interest in the subject even as I typed about it. Much as is happening right now. So, to wrap things up, I don't get NASCAR, and I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting, it annoys me that it's clogging up space on sports TV and websites, but I don't care enough to hate it, or make some big effort to sociological indict it as a racist entertainment. Especially now that, like Wal-Mart, it's spread across the country and has gained some black, latino, and asian fans.
In fact, this puzzling headline is proof of NASCAR's growing diversity. Ten years ago that headline would have read, "Bubba Joe receives beer from Budweiser Racing" and I'd have known at once it was about NASCAR, wouldn't have clicked to see the details (lite or draft?), and wouldn't have had material for a blog post.
In other photo news, I had this for lunch a few weeks ago. It was a semi-date afternoon with the IG, and we did a chocolate factory tour, and then drove over to Berkeley for a crepe. I'd only previously had crepes from dessert bars in buffet restaurants, and had never enjoyed them. Tasty exterior, like a very thin pancake, but the stuffing was essentially foamy cake icing, and unpalatable.
The IG wanted to get a savory crepe though, which just means non-dessert. I was game, so we went to one of the many crepes places within a few blocks of UC Berkeley, and split a spinach, mushroom, and cheese crepe. Very tasty. It's basically a glorified pastry-style quesadilla, served rolled up into a funnel, so you can hold it at the point and devour it like a giant waffle ice cream cone. We ate ours on a plate with forks, since we were splitting it and we aren't savages.
I don't know if I'd make them a regular part of my diet, even if there were a good crepes place conveniently near my home and price were no object, but it was nice for a change. Plus it was fun to see the cooking process on the special crepe oven, as pictured above. Nice image quality for a cell phone cam, eh? Remember that, because...
This is a photo I took of Jinx in the tub, also on the cell phone camera. It's not that my camera died, it's that the only illumination in the bathroom at the time was an overhead heat lamp, which accounts for the red/orange light you see suffusing things in this shot.
Jinx sleeps in the bedroom with me at night, and I close the door since it's like, bright in the plant-infested living room. She's a quiet kitty though, and usually sleeps soundly for the whole night. Or at least doesn't become unsoundly enough to wake me up, so same thing. She's always thirsty in the morning when I get up though, since while she's got a bowl of water, she only drinks out of it in desperate need. She gets most of her water from a little waterfall relaxation sculpture thing in the living room, where she can drink it as it flows down over the rocks. She's also fond of drinking out of the drain dishes below houseplants, though she likes rainwater best. She was chugging the overflow from various mosquito-enabling dishes and trays on the back patio, during the rainy season (which usually extends until about June here, but apparently ended in mid-February this very sunny winter).
I don't leave the water fountain on overnight though, and since it's always blindingly bright in my living room, I usually just crack the door to let her out of the bedroom when I wake up. She heads out into the living room, but usually returns to me in the bathroom where I'm shaving or using the toilet or showering, since there's nothing to drink in the living room, since the fountain hasn't been turned on yet. And she's thirsty, as I might have previously mentioned.
Lately, she's grown impatient and has taken to finding her own sources of flowing water. She drank out of the sink constantly when she (and I) lived in Malaya's condo, but lost that habit in this apt. She still hasn't reacquired it, but she has lately started hopping into the tub and licking up any drops of water she can find, if some linger from last night's shower. Better yet, sometimes she can guilt Daddy into turning on the tub, just a trickle, which she then uses primarily to get her face wet while occasionally managing to lap a few drops out of the air.
Just to end with a better quality image, here's one from her work on the back patio a few weeks ago. I put her box out there to air out a bit with a bunch of new litter in it, and as always seems to be the case with housecats, she found the prospect of free range pooping to be quite intoxicating. She kicks about twice per box visit, when the box is inside, with the usual lid on it. When she catches it outside though, and uncovered? She digs like Faildog.
Finally, here's a long overdue photo of last year's birthday present from Malaya. We continued our annual tradition of visiting The Bone Room on or around my birthday, and since I already had a nice sheep's skull w/ horns, and tree branch with some bat skeletons on it, I diversified to this articulated snake skeleton. Rather a nice before and after sort of image, eh? Click to see it much larger.
These are very cute and somewhat painfully true, to a cat owner. The first one, Let Me In, is a bit OTT in the cutesy humor, but I like Cat Man Do quite a bit. That was so Dusty. Thankfully, Jinx is usually pretty content to sleep on my ankles as long as I want to stay in the nice dark bedroom.
The annual NCAA men's basketball tournament is underway, and as always, it's getting a lot of media attention. I've not seen any games nor do I care who wins, but I find the process people go through as they fill out their brackets and engage in office and online pools amusing. Basically, it's a huge crap shoot, with 64 teams in a single elimination bracket and no one ever picks even half the games right, since you've got to pick the whole thing in advance. One high seed loses early and you picked them to go to the finals = half your bracket is ruined. No one ever picks all the upsets, or backs all the correct favorites, and while I've never filled out a tournament bracket or been involved in such a pool, I imagine the winners of such things get some small % of the games correct. 25/63, or something like that, mostly in the early rounds when the higher seeds usually win, and then by the luck of picking a few of the #1 seeds that make the final four and rack up 4 or 5 wins on their way.
I bring this absurdity up since ESPN.com has an absurd front page video interview today with some 15 y/o from Ohio; famous by dint of being the only person to get every game right so far, out of the hundreds of thousands who took the time to fill out the ESPN.com online tournament bracket. It's an amusingly idiotic interview, since the reporter woman is so earnest and respectful with her semi-worshipful questions about his selection methodology. The kid tries to play along, but it's pretty clear he can't take the whole thing too seriously. He didn't spend hundreds of hours researching this bullshit, and he doesn't really care who wins. He picked a few of the clear favorites, threw darts at random fun names for some upsets, and got really, really, lucky. This is why no one will ever pick every game right, and why exactly 1 person out of a million got even the first 2 rounds right.
What's funny about it is the reverence the ESPN reporter places on the idiotic subject, as if we could somehow learn from the kid's example, and emulate his successful research methods next year. No cable TV. Read the newspaper. Research online.
It reminds me of the stock market. Everyone who makes a living from financial markets must pretend that there's some science to it and that it reacts to logic and reason and that it can be predicted and controlled with the proper methods and tools. Clearly that's all bullshit; stocks go up and down largely at random based on irrational investor psychology, hot new things pop up and then go bankrupt just when everyone thought they were wonderful, and chaos theory reigns. No one picking stocks or investments is any more accurate than sports experts offering up their NCAA brackets, and none of those experts ever get even half the games correct. Who does? Random 15 y/o's from Ohio. Is that an investment leader you want to follow?
The one advantage of real life financial gambling is that you don't have to bet on every game, so to speak. You can just back UCLA and UNC and Duke and a few other mega teams/companies and count on them to be consistently profitable, while ignoring the hot, short term, trendy picks that make huge profits until, as the ongoing high risk mortgage meltdown, they go from being the best investments on earth to worthless in a matter of months. My objection is that people in the field, aside from the occasional honest Warren Buffet types, refuse to admit this. That's no surprise; they're selling an investing service and of course they're going to say you can be sure to make money with them, or in the market in general, since they're making their money by skimming off of your money. The house wants you to keep gambling, since their profits come from your action, whether you win or lose.
As I've blogged in the past, apparently in narcissistic fashion, I've been doing a fair amount of mountain biking these past few months. I rode several times a week during the fall, and found it a fun way to exercise, improve my cardio, thicken my thighs, and lose weight. I've done it less often since then, mostly due to regular rain and having a gym membership for the past 2 months, but I still enjoy biking from time to time.
That time is probably going to become a lot more frequent in the immediate future, since my dad kindly offered to buy me a new mountain bike as a graduation present. I'd been riding one he gave me years ago, when he had to stop offroading after some minor back surgery, and it was not the most modern cycle. It wasn't new in this millennium, weighed a ton, lacked any sort of shocks or modern brakes or gear shifters, and had taken enough wear that the back tire was taco'ed to the point that it rubbed the frame a bit each revolution, no matter how I tried to adjust the rear sprocket.
I rode it all the same, and took particular pride in passing younger men on far newer bikes, especially going uphill. In fact, I thought the old, heavy, slow, friction-testing bike was kind of a good thing. After all, my goal was to get exercise, not race, and if my bike was slower and took more work to ride uphill on, I got that much more of it.
Still, when offered a new bike I didn't hesitate to accept, in no small part since my old bike was non-functional. The piece that clamps the chain into a circle snapped off one day while riding, giving me a several mile walk back to my car. It then proved irreplaceable; my bike is so old that it's got a 7 speed rear sprocket, and they don't even sell those anymore. Everything is 8 or 9 or 10 speed now, (On the rear, and usually 3 speed in the front. Multiply to discover the total number of speeds, quite a few of which are redundant.) and the local bike shop I queried didn't have any 7 gear chains or chain connectors. They said an 8 speed should work, since the space between the links in the chain was the same. I bought one, it only cost $4, but it wouldn't fit. My chain was too wide, so the little locking posts couldn't quite fit into each other properly. I took it back and they said I could get a new rear gear and matching chain, or look at used bike stores or online to find the part I needed.
I did... nothing, since it seemed ridiculous to spend $100 on new parts for such an old bike. I did mention the issue to my dad at least, which probably served as some of the impetus for him to seize upon a new bike as a worthwhile graduation present.
I was glad to hear his offer, and I even took a couple of weeks to semi-research my vouchered purchase. I didn't learn much; there are tons of sites and enthusiast forums offering reviews on bikes, but there are countless models and types, the vast majority were laughably out of my price range ($3k+ is not a lot to pay for a good bike, these days), and opinions differed widely and wildly. (And they all met both criteria of the asshole simile.)
I did visit a local bike shop, the one that didn't stock 7-speed chain connectors, and there got a salesdude to talk me through the options. Sadly, that wasn't of much help, since the options were too esoteric. The clerks would rhapsodize on Shimano 9 vs. 10 cassettes, and look somewhat disgusted when I had no idea what a "cassette" was, (it's the 8 or 9 gear sprocket that goes on the rear wheel.) much less what material or manufacturer I preferred.
I'd ask them what the difference was between the $400 and $700 and $1100 bikes by the same manufacturer, and they'd gesture expansively and say, "The components."
"So what's the difference between a $50 and $300 cassette?" I'd ask, glibly showing off the new lingo.
"Oh, materials, manufacturer, tooth settings." they'd reply. Which, of course, told me nothing I couldn't have guessed.
"So between these two," I'd counter, pointing to the $500 and $1000 bikes on the rack, "Which would you get?" And when they invariably said the more expensive one, I'd ask why, and what made it worth $500 more. "Better components. It would ride better." they'd reply, which again, really told me nothing.
I can see why there are price differences in cars; more engine power, leather seats, security system, convertible, alarm, etc. But bikes? They're just wheels with gears and a chain, and they're all about the same size, with the same tires, virtually identical number of speeds, etc. Yet some are $300, and others are $8000. Some have shocks and such, but you're still sitting on it and pedaling. What's the big difference? In the end, a lot of it came down to brand name preference, apparently. The $3000 frame is the $700 frame with a different $.04 sticker on it. I understood that sort of thing when I was 12 and the new kid in school and had to wear whatever brand names the cool kids wore, in an effort to, if not fit in, at least not get bullied as much. But do grown adults really spend enough money to feed (or arm) African villages for imperceptible differences on brand name parts that fit inside their bikes, where no one will ever see them or know they're there?
Eventually, and appropriately, my choice was made on somewhat irrational grounds. I looked online and found several bike shops in San Rafael, and resolved to visit a few of them last weekend, to compare prices and get a feel for what sort of recommendations and guarantees they offered. The first one I headed to was no longer in that location and Mike's Bikes had closed at 2pm since it was some sort of religious holiday, so back I headed to Performance Bikes, which I knew of only since it was in the shopping center beside Trader Joe's, and after another fairly fruitless survey of the available stock I settled on/picked at random a GT Avalanche. Here's a picture of it leaning against Jinxie's scratching post.
What's that you say? You can't make out anything more than that it's gray, and that I've got a ridiculous quilt on my futon/couch? Well join the crowd; I hardly know anything more about it and I own the damn thing. I do know that it rides awesome, though when compared to the two-wheeled plow I'd been riding before, that's not a real discerning recommendation.
The bike has those clamp in pedals that require matching metal clamps on the bottom of the shoes. I'd never used a bike with those before, but my dad's had some for years and he swears by them, despite the occasional road rash created by a critical moment inability to disengage his feet from said clamps. I hesitated a bit, since where I ride a critical moment foot lock could lead to a Wiley E. Coyote-like fall, rather than just road rash, but most of the mountain bikes had the clamp pedals, so I figured if other people are surviving with them, I could to.
Happily, they're no problem. I've ridden twice so far, a test ride on pavement Sunday evening [which was to last 10 minutes and instead went about 15 miles, since the bike rode so nicely and smoothly (it's the components)], and a longer dirt trails ride Monday, and I had no trouble getting my feet out every time I wanted to. Better yet, they never came out when I didn't, and that was frequently a problem with my old bike, even though it had straps the foot slid into. I'd hit a really rough patch of rock or hard dirt, especially when trying to crank hard uphill, and one foot would just bounce right out and off the pedal. That never happened on the new bike, though that was due as much (or more) to the front shocks than the pedal clamp.
I didn't get full suspension, since I didn't think I needed the rear shocks. Those cost a fair bit more, add weight, and they're not really necessary unless you're doing a lot of big jumps. At least that's what the bike shop guys told me, so it must be true! I thought I might regret that, since there are sections of hardpacked dirt I dread on my trails. Not that they're difficult to navigate, but it's so bumpy that I can't pedal over them. I just have to roll as the bike jounces along, which is merely annoying going downhill or flat, but actively detrimental when riding uphill.
Much to my surprise, the front shock almost entirely neutralized that problem. The back still bounced a lot, but without the full bike rigidity pitching me front-back-front-back, I zoomed up, down, and over such patches, and similar ones of rocks, without anywhere near the sort of jouncing I'd come to expect.
I also disproved my old theory/justification about exercise. I was more tired after Monday's ride than I used to be on the old plow. I didn't go much further than I used to, but I was pedaling in a higher gear on all the uphills, and even though the bike goes so much easier, I was moving so much faster that I still worked harder. Either that or the fact that I hadn't been out in like 3 weeks took the tits off of this bull. Let's pretend it's the former, though, eh?
On the whole, I can highly recommend a new, better, front shock, pedal clamp mountain bike, if you're still riding a bike that was new during Clinton's first term. (Bill, I mean.) Better yet; get a generous relative to buy it. Return to college and finish your degree to earn this present, if necessary. Best $700 my dad ever spent!
Update: Fun fact about hydraulic disc brakes. If you squeeze the brake lever when the bike wheel, or something else of similar width, is not in the brake mechanism, the metal braking plates will squeeze together and never open again. Well, never if you don't know how to disassemble the hydraulic mechanism and reset it. Been nice if they'd told me that when I bought the bike, so that I didn't inadvertently squeeze the brake lever at some point yesterday, while driving the bike back from a nearby mountain. Now I can't put the front tire back on, and I don't have the tools or knowledge of how to reset the brake. Happily, they said it would only take a few minutes to fix in the shop. They recommended getting a stack of business cards, or some sort of strong cardboard, and wedging it into the brake opening any time the tire is off. The joys of technological improvements!
Update II: It turns out that fixing the problem isn't so hard. You don't need to disassemble the brakes or anything; you just very gently and carefully lever the brake pads apart, going slowly so the hydraulic fluid is moved back up the line. The tip of a flathead screwdriver works well enough, or you can keep sliding business or playing cards between them. They suggest you stick something into the brake when you have a tire off, to avoid this problem. A stack of business cards, a piece of thick plastic, etc. Apparently bikes used to ship with a little clip on brake lock that fit into place, but it's not common anymore, and the shop didn't have any in stock. Not even to purchase.
Continuing in my series of reviews unearthed from my notes page, here's one of a popular Anime series. Starting with the scores:
Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, The Far-Away Dawn, 2002 Script/Story: 3 Acting/Casting: 2 Action: 8 Combat Realism: 3 Humor: NA Horror: NA Eye Candy: 7 Fun Factor: 5 Replayability: 4 Overall: 3
I can't point you to quite what I saw on this DVD, since it doesn't seem to exist on IMDB. I think I saw this one, but the box cover is different and the plot summary doesn't quite match up. There are about 70 other Mobile Suit Gundam titles on IMDB too, but none of them match the title exactly.
At any rate, I was pretty disappointed in this one. I'd long heard that Gundam was one of the better mech-based anime series, and when I saw a movie-length title at the library, I snapped it up. This wasn't any good, but it was somewhat entertaining. In any event, at least now I know better.
The box cover of this DVD said it had all new footage, which I took to mean they were squeezing in a bunch of footage from the TV series and supplementing it with a few bonus scenes in an effort to plump out a cash cow DVD release that fans would have to buy. I couldn't tell what was new and what wasn't, but it all looked about the same animation quality, aside from a very few short bits of pure CGI, which always stood out in contrast to the hand animation.
The film played like a greatest hits of an existing series, since there were dozens of characters, none of whom had any sort of introduction or background given before they appeared on screen. I had a hard time keeping them straight, and I'm sure a fan of the series would have gotten more out of this than I did, but that was far from the biggest stumbling block.
My biggest annoyance was the acting, or whatever you call it when its animated. Almost all the lead characters are high-strung, overly-emotional 16 y/o's, who are of course entrusted, without any supervision, at the controls of the most powerful war machines ever created. The movie is essentially a long series of crappy robot battles, broken up by scenes of more or less identical blue-haired teenagers screaming at each other and crying. It's not unwatchable, but I only made it through the dialogue with generous use of the fast forward button.
The battles aren't much better, as they consist primarily of lots of small planes and missile installations being destroyed by the first mech to turn towards them. You have to wonder how they're finding anyone to man the guns or fly the fighters when their survival rate in any battle with a mech is about .01%. Surely they could be automated more efficiently and cheaply? Nevertheless, every battle is filled with shots of soldiers diving for cover and screaming as fireballs engulf them, courtesy of some 15 y/o busy having an emotional breakdown, mid-battle, from within the complete safety of his/her mech.
As for the overall story... who knows. It's something to do with alien invaders, who are called ZAFT or "the Coordinators," as they battle against the Earth forces who are also called "the Naturals." The aliens look exactly like humans, so I'm not sure if they're actually aliens, or just humans who moved into space some generations ago and then turned on the home planet. I also don't see any sign of coordination between the invaders, or any reason the earthlings are called naturals; it's not like the invaders are all Borged out with cybernetics or anything.
They're fighting, at any rate, but it seems a fairly one-sided war, as ZAFT launches one raid after another on earth's defense headquarter locations. They're not just nuking cities, kindly enough. Adding complexity/confusion is a third power, an earth nation called the Orb. (Not for their shape either, as far as I saw.) Orb tries to remain neutral in the war (if that makes any sense when their planet is being attacked), but they have kick ass guns of their own, sort of like a well-armed Switzerland.
Complicating things are background relationships of the leads. One of the leading ZAFT mech pilots apparently was best friends with some of the leading Earth force pilots. They knew each other in military school, or something like that, though it's hard to see how when they're all like 14 now. It's not an Ender's War kind of brilliant child war movie either; they're just flighty and hysterical and pouty and all the other stereotypes of teenaged behavior in most animes -- they're just piloting multi-billion dollar death machines while they do it.
Some pilots nearly kill each other, but eject just in time, and regain consciousness in a hospital on the enemy ship, but they're really very friendly in person, and then some ZAFT scientist has a super new mech but he thinks the captured earth pilot should get it since he's a nice guy, and his daughter likes him, but other people don't understand, and then it's treason, and then Orb is suddenly losing, and then mechs show up at the last second, and then Orb is sending out some space ship with their young and talented in it, and ZAFT is trying to stop them, and it just goes on and on.
If you knew the series and the characters and such, you might enjoy it. I was mostly confused and disinterested as one pack of flighty teenagers after another had a shouting argument that ended in confusion or was interrupted by another inconclusive space battle. Plus, since this is all an extension of the TV series, there was never any introduction to the characters or their situations. The scene would just cut to another group of characters we were supposed to know and care about already, since the movie didn't give us any info about them or reason to give a damn what they were doing.
It's pretty much prototypical anime, in other words. If you don't get it you don't know enough about it, and if you don't like it then it's not for you.
I've moved on to the videos from Beyond Belief 2007, Enlightenment 2.0, and this time I'm going to comment on some of them as I view them. They're hard to organize or structure via google video, but happily The Science Network sponsored and filmed the proceedings, and they've got what appears to be the entire conference on their website, with the videos sorted by speaker. The order is side to side, not in columns. Start at the top left, then top right, then next down on the left, etc, so Dan Dennet is the sixth speaker on the first day. His presentation hits his usual themes about the evolutionary origins of morality and it's a good one, though he hits most of the same themes he does in lots of his talks. I talked about this issue and linked to a speech of his a couple of months ago, so I won't get into it again, other than to recommend his presentation.
Another one I thought less of, but was moved to discuss, was by David Sloan Wilson, since he challenges a lot of the conventional "new-atheist" wisdom. I don't agree with him on much, but he makes some interesting points. Sadly, he's not a very good presenter; his voice occasionally does a bit of the "havv woo vuh wing?" accent of The Impressive Clergyman from The Princess Bride, and when he gets into the last five minutes of his speech and starts launching (some good, some failing) attacks on the work of his colleagues, he gets little dog syndrome, and starts talking louder, faster, and in a high, shrill voice.
That aside, the meat of his criticism is that the "New Atheism," (which I'm going to abbreviate to NA) as presented by Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, is a sort of stealth religion. Wilson says that NA portrays religion as "bad bad bad in every way." He says non-religious systems can be just as irrational and non-evidential as religions, and uses Ann Rand's objectivism as an example, though he doesn't go into his reasons, other than to say that Ann Rand died of cancer after smoking for her whole life, and that she was surprised to do so since she bought too much of her own "I am perfected" objectivism hype. He says he's got a chapter in his book on the subject though, so perhaps he makes a stronger case there.
Wilson presents four bullet points for the science vs. religion discussion:
Is there any scientific evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?
If not, how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?
Are the impacts of religion on culture good or bad?
How can we use our knowledge of religion to ameliorate its negative effects and advance the goals of secular society?
He says these are what the NA should be concentrating on, and that 2-4 are the most important, since everyone at the conference knows that the answer to #1 is no. He cites Dawkins as having said that he cares passionately about #1 and doesn't care about #2-4, a point Wilson seems to think should serve as an indictment. And no doubt it does, in Wilson's mind.
The point I think he's missing is that the four horsemen of the NA aren't preaching to the converted, who know that there's no evidence for the supernatural reality of religion. They're trying to outreach to the world at large, and especially to the huge numbers of people who are nominally religious, but not devout, and who probably have never really given that much thought to what they believe, and why (or why not). Those wavering masses are the ones ripe for de-conversion, and the NAs have concluded (rightly or wrongly) that best way to do that is to mercilessly and relentlessly point out that all the origin myths and supernatural constructs of religious mythology are demonstrably false.
Sophisticated theologians of the type who show up in debates with Dawkins and Harris and the others, aren't swayed by this since they've long since moved past the magical bits of their religion, and religion in general. They'll gladly admit that there was no Adam and Eve, that Jesus probably wasn't actually resurrected, that Noah didn't exist, that Mohammad wasn't really taken to Heaven on a winged horse (after being disemboweled by an angel and washed clean of his sins), etc. Theologians treat all those stories as metaphors and analogies, and thus immunize their arguments from being brought down by logical fallacies. They speak about the utilitarian uses of religion, and the good it does in the world, and the evils of atheistic regimes, etc. Those are interesting issues, and show up in points 2-4, and are covered in detail by all of the NA writers, but point #1 is more important in most cases, since it's the one that hits most religious people more squarely in the heart of their beliefs. I've not seen any surveys or studies, on it, but it seems that many religious people stick to their religion since it's useful and moral and gives them a sense of community, etc -- but underlying all that is their belief that it's more special and powerful than any human alternatives, since there's supernatural truth and wisdom behind it.
Jesus isn't just another philosopher; he's the son of God/God himself, and fairly obvoiusly, this gives his words greater weight. Mohammad wasn't just a caravan trader; he was taking dictation from Allah. Joseph Smith wasn't just a convicted con artist and aspiring polygamist, he was translating the latter day writings of an arch angel (Named Moroni. No, really.) And so forth. And if you hammer home the fact that every religious claim that aspires to #1 is at best unprovable, and at worst (usually) clearly false, that does a great deal to, if not undermine unwarranted faith, at least open the minds of people who have never before seriously considered the possibility that the stories at the core of their religion are simply nonsense.
The fact that to do that you've got to be directly confrontational, is what, I think, so unsettles some of the delicate, scholarly, polite, deferential, atheistic scientists, like David Sloan Wilson. He wants the NA writers to talk about things of interest to him, i.e. points #2-4 on his list. He doesn't want to hear more about point #1, and/since it riles people up and creates controversy. Wilson probably got button-holed at a faculty dinner by some fundie from admin who demanded to know if everyone in biology dept he was an atheist like that rude Richard Dawkins, and if he was filling his science classes with rabble rousing atheism that might get back to the parents of the students, and result in a lessening of donations.
And yes, I'm engaging in complete speculation there. Very bad science.
The amusing post script to this came in Sam Harris' riveting presentation on day three of the conference, when he mentions talking to Wilson between sessions, and finding out that Wilson hadn't read a word of his work and was just lumping him in with the others since he was on the best seller list too.
Finally, on a completely different topic, this presentation by Gregory Clark, an economist from UC San Diego, is awesome. Nothing about religion or atheism (which is true of most of the presentations from this conference); it's all about the economic development of human civilization, and how there was essentially no growth at all, on a per capita basis, until just a couple of hundred years ago. He focused on demographic information in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based on an analysis of thousands of wills, and found that economic gains functioned in a very Darwinian fashion, with only the well-off leaving enough heirs to increase the population. Rich men left on average four heirs, while poor men left one or none, a fact that meant that the rich, or at least prosperous business class, steadily replaced the poor in society, since there wasn't much of a population gain over that time.
It sounds like a dry subject, but it's fascinating as he presents it, with information about the unbelievably high interest rates of the time reflecting the impatience of lenders (and the odds someone would die before paying back their loan), speculation about some possible genetic predisposition for (passed down as a heritable trait) for economic success based on work ethic, the fact that Americans' incomes have increased for centuries but our leisure time to enjoy them has remained constant or shrunk, and more. It's historical info of the Guns, Germs, and Steel type, so if you enjoy that kind of knowledge and trying to figure out what really causes societies to change and grow, you should enjoy this one.
I recently complained (To who? Not sure.) that most of the things I want to blog about lately are too complicated to get into. Not that you guys wouldn't understand them, but that there's a great deal of explanation required to set the context, and that it's 1) too much work for me to go to, since 2) you guys don't really care. That said, this one is good enough to be worth the trouble, I think.
Very briefly: some film makers put together a documentary about the issues of science/biology education vs. Creationism, a "debate" that exists only in the US, amongst Western nations. The reason it only exists here is fairly clear; there's no scientific value to Creationism. In fact, it's reverse science. Rather than objectively (as best humans can) evaluating the evidence and coming to conclusions based on that, Creationists began with a conclusion, that God made the world (in 6 days, 6000 years ago) with His magic powers. They then worked at sifting through and cherry pick from sciences such as biology, astronomy, geology, paleontology, etc, to find "evidence" to back up their pre-conclusion. They've not been very successful, for fairly obvious reasons (they're wrong).
The people behind Expelled are funded by Creationist groups, but they initially hid that fact and presented themselves as independent film makers while conducting interviews with leading theologians, scientists, biologists, etc. Furthermore, they weren't making a documentary about the issue, but were producing a propaganda piece to argue that science was discriminating against the teaching of Intelligent Design, and that university professors were being persecuted, denied tenure, fired, etc, for their religious beliefs. Once word leaked about this, many of the scientists reacted angrily, since they'd been interviewed under false pretenses, and since they feared (with good reason) that their words would be presented out of context and edited misleadingly.
There's no definitive word on that yet, since the film is not yet showing publicly; just privately, to select, primarily religious groups. Which brings me to... this amusing blog post. It's by PZ Myers, one of the more prominent science/atheist bloggers. He was interviewed by the Expelled people, he's been one of the most voluble complainers about the process and the ideological aims of the film, and it's gotten him attention; to the point that when he tried to attend a screening Friday night in Minneapolis, he was expelled from the line. The producers recognized him, barred him from the screening, and kicked him out of the theater entirely.
The punchline, as he gets to at the end of his post, was who they didn't kick out. His friend and guest, Richard Dawkins. Yes, that Richard Dawkins, author of numerous scientific best sellers, world-renowned lecturer, and the world's best known (except in Minnesota movie theaters, apparently) and most influential atheist. Dawkins they let in without any idea who he was, but PZ, kicked to the curb.
I'm not sure if I enjoy the irony, or the amusement at the ignorance of some assholes, or just the thought of PZ having bragging rights over Dawkins. Whatever the cause, I laughed my ass off at the event in question.
Since one of my posts wouldn't be complete without bitching about something, I'll add that the comments thread, which shot up over 1000 posts in less than 8 hours, depressed me. Most of the people just enjoyed the humor of the event, but a fair number did the usual clueless, "How can they kick you out of a theater, this is America, land of the free?" I see this exact same thing in online forums, where people (usually younger ones) get banned or deleted and say that's illegal, and that they have constitutional rights to be trolls without recourse by the ownership.
I'm not sure how the message implicit behind the "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" signs they've surely seen in hundreds of businesses hasn't sunk in? Private businesses can ban service to people they don't want to serve, within fairly broad parameters. There are constitutional amendments barring discrimination against entire classes or races of people, such as blacks, women, handicapped individuals, etc. But that doesn't mean a movie theater can't kick out someone, for any or no reason, at their own discretion. Just because most businesses don't choose to do this doesn't mean it's not their right. And the same goes for websites and online forums, but much more so, since there's no local jurisdiction to involve, and it's much harder to make a legal argument about an implicit right to access a website.
I always assume these arguments are coming from young, middle or upper class white people, who have never had anything denied to them, and therefore don't even really grasp the concept that something could be denied to them. "How can you not let me have what I want? It's my right!" College professors I've spoken with perpetually lament this issue, as 18 and 19 y/os who breezed through the farce that is the American public school system arrive in college, put forth their usual half-assed effort on a paper or test, and then stare in shock at the first C- they've ever received in their academic career. "How can I not get an A? I deserve an A. I've always gotten A's!"
To construct a parallel to the initial issue of this post; I think the "I'm an American; it's my right!" mindset is essentially identical to the "I'm a Christian (or whatever) and my religion is true and good." The people who say these things are almost certainly the ones least qualified to offer any factual statements about American law, or religious theory. They grew up in the respective systems, and they know something about them via cultural osmosis, but they have only a very vague understanding, not having studied the core documents of either system, and certainly never having ingested any critical analysis.
One of the most common laments by atheists who attempt to engage religious laymen in debates is that it's like wrestling a jellyfish. There's nothing to seize hold of since every religious person has assembled a different tray of beliefs from their cafeteria system of faith, and most of the faithful have no idea what their faith actually states or requires of believers. Nor do they know more than the vaguest caricature of the theory of evolution, the formation of the universe, or other scientific arguments that have almost entirely superseded the ancient superstition explanations.
Hence you get people who call themselves devout (for instance) Catholics while using birth control, supporting capital punishment and abortion, and lacking the ability to name more than 3 or 4 of the ten commandments. How do you argue with such a person about faith or reason? They're entirely lacking in internal consistency, they probably disbelieve most of the core tenants of their own faith, they've never read any theology, and yet they consider themselves faithful, and say their religion is important to them.
I took a class on Sexual Morality last semester, and in one early lecture the very analytical, probably-atheistic professor was talking about various religious interpretations of belief systems, and how people applied rules to others they didn't apply to themselves. He pointed out how silly it was for people to say they were a member of religion A or B or C when they didn't actually follow any/many of the precepts of that religion, and before we could move on one student interjected. She said she was strongly Catholic, and just because she was very socially liberal and thought most of what the Pope said was bullshit didn't make that any less so. The prof kind of chuckled, and said, "Then you're not really a Catholic." The girl looked stunned, and fell silent, and when the break came a few minutes later she stormed out.
I got a snack and walked around the building during the break, and wasn't entirely surprised to find the girl sitting on the steps outside one door, wide-eyed, red-eyed, and trembling. She was very bright, but very tense and intense, and since she was the only person in the class (besides me) who ever had anything to say during discussion, I hoped her freak out wasn't going to go to the point of her dropping the class, since I didn't want to have to carry all the commenting load. So I talked to her for a bit, but mostly listened, since she wasn't available for rational discussion. She was basically livid, red in the face and literally shaking, that the prof could say she wasn't a Catholic. I didn't have much to say about that, since after all... the prof was correct.
Being a member of a religion isn't entirely self-defined. You can be a Christian without following any set doctrines, though you've pretty well got to believe in the divinity of Christ and follow his teachings (Sherri Shepherd aside). But if you want to be a specific type of Christian, such as a Catholic, you have to believe what that sect lists as their official rules. In fact, the Catholic Church is kind of picky about that, and fairly specific in enumerating said rules.
Admittedly, no religion is exactly eager to divest itself of a member, since most realize they remain viable only so long as people are convinced that other people believe in them. Even excommunicated individuals technically remain Catholics, since baptism is forever. They're just denied sacrament and the other perks, and are sure to go to hell.
So technically, the intense girl in my class was right. She was a Catholic, and the prof was wrong to say she wasn't one. She just wasn't a good one, and it was logically absurd for her to say she was one, when as a med student she knew better than most of the foundational and operational mythology, and didn't agree with the theology or political applications of those beliefs. But, as I should have learned long ago, since when does logic or reason factor into anyone's core belief system?
Happily, she remained in the class and continued doing most of the talking, which helped make the rather meticulous lectures somewhat more enjoyable than the dry, technical reading we had to do to support them.
I've had partial reviews of a bunch of films written and sitting on my notes page for months, a stronghold from which they taunt me. Mockingly. So I'm going to work through that backlog over the coming week(s), when I have a chance to flesh out the old notes and scores into something more worth reading.
Good thing there are DVDs now, eh? Back in the 1970s it would have been pointless to post movie reviews on a blog months after the films were gone from theaters... oh wait.
Curse of the Golden Flower. Malaya and me endured this one last year, in theaters. We were growing tired of wuxia by then, after having our Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon appreciation blunted by the stupid stories and overly decorated visuals of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but we thought perhaps Curse of the Golden Flower would restore our faith in the genre. Tragically, all did not go according to plan.
The Curse of the Golden Flower, 2006 Script/Story: 3 Acting/Casting: 5 Action: 6 Eye Candy: 7 Fun Factor: 2 Replayability: 3 Overall: 3
This was the worst of the big budget, gorgeous scenery, Imperial China wuxia films yet. After yawning our way through this snoozer, Malaya and me spent the drive home debating whether or not the steadily decreasing quality of these films is something we can blame on Crouching Tiger. That was the only one of them that was actually any good, in the sense of being a complete film with a plot. It was sprawling and undisciplined, and I hated the extended irrelevancy of the middle section, featuring the spoiled princess and the Mongolian hordesman in the trackless desert, but most of the principle characters were interesting and well-rounded, there were discernible good guys and bad guys, the scenery was lushly gorgeous, and the fight scenes were great. Every wuxia film since then has upped the ante with scenery and set decoration and vast hordes of extras in matching, color-coordinated costumes, but the characters have become steadily less interesting and more clichéd, the plots have become one-dimensional fairy tales, and the fight scenes have grown bloated and top heavy with too many extras and magical powers.
Worst of all, the films have become overt propaganda pieces to the glory of the ruling Chinese emperor, showing that apparently the communist rulers of China see themselves as the direct spiritual descendants of that godlike level of authority. The plot of Hero was almost interesting, since it was about an assassin trying to infiltrate the king's court to kill him before his despoiling armies could finish unifying (by massacre) all of China. In the end the assassin decided not to kill the ing since it was better for the king to triumph in his wars and unify the land so it could be great... 1200 years later. Talk about foresight!
Curse picks up on this theme, but does so in a fashion that's even more depressing and frankly, vile. It's like bad Shakespeare. The king is a vicious, cruel brute, he's slowing poisoning his wife, and his sons both hate him and want to overthrow him, if only to save the queen's life. So they try and try, and fail in the end since the king is smarter and presumably is favored by the gods to rule. So one son dies, one is humbled and beaten, and the queen has to continue drinking the poisonous medicine until she loses her mind as penance for having some original thoughts and opposing her husband's will. The end. Seriously, that's the plot. There are a few irrelevant side plots with loyal court physicians being murdered for trying to help the queen, assassins and long lost enemies returning as friends, etc. But all those details are irrelevant to the central theme.
The design is gorgeous, but painfully so. They could have called it Curse of the Golden Wallpaper since about 2/3 of the movie takes place in obscenely overdecorated and overlit hallways, most of them running as straight, long and nowhere as the passages on the Starship Enterprise. I gave it a 7 on eye candy mostly for effort. If this is the first wuxia movie you ever see you'll be dazzled and amazed and wonder why I didn't give it a 10. If you've seen several others, you'll wonder why I didn't give it a 4, since we've seen every gaudily-colored set, masses of troops in bright matching armor, vast hordes of black-pajamed ninjas, etc, etc, in other, better films. They're visually attractive, but everything is so overdone in this picture it's like being dumped into one of those outdoor wild flower gardens, where there are just acres and acres of brilliant blossoms. Pretty, but sensory overload. One flower is heartbreaking. Five is touching. Fifty is impressive. Five thousand is eye-aching. This film, and wuxia in general, is fifty thousand flowers, all perfect arranged for color, and all changing to a new color every 5 minutes.
This literally happens in Curse; events draw as close to a grand finale as they ever do when one of the rebellious sons leads an army against the emperor during a chrysanthemum festival. There are stylized, elaborate scenes of thousands of warriors in matching costumes charging through the old time Broadway Musical-looking palace courtyard sets, and being met by equal numbers of contrasting color costumed soldiers, while thousands more servants scuttle out with tens of thousands of pots of flowers with which they literally carpet the vast courtyard. Battle ensues, with massive life loss and bloodshed, until only the one prince is left, fighting like, 5000 soldiers. He kills maybe 100 of them, all with slow motion, wide-sweeping, artistic slashes of his spear. Corpses bounce through the flowers, blood splatters like (as) paint, dramatic music plays, etc. Finally the prince is beaten down, but not killed, and as he's carried up to the royal patio where the gloating king waits, thousands more servants run out and instantly remove the bodies, and replace all of the broken and bloodied pots of flowers with fresh new ones.
It's all very symbolic and artistic and weird, but I found it silly and utterly uninvolving. It was all so clearly choreographed for the movie, and so artificial and unreal that it completely took me out of the story. YMMV, and I hope it does, since I think I'm done with wuxia now. They've just gotten too unreal, like Broadway with swords, and the entire movies are now performances, like some sort of Chinese Bollywood. Which is fine, if you want to be visually-delighted and don't mind that you're watching an odd sort of theatrical performance, rather than a motion picture that attempts to engage and involve you with a believable story, sympathetic characters, realistic events, etc.
One of the presenters at the previously-referenced Beyond Belief 2006 told this joke in their address, and I thought it funny enough to transcribe. And now I share it with you...
A rabbi, a priest, and a minister were at a religious retreat, and on a very hot day they decided to go swimming. None had a swimsuit so they had to go skinny dipping. No biggie, and they were enjoying themselves in the lake when they heard some voices approaching through the woods. In a panic, they dashed out of the water and ran into cover in the forest. As they ran, the the priest and the minister covered their genitals with their hands, while the rabbi covered his face. Once they reached cover and started putting their clothes on, the priest and the minister gave into their confusion and asked the rabbi why he'd covered his face instead of his nudity.
"I don't know about you guys, but it's my face that my congregation will recognize." he said.
I've been watching (well, listening to) the video presentations from Beyond Belief 2006, for the past week, and have found most of them quite interesting. The event was a conference that ran for several days at the Salk Institute at UCSD in November 2006, and while it sounds like an atheist conference, it's much more than that. Some famous atheists were present, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and given that it's a scientific conference the majority of the speakers were surely non-religious (the more science you know the less superstition you believe) but the bulk of the presenters are not speaking about atheism or religion.
The format is that speakers on related fields make sequential presentations, 3 or 4 people doing 20-30 minutes each, and there's some conversation with the learned audience in between, or afterwards with the presenters debating (arguing) the points each made. Topics covered include brain function and consciousness, morality in human social development, conflict and compatibility between science and religion, religion and superstition in medicine, and much more. Conveniently, there's a wikipedia page that lists all the speakers and their topics.
I've considered blogging about numerous topics so far, but as soon as I think of something good, something else comes up and I want to absorb it. Plus, most of the issues are being debated at a fairly high level, and I'm either a layman and can't explain them adequately to make a useful blog post, or they're issues that I've become knowledgeable about, but that would require so much explanation as to make them tedious reads.
For instance, I've gotten very interested in the foundational levels of human morality and culture, from an evolutionary POV. Like all the expert historians and anthropologists and others who research this field, I don't give any credence to the various religious creation myths; the old man in the sky did not hand down rules to live by. Not to the ancient Jews, or Chinese, or Sumerians, or Egyptians, or anyone else. Human cultures evolved their own rules and laws, and while there are a lot of differences in these from culture to culture, there are a fascinating number that show up in almost every culture. A version of The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is present in almost every culture, for instance. Cultures also have many of the same laws, most of them encoded not just into their laws, but into their religion or morality. It's fairly obvious why; cultures that didn't encourage teaching children, honoring elders, protecting the innocent, punishing the guilty, etc, could not, and did not, last long enough to leave any historical footprint, much less survive into the modern day.
There's a kind of parallel to another the "why are there orderly, logical, physical laws of the universe?" topic, which is discussed in various other presentations at Beyond Belief 2006. Mythological explanations about divine creators aside, there's no "why" to the laws of the universe; they simply are, and if they were not, we wouldn't be here 13b years later to wonder about them. The physical laws have to exist and function as they do for anything to proceed. If gravity or the speed of light or mass or energy, or the other essential foundations of what we perceive as reality didn't work consistently and permanently, then there wouldn't be stable galaxies, our solar system wouldn't have eventually formed, our planet wouldn't have coalesced and cooled, evolution couldn't have brought about higher life forms (to flatter humans with such a description), and we wouldn't have developed to the point that we could wonder about such issues.
I'm giving an enormously simplified version of the formation of the universe and the creation of human civilization, but it's interesting that in both cases, so many people prefer to interpolate magical causes, based on the apparent success of these long chains of events. It's as if you find yourself standing in a 7/11 at midnight with a winning lottery ticket in your hand, and as you think back over your day you decide that miracles were required to bring you to that point. If you hadn't slept 10 minutes late you wouldn't have been late to work, and could have made a sandwich for lunch, but you didn't so you had to go out to lunch, which let you pick up the dry cleaning then, which meant you had time after work to go home and cook instead of picking up pizza by the dry cleaners, and since you made cream of broccoli and used up the last of the milk, you had to run over to 7/11 before bed since you have to have milk in your morning coffee, and since the 7/11 milk is 50% more than in a grocery store, you had to break a five, which left you with just enough change to buy 2 lottery tickets, one of which won you $500.
So is that a miracle? Did Allah, or Yahweh, or Zeus, or Zoroaster, or whoever, cause all that by making you oversleep, thus setting the chain of events into motion? Did your deity of choice interfere/vene at some other point, making you notice the lottery commercial during the evening news? Did they/he/she/it help you out by making the person ahead of you at 7/11 buy 5 tickets, leaving the next one as your winner? Or stop the person ahead of you from buying 10 tickets, thus taking the winning one before you had your chance?
The possibilities, if you indulge in that sort of magical thinking, are endless. You've got to include the solipsism required in all religions to make it work though, since you have to believe that you're special. After all, the omniscent creator of all took a bit of his/her/its day to ensure that you won the lottery. Or that life formed on your planet. Or that your culture's moral beliefs were functional enough to let your civilization perpetuate. Why should God care about you one way or the other, though? It doesn't make any sense, unless you're the chosen species/race/culture/individual. Which is what almost every culture thinks of their god, an opinion echoed by most individuals in those cultures. It's only very recently, in the overall time of human existence, that we've known enough about how the earth formed, how life evolved, and how cultures organized themselves, that this sort of childish, "I'm/we're special." self-fulfilling wish fulfillment has become optional.
I'm always amazed that there were any atheists before about 1870. It seems the default position for any scientifically aware, culturally objective person today, but it's easy now that we know better than all those old myths. Imagine being able to reject the superstition before you knew how life formed, how old the Earth is, how improbable human evolution on this planet has been, and how utterly insignificant our speck of a solar system actually is? It's easy to give great credit to the great thinkers who did so, but really, do they deserve it? Was it logical or reasonable to reject theistic explanations for the universe when no better ones were available? Sure, the venality of most organized religion has been enough to repulse free thinkers since prehistoric days, but just because the people running a system are all greedy assholes doesn't mean the system is a lie; especially when it's the only semi-coherent explanation for human life, culture, history, and everything else you see around you.
My, how I digress into philosophy. Forgiveness? I meant simply to link to the Beyond Belief 2006 videos, and to mention a couple of interesting tidbits. I liked this exchange from the fourth video. At 23:40 mark, an audience member responds to the just-concluded presentation, "From a physics perspective, everything you've been saying is nonsense... and maybe I'm being too polite?" The debate continues from there, with highly-knowledgeable people from disparate fields arguing the points in very entertaining fashion. I enjoy watching brilliant, highly-educated people, go at it. Unfortunately, that particular exchange is about brain function and it's so technical that I can't even begin to evaluate the material. The presentation was about such radical theories of consciousness and brain function and dendratic connections and issues of great interest to neuroscientists and philosophers. I found it interesting, but way too specialized to know, or even intuit, who was in the right.
Another interesting thing that prompted me to write this post is near the start of Session Seven. The speaker is talking about common logical fallacies, and how people make those mistakes, and why. She mentions studies on how much people love their spouses, and how that value can be tweaked. For instance, if you get a group of people and have them write 3 reasons they love their S.O., then rate how much they love that person, they love their SO more than other people who do the same thing, but who must first list 9 reasons. This seems backwards, but the explanation is that everyone's got 3 things they really like about their husband/wife, but 9? That's a stretch. So people write down 3 or 4 or 5, and then start scratching their heads to get through 6 and 7, and by 8 and 9 they're making stuff up, or thinking about traits they don't actually like very much at all. The study essentially makes people think too deeply.
The presenter doesn't address the parallel, at least not as far into the video as I've gotten, but I see a possible connection between this result, and religious belief. Scientists who know the most about the relevant issues, such as the evolution of life and the formation of the universe, are the least likely to retain religious belief. Of all types of scientists, biologists and physicists are the least likely to believe in a personal god. On the other hand, people who know nothing about biology (evolution) or physics (formation and structure of the universe), are almost guaranteed to be deeply religious. It's only logical; if such people have ever given any thought to how and why and when, they have no scientific answers, so need magical ones. Biologists and physicists, on the other hand, have thousands of answers, and can therefore discard the magical ones. By the same token, if you only think about 3 things you love about your spouse, such as: they're always there for you in times of trouble, they understand you better than anyone, and they can always make you feel better, you're reassured and rate your love very highly. If you have to think of 9 things though, you're getting into physics and biology, and analytical, critical thinking. And reality might intrude on your blissful theorizing.
Of course there's a big problem with this comparison; those husbands and wives actually exist, and the love one feels for them is therefore a real emotion, and not simply wish fulfillment. Hey, I never said the analogy was perfect.
I've spent the past year without any TV, and have instead listened to dozens (hundreds?) of informative presentations and lectures on Google Video and You Tube. I highly recommend this course of study; it's not quite a books on tape sort of thing, but it's a great way to fill your mind and get new ideas and information (albeit somewhat superficial) on a wide variety of topics. Inspired by the Beyond Belief sessions, I think I'm going to branch into videos from other academic and scientific conferences. They're like reading intelligent magazine articles from a wide variety of journals, most of them nicely fill the 30 or 40 minutes I spend preparing and consuming a meal, and they're free. I wish I'd gotten into this habit when I was still living with Malaya, since we often ended up watching or listening to something utterly idiotic on TV, just to fill the time while we were cooking or eating or hanging out. There's a time for empty-brained entertainment, but that time isn't from 7-11pm, every night. Plus, most of our (Malaya and me) enjoyment in stupid shows like CSI or Jerry Springer or MMA came from discussing them. And we were never talking about them on the level of the idiots on those shows, but in terms of what the popularity of the programs, or the attitudes of the people on them, said about our society and culture at large.
As I enjoy and find myself frequently challenged by the intellectual videos these days, I often wonder how different this world would be if our leaders were interested in stretching their minds. What would America be like today, if George Bush engaged with Beyond Belief conference videos, rather than college football and Fox News? No telling, really, and while it's fun to pretend enlightenment would follow, I doubt it would make much difference. After all, Dubya just signs what they put in front of him, and follows whatever course of action he's presented with in plausible terms. And Rove and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the others who actually formulated the administration's policies were intellectual and intelligent enough to enjoy academic conferences; they were just ideologically biased, and smart enough to twist evidence to fit their world view.
I still recommend these types of videos to the rest of us, better you know and learn, even if you're going to use that knowledge for misguided evil.
We hadn't gotten together in a few weeks, so on Saturday I drove over to Malaya's condo and picked her up for some social activities. We got lunch (at a Vietnamese place we picked at random), scavenged from a used book store that was (sadly) going out of business and selling everything at 75% off, and then headed to the movies for some mindless action fun. Our drug of choice? Doomsday, a new low-budget gore-fest shot in South Africa, set in Ireland, and starring no one you've ever heard of, aside from Bob Hoskins doing a hard-boiled police chief character who might as well have been cut and pasted out of every other action movie ever made.
It's not a good movie, but it's fun for action/horror movie fans who don't mind (or who actually enjoy) absurd amounts of gore and needless violence. You know who you are. Set your expectations appropriately, and you'll have a good time with this one. To the scores:
I had the hardest time figuring the scores for this film I almost wanted to rate it like I did the first few Harry Potter novels, with different scores for adults and children. In the case of Doomsday, the scores would be for horror/action movie fans vs. real people, but I decided against that since there's no way anyone but horror/action movie fans would get through the first 15 minutes of this picture, much less the whole thing. Several people walked out of the very uncrowded early Saturday afternoon screening Malaya and me attended; a couple beside us during the sadistic torture/human BBQ/mob cannibalism scene at about the 30 minute mark. Yes, you read that right.
It's a potentially very offensive film, but neither of us was offended because it was all so ridiculous and outrageous. The tone of the film was light and silly, even while the violence was never less than grotesque. In an odd way, the violence itself contributes to that, by always going overboard. Every human who dies in the film explodes like a swollen sack of cranberry sauce, whether they're shot with bullets or arrows, stabbed, run over, impaled, beheaded, hit with a fire axe, etc. The same bloody mess rules apply to animals as well, including cows and a rabbit, so at least the film is consistent.
Every fight scene includes at least one horribly maiming injury, and usually ends with a slow motion beheading and/or de-limbing. Every human in the film is happy to murder, repeatedly, given any opportunity to do so. All human leaders in the film are genocidal maniacs, clinging to power by any means available to them and happily sacrificing many/most/all of their followers to further their own ends. You get the picture.
All that said, it's not a grim or dark film, since it's just so stupid and so wacky that it's impossible to take it seriously. The constant homages to other films help with that, since they're so blatant and obvious that you get some of the mood of those action classics inserted into this one, like fun via a solid flavor injector. Yes this film is frequently almost identical to The Road Warrior, Escape from New York, and all the recent zombie movies, where the zombies run fast and hit hard, but since those were fun movies, and this one is ripping off their theme and look, but not actually clumsily recreating their scenes (which was something that bothered me aboutAvP2), it's not an unpleasant process.
It was better than the trailer suggested, and the other films it appears to borrow from weren't as obvious in the full film, but The Road Warrior comparisons more than made up for it, since at least half this movie was essentially set in the same world as that Mel Gibson classic, including the character types, fashions, world economy, and political themes. Of course it lacked the subtleties, varied sub-characters, or the believable characterization of the Mad Max films, but that's to be expected these days. All the characters in Doomsday are pretty clearly doing what they're doing since it's required of them by the plot. No one feels like a real person, or an individual. There's the crazy, sadistic bad guy, his hot and psycho girlfriend, countless anonymous and incompetent guards, the good guy's loyal, competent, but unimaginative second in command, the timid follower who might find his guts eventually, the flaccid damsel in distress, etc.
I don't include the poor man's Kate Beckinsale female hero lead in this listing, since I don't think she had enough of a character to have a character type. She was whatever the movie required her to be at the time; brave and perfectly competent, an indestructible killer, sensitive and remorseful over lost comrades (but only when there was time for it, and she could always snap instantly back into single-minded combat mode), honest and caring, deceptive and manipulative, etc. She's basically the cipher-like hero of a video game RPG, capable in all situations and possessed of no individual traits or behaviors that would compromise her doing anything, at any time, to save the day. Or that make her memorable or interesting.
And yes, I'm vastly overanalyzing a movie that's designed to be impervious to analysis, or at least to render analysis irrelevant. There is a plot and a sense of narrative, but it's non-essential, and irrelevant. That there's a plot might actually be a bad thing, since the plot is so dumb and improbable, and contradicts itself in so many ways, that it's actively distracting when it intrudes. Fortunately, it's not difficult to forget, or just go along with since viewers know this sort of film has to have a ticking clock of some type, to motivate the leads to continually take the insane risks they take in order to keep the action going. So of course 90% of the action scenes are silly and pointless, especially the last half hour of Mad Max-honoring car chase absurdity (that is so patently taking place nowhere near Ireland that I imagine natives of that country will spend most of it laughing out loud), but since you bought your ticket wanting action scenes and mayhem, are you going to complain? No. Well, not too loudly, anyway.
Doomsday is an awful, violent, disgusting movie, but that's all intentional, and if you go in expecting a cheesy, bloody action movie, you'll probably have a pretty good time. Malaya and me did, at least.
Lots of interesting movie trailers online lately, and as I begin typing this it occurs to me that none of the good ones have Mr. Voice intoning over them. Perhaps he got laryngitis and inadvertently allowed a full season's worth of action film trailers to be produced without relentlessly-stupid and cliche-filled voice over work? No wonder these trailers are all good. Never fear; I'm sure he'll be back in form in time to ruin the summer films.
First up, I've got to plug Iron Man first, since I liked the teaser months ago, and I really like the full trailer. It's entertaining in of itself, and it makes the movie look good too. As with the teaser, (classic) rock songs are fitted flawlessly into this offering, and they blend perfectly with the theme and mood of the scenes shown, and actually seem to advance the narrative.
I'm looking forward to seeing this film, which makes it almost a certainty that all of the quirky humor and intelligence the trailers show will be edited mercilessly, leaving nothing but the typical intelligence-insulting, Bruckheimerian swill we've come to expect from big budget superhero movies.
Speaking of, did you know they're making a second Hulk movie? Yeah, it was news to me too, but there's a teaser trailer and everything. It sucks, frankly. The trailer, I mean. No idea about the movie, but I always found the Hulk one of the least interesting comic book characters, and when its trailers sucked I never bothered to see the first film. I didn't miss much, judging from the critical and commercial reception to Ang Lee's misguided attempt at artsy-stylings. It looks like they're going more serious with this sequel (?), and there's a new, better-known actor playing the lead, and the Hulk himself seems to be more realistic, or at least somewhat less like one of Jim Carrey's hydra heads from The Mask.
No idea if the Hulk 2 will be any good, and it's highly unlikely I'll ever see it, but I could have possibly been won over. Hell, if the trailers can make me want to see Speed Racer, then anything's possible with a good 2 minutes of careful editing. This Hulk teaser is nothing special though, and the ending, with the indestructible Hulk fighting some sort of indestructible evil Skeletor Hulk in the rain in a ruined city is highly reminiscent of Neo vs. Agent Smith in Matrix 3. You know, the one everyone hated, and the one that proved how cinematically boring it was to have two indestructible characters fight, even with an entire city to destroy in the process. Looks like Hulk 2 will reconfirm that fact, starting June 13th, in a theater near you!
(On second thought, Hulk vs. Skeletor Hulk looks more like the battle between Mr. Hyde and the steroid swollen evil monster at the end of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Not that that analogy exactly improves the film's outlook.)
In some good news, there's no reason to fall further down the well of unfunny by making Austin Powers 4 (though I'm sure they will anyway), since every joke that wouldn't have been funny in that movie seems to have been crammed into this one. It's The Love Guru!
You know how most of the "comedies" made from Saturday Night Live sketches are criticized for being 90 painful minute belaborings of concepts that hardly had enough meat on their bones to keep a 6-8 minute sketch lively? Well this one looks like they skipped the "good 6-8 minute sketch" part. On the plus side, it's got a lot of bright colors...
...but nothing like the ones in the jumbo Crayola box that is Speed Racer! I blogged, in confusion, about this some months ago, after I forced myself to watch the teaser, expecting to actively hate it. It took me three viewings, but I eventually had to admit I was nearly won over, and definitely curious.
The teaser was more innovative than the full trailer; as I said in that earlier blog post, it made the film appear to be essentially a live action Anime. To quote myself, "...there are moments of overwrought, overserious drama mixed in with madcap comedy, the costuming is highly distinctive, there are random sections of martial arts and physics-defying action scenes, the logo and graphics are super high tech and seem out of place compared to the cartoonish everything else, etc."
The full trailer doesn't have that aspect to things, or any hint of the plot. It sells the film entirely on visuals and action, and doesn't do a bad job of that. It's a spectacularly colorful, eye candy fest, and I highly recommend you watch it in HD, and do some frame by frame advancing with the aid of the arrow keys. The driving scenes are really interesting; the cars are always in super sharp focus, CG-style. Not blurred to show speed, but crystal clear, and the plastic-y, reflective, textured nature of the Mach-5 is just "reach out and touch it" tasty. The wildly-curving race tracks are equally amazing to behold, and even the obviously CG shots of the grandstands are somewhat fascinating, with the spilled-bag-of-Skittles splashes of color in the spectator's clothing.
It's CG to a new extent in live action film; nothing is meant to look realistic, it's all hyper-realistic, with more color, more detail, more visual information than the human eye can take in, or human brain can process, at the speed it zooms by. I'm reminded of the jaw-dropping visuals in some anime, such as Ghost in the Shell 2. I'm not sure why I like how it looks in Speed Racer, though. I was unmoved by the equally-cartoonish, entirely-CG visuals in the Star Wars prequels and The Fifth Element, and while I thought they worked nicely in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, everything was so golden-hued and oddly-tinted in that film that it was almost monochromatic. On the other hand, Star Wars 1-3 and The Fifth Element were awful films, while Sky Captain was fairly brilliant, so it's entirely possible that what the directors did with the visuals was more influential on my judgmental memory than the visuals themselves.
Elsewhere, the full trailer for Pixar's new joint, Wall-E, is online, and it's very good. The teasers made the robot look cute but gave no sense of the film. The trailer is the real deal though, and it provides a quick summary of the entire film's plot, great visuals, a good sense of the mood (humorous) and tone (light but sentimental), and even some laughs. It also makes it look like, once again, Pixar is setting up a story to challenge themselves commercially. There's a non-speaking protagonist, all the leads are not only inhuman, they're not even organic, and it's set in an unfamiliar, sci-fi future world. For a studio that could just churn out family friendly sequels to Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles sequels until the end of time, (you know, like what Disney does with their straight to video Cinderella 3: If the Slipper Fits sludge) it's damn admirable that they're not playing it safe.
Elsewhere, I'm sure I'll end up seeing Mrs. Smith 2, I mean Wanted, with Angelina Jolie as the super assassin, but the trailer makes it hard to love. The action scenes are cartoonish to the extreme (and not in an intentional, anime way like Speed Racer's), the male lead looks like 10 pounds of zero in a 20 pound suit, and the whole "curving bullet" thing is just risable. Nevertheless, it's Angelina doing cool action stuff and being a bad ass, so I'll probably be there.
I definitely would have in the old days, since I know Malaya's going to be at this one opening weekend, but we don't see movies together that much anymore, (one of those consequences of breaking up and living 40 miles apart) and my new semi-imaginary girlfriend isn't a fan of this type of film, though she does make occasional exceptions. And since she owes me for The Other Boleyn Girl, (no, it wasn't exactly my first choice) maybe I'll cash in that chip on this flick. Or save it for Iron Man?
Finally, I almost hesitate to mention this film, but how can I not? Doomsday. It's one of those action movies they dump without critical screenings in the spring, when there's no action movie competition, and there's no way it's any good, but the trailer is almost required viewing for any action movie fan. You could make a drinking game out of it, but you'd be dead. The rules are would be simple; drink every time you see something so clearly taken from a classic action film that 80% of theater goers could shout it out in unison.
I didn't catalog them all, but the basic premise is 28 Days Later meets Resident Evil, and then as soon as they get into the action it's The Road Warrior crossed with Escape from New York. There are also clear "influences" from Aliens'Alien vs. Predator 2's marine squad, Gladiator's mortal combat, The Matrix 2's car chase scenes, and several others. All crammed into 2 minutes of absurdity.
Bonus points for the most gratuitous, slow motion, butt shot in recent cinematic history?
I get the feeling that this film could be almost like an action version of those Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, type films, where there's no real movie, just a bunch of homages and recreations of genre classics. Except Doomsday's playing things seriously? Who knows, it might be good, or at least entertaining. At worst, it will motivate viewers to go watch all the movies it so liberally cribbed from, and that's a happy ending to any story.
