Monday, June 30, 2008
Swift Boating McCain?
I've not had much time to follow political news, or anything else but
Diablo III since the big announcement late Friday night (California time). But when I hit Yahoo news this afternoon, between running some errands and looking up the location of the UPS store in downtown San Rafael, I thought
this was absurd enough that it required comment.
Retired 4-star US Army General Wesley Clark (who I thought was a good choice for the democratic presidential candidate in 2004, for reasons I no longer recall) was on some weekend political talk show, and when questioned, pointed out something fairly obvious. That John McCain's main claim to military fame, that his plane was shot down and he was imprisoned (and very cruelly-treated) by the Viet Cong for the duration of the Vietnam War, doesn't necessarily qualify him to be president of the US.
If you live outside of the US, you probably wonder how this is even remotely controversial. Clark has vastly greater military credentials than McCain, presumably knows quite a bit about the intellectual and leadership qualities of your average Navy flyboy, was very careful in his comments to honor McCain's service and bravery in captivity, and said nothing against the value of anyone's military service. He just pointed out that getting shot down in a fighter plane and captured by the Vietnamese army isn't an experience that exactly translates into presidential experience.
His remarks have become big news in large part because the mainstream media in the US is
happy to misrepresent anything for ratings, is entirely cowed by and fearful of saying anything that might remotely be construed as anti-military (especially in a time of war, such as um... ever), and because that same media
harbors an enormous man-crush on John McCain. And, of course, because right wingers who support McCain (largely by default, since the hardcore 25%er base liked all the other Republican candidates better than the pseudo-independent McCain) have gone insane over the issue, since they live to 1) support Republicans, 2) attack the patriotism of Democrats, and 3) support the military (in every way but by actually, you know, paying the soldiers more or giving them better support post service).
The real irony is that the only prominent people attacking John McCain's military service are... right wingers. There's a substantial fringe faction (including
Republican ex-congressmen) who thinks he's literally a Manchurian Candidate. That he was brainwashed and "turned" by communist Chinese operatives during his lengthy captivity, that he made numerous anti-American propaganda tapes while in captivity, that he covered it up through his powerful position as a senator on the military affairs subcommittee, that he abandoned his fellow P.O.W.'s by opposing programs that would have searched for prisoners still held after America lost the Vietnam war, that he's currently under the control of the Chinese government, and that President McCain would be (almost) as bad for America as the secretly-Muslim, whitey-hating, possibly-atheistic African impostor he's competing against for the job.
Yes, this is the sort of thing that dominates political discourse in America. How else do you think we ended up with two terms of George Bush Jr.? Debating the issues?
Labels: military, politics
Friday, June 27, 2008
Five things...
Not much time for blogging lately, with other things going on. But since this'll serve as a blog entry, and let me think things over while I'm typing it, here I go.
1) My nice little part time (hours and pay) job updating the content on
diabloii.net, and filling up the wiki, and establishing the screenshots section, and encouraging the forums, and planning for some future day when Diablo III comes... has blown up thsi week since it seems almost certain that Blizzard is going to announce Diablo III at the WWI convention this weekend in Paris. Other staff members on the site have, in fact, said for a fact that that will happen, and I both believe and hope they are correct in that prediction.
Perhaps needless to say, this has caused the gaming world to stand up and take notice, and site traffic and attention is vastly increased. Blizzard has been posting
mysterious splash screens on their website all week; a new one each night at midnight, and as the images progress and the mystery deepens, the fan interest is spiraling ever higher. I posted the new images tonight at 12:15, went to the gym, got home at 2am, and there were upwards of 400 new comments in the forum, and more than 100 directly on my post.
This is starting to remind me somewhat of the pre-D2 days, when virtually anything we posted on the site would be viewed by 10,000 people in like, 3 hours. Hellgate:London never approached that level of activity/popularity pre-game, and certainly didn't once it was released, but Diablo III is doing it before it even (officially) exists.
This weekend is going to be interesting, when/if they do announce the game and release screenshots and information. I may need to make some new forums just to divide up the Diablo III comments and attention, since new posts are scrolling off the first page in just hours now, and that's with basically nothing to talk about but wild speculation over the enigmatic clues Blizzard is throwing forth.
2) I ordered a
furminator last week from Amazon ($20 there, vs. the ridiculous $40 they want at PetCo), it arrived this afternoon, and tonight I can safely say that it works as well as advertised. I have used it on Jinx several times thus far, for no more than a couple of minutes each time, and I could literally stuff a pillow with the hair that's come off of her. This photo is from the first go, and all that fur came off in about 45 seconds, and just from one side of her lower back. I later got a clump that would have burned out a clothes dryer from 1 minute combing the base of her tail, and removed a cabbage-sized tumbleweed from her neck and the sides of her face.
The amazing thing is that she looks exactly the same. Same coloration, same thickness, and she even feels the same afterwards. Perhaps a bit softer, but I can't necessarily tell the difference between this and how she feels after normal brushing, when her fur is all orderly and smoothed down.
The product literature claims that it removes the undercoat, and that does seem to be true, since the fur that comes off of Jinx is all blonde/light gray and monochromatic, while her actual pelt has dark patches and variegations. As best I can tell, it works by shaving/cutting the fur, but only down by the skin. The tines are very pointy and angled, and not very deep. They're maybe 5mm deep, and all angle to a V shape, which is beveled somewhat on the top side. So the longer, outer hairs get pushed to the sides, while the softer, shedding underfur gets cut off near the root. The larger models, for big dogs, come with replacement blades, but the smaller cat ones are just one piece.
It's damn clever, and quite effective. I get more fur with 5-10 seconds of this than I would with several minutes of brushing with a normal pet comb. They say not to use it if the animal has skin lesions or a rash, and not to go over the same area too much, but if it hurts, Jinx has given no sign. She purrs relentlessly when I do it on her neck and chin and cheeks; she always enjoys being brushed there, but she definitely enjoys the furminator more than a normal comb, perhaps since it scratches her better?
I'm going to get her more thoroughly tomorrow, and see if she actually looks/feels/vomits any differently once I've taken another pound of fluff off her. She doesn't hork up hairballs that often, but she does do so from time to time, and there's perpetually cat fur flying around my apartment, so it would be lovely to minimize those effects. Plus it's fun to unpeel her with this strange device.
This is not her post-furminating, but is a photo I took last week when I found how nicely she blended with a new fleecy brown blanket I got. I didn't think it would pair well with her color, but I think the brown and gray go very well together.
3) I'm taking a couple of months off of kali. I've not been for a few weeks, and as of yet I'm not missing it. The class has gotten very rarefied of late; lots of talking, lots of theory, and very little of what I wanted from it, which was practical self defense techniques, sparring practice, and playing with weapons. I don't mind if we do odd things, but I want them to involve sticks, swords, staves, spears, etc. Odd forms of open hand, while no more practical, don't interest me as much, and yes, that's an entirely personal preference with no real defensible logic to it.
I've been thinking about trying some other forms of martial arts, or even just doing something more brutish and direct, like some MMA (non-competitively) or kick boxing or the like. However, I've not sought out any such activities yet, and I'm not really feeling motivated to do so tonight. I'm not hibernating; I've been working out 4 or 5x a week, but haven't felt any real desire to fight or train.
One unexpected benefit of not going to kali for 3 weeks is that my back and hip are feeling almost normal. I complained some weeks ago about how my right hip had been growing very stiff, and radiating up into my back, when I stood around for a while on a hard floor. And the chief culprit was kali class, since our current studio has a concrete floor, and with all the lecturing lately, we'd had a number of nights with almost nothing but standing still. I knew that was aggravating my sore back, since I was always sorest Tuesday nights after class, but now that I've not done it for a few weeks, that's become very clear. I miss the combat and fraternity of class, but I do not miss being unable to get out of bed Wednesday morning, and limping until Friday each week.
4) Freed from/deprived of my martial arts outlet, which (some weeks) provided a pretty good workout, and no longer so burdened by a sporadically sore back/hip, I've been hitting the gym more often, and enjoying it. I'm doing very long cardio sessions; usually 20 minutes at a pretty high speed on the stepmaster stepmill machine (about 120 stories climbed in that time), and then 35-55 minutes on the elliptical (800+ calories, according to the highly-inaccurate digital readout), before an hour of weights, situps, etc.
I can't say that I see any big differences in my body, but one thing I've been experimenting with lately is the situp machine. My gym, like every gym I've ever been in, has
a bunch of these, and they allow you to do far more situps than you could just lying on the floor, or on an inclined bench. The upper back thingie rocks with you, so it provides neck and shoulder support, and part of the exertion is on your shoulders and arms. How you use it varies the load; if you really lift with your crunch muscles instead of using your arms and bracing your feet, it's far more exertion. The best is to stick your legs straight up in the air, or at least curl them up so they're not on the footrests, since you get much more strain on your stomach that way.
I've used that type of machine at the gym for years, and I used to do 50 or 75 situps on it when I went to the gym with Malaya a few years ago. I'd do that many straight, and then turn my legs so both knees were on the left or right, and do another 15 or 20 each way to get the sides of my stomach. I'd upped that to about 100 during the 5 months I've been going to my new gym, but was also doing a lot of reps on the "make it burn"
crunch machine, and using some other ab/torso machines too.
Last week I started to realize that I wasn't really getting tired on the sit up machine anymore. I was doing my usual 100 or so situps, about half with my legs up in the air, but I was just doing that many out of habit, not because I was too tired to do any more, which is why I stop doing reps on all the other machines I use at the gym. So I tried to do more, and did 250 one day last week, and then did 300 the next time, and followed that by another 50 to the left and 50 more to the right.
I don't recall exactly which day, but over the weekend I did 500 without pause, and then more to the sides, and on Tuesday I did 750. That was getting to be silly, not in terms of how many, but just in the time it took. I haven't exactly timed myself, but I do them a little faster than one per second, so it took me something like 10 minutes to do 750. Ten minutes doesn't seem that long when upright on a cardio machine, but when you're just rocking up and down on a sit up machine, it's a long time. I'm not used to being on any single piece of exercise equipment for longer than it takes one song to play on my ipod. Much less two or three.
That aside, I decided to see how far I could go tonight, and set 1000 as my goal. That was an arbitrary number, I thought, since if I could do even 300 or 400, I could theoretically do them forever. It wasn't like they were getting gradually more difficult every 10 or 15; or that my muscles were steadily, but very slowly, tightening up. It was just a mental thing; could I do situps for that long?
As it turns out, I could. I didn't time them, though I probably should have since I doubt I'll do it again. But it took 4 full Eminem songs, one of which was Stan, and that's about his longest song. At least 15 minutes lying there, nonstop sit up'ing. And yeah, I could have done them forever. I felt my stomach get tight after 30 or 40 with my legs up, but then I'd put them down on the foot pegs and breath deeply to relax my stomach, and after 10 or 15 situps I'd be back to a neutral state; neither tired nor straining.
My conclusion is that doing situps on that sort of machine is equivalent to doing a bench press with no weight on the bar. Once you get to some level of fitness in the relevant muscles, it's not really exercise anymore, and you can more or less do it forever. The problem is that since it's not a strain, you won't really improve your muscles by doing it. It's like trying to build up your legs by walking. I'm now thinking it's pointless to do more than a couple of hundred reps on that machine, and maybe not even that many, since they're not straining me. Other ab machines do, and there's a simple padded plank with footrests that I can't do more than 30 or 40 situps on without cramping up. I see some guys on there holding medicine balls, or 20lbs weights to their chests, so I imagine they could go infinitely on the situp machine too.
I find it interesting though, and surprising, that it's possible to get to a point where such a machine is no longer work. I imagine guys with really strong upper bodies feel the same way about pushups; their arms and chests are powerful enough that they can lift their own upper body weight an infinite number of times, and it's neither tiring, nor enough of a strain to let them build more weight.
5) Last week, on my birthday, motivated by boredom, ennui, mild loneliness/horniness, and a glass of exquisite dessert wine gifted me by my dad, I popped my own cherry by placing a spur-of-the-moment personal ad at an online dating service. I didn't have any expectations for it, so when 3 actual human women replied, (along with about 10 really lame, boring, and obviously fake spammers/scammers) I was pleasantly surprised. A week into trying to get to know them, I'm less pleasantly.
In my spontaneous state, I didn't include some of the basic personal ad elements, such as a desired age range. I would have gone something like 24-34, since like most men, I want a woman who is potentially younger than me, since like most men, I find younger women more attractive. I wasn't looking for a hook up, and physical attraction isn't anywhere near my most important criteria for a date, but there has to be some attraction to make it worth the effort to get to know a person, when romance is the potential end game.
Given my lack of specifications, I shouldn't have been surprised that two of the women were, as Chris Rock said, "
damn near forty!" Yeah, age is just a number, but both women were white, and not to be racist, but white women don't age well. The event horizon varies from woman to woman, but most white women go from MILF to cougar to granny in like, 3 years. Whether that happens from 28-34, or 32-36, or 35-40, you can almost see time taking its toll from day to day. White women in that range are almost better off accepting the inevitable, putting on 25 pounds, and aging gracefully, since the alternative is um...
this.
None of the women who replied to my ad were Terri Hatcher'ed, but neither were they women that I, in great shape and still semi-able to pass for 30, found real desirable. While contemplating the chronological doom that is my fate, I reflected on the downside of having spent so much time with the IG over the past 6-8 months. It's been fun, and she's good company and we're very friendly, but we're not destined for romance or an LTR, and more relevantly for my current dilemma, she's in her early 20s, is very pretty, and wears size 2 petite. And it's hard (impossible, in my current case) to go from that, to women who are more than a decade and a half older, even if they look fairly good for their age.
All is not lost on the personal ad front though, since I'm still corresponding with one woman who is but 32, and even if that doesn't work out I got my feet wet with this free ad nonsense, and saw the possibilities. There are countless non-free dating/singles sites with more quality control, more serious singles, and many more opportunities to find someone with a more selective criteria than "click here." And I might one of them later this summer.
I'm not sure how suitable such an activity is for blogging about. Such activities are definitely "blog material," but I'm wouldn't be doing it entirely on a lark and I'm not looking just for hook ups, and I'd have to/want to reveal my blog to any woman I was sincerely interested in. And me blogging about her, or other women I'd seen before her, probably wouldn't be a huge selling point. Nor would/will the comments I made in this post about white women aging in dog years, for that matter.
Guess I'd better find more Asian
girls women, eh? They're cuter when they're young, and better yet, they age more gracefully. Plus, by 30 most of them have escaped the controlling clutches of the "traditional" family they grew up in/rebelled against, and can start to live their own lives, rather than just doing what their parents want for them.
Was that five things? I think so, and it's too late to proofread or count now. I picked the number kind of at random, so it's nice if it worked out in the end.
Labels: dating, diablo iii, fitness, jinx, personal, pets
Monday, June 23, 2008
Book Review: Weaveworld
Continuing (belatedly) my trilogy of reviews of Clive Barker's non-trilogy of early, thematically-similar novels, (
The Damnation Game,
Weaveworld, and
Imajica) here's my take on Weaveworld. I first read this book around 1990, when it was newish and I had recently discovered Clive Barker's work. He almost immediately became my favorite author, (supplanting Stephen King, whose work had instantly turned me into a horror fan and gradually drawn me into my so-far-misbegotten career path) and while I enjoyed the novel back then, it was far from my favorite of Barker's books.
I appreciated the scope and imagination, but the main character is rather wishy-washy in his everyman-ness, there aren't many out and out "horror" scenes, the plot is rather wandering, and the philosophical/metaphysical/mythological Christian elements of the story left me cold. I'd read it once or twice during the years since then, but when I tackled it last month I tried to approach it as a neutral observer. How did it strike me now, nearly 20 years after my first exposure to the novel? To the scores:
Weaveworld, by Clive Barker, 1989
Plot: 6
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 9/8
Characters: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 8
Overall: 8
This was Barker's second novel, and it's better than
The Damnation Game, his first. It's far larger and more imaginative, and it greatly builds on the elements Barker established in
The Damnation Game, while deviating considerably from typical horror (and fiction) novel form. The novel is far longer (in pages and time frame) and larger (in concept and content) than the usual fiction tale, and it's not a thriller. Nor does it aspire to be one. There are moments of action and excitement and tension, but it's not a ticking clock type story. My page turner score is based largely on the inventiveness and creativity sucking the reader in, rather than the novel exhibiting a steadily building tension.
It's also what I suspected when I began this rereading of early Barker novels. It's very nearly a dry run for
Imajica, a masterpiece of a novel that's essentially
Weaveworld reimagined, enlarged, deepened, and improved in almost every way.
As is the case in all 3 of these early Barker novels, the plot starts small and mundane, then gradually swells into a vast, world and age-spanning conflagration that sweeps the protagonists into key positions in a struggle that's been running since long before were born. The title refers to a vast and ancient tapestry, within which a people and a jigsaw collection of their favorite parts of the world are contained. It's a magical world, housing magical refugees from our mundane realm. The story tells that there were once magical tribes of semi-humans living on the earth, but as humans spread the tribes were accused of witchcraft and heresy, and forced to retreat. They could have survived that, until they began to suffer massacres at the hands of an unseen, unknown monster they called the Scourge. Harassed by humans and driven nearly extinct by the Scourge, the remnants of the tribes gathered and worked a great magic, weaving themselves and their most precious keepsakes (which include physical objects and bits of geographic locations) into a carpet. There they remained for centuries, guarded by a series of half-human protectors and hunted by exiles of their own kind, and perhaps still by the Scourge, now sleeping and hidden in some distant, unknown corner of the world.
The plot of
Weaveworld involves the pursuit of the tapestry by several individuals of great power, the awakening of the Scourge, the unweaving and reweaving of the land, and an epic and lengthy struggle during which most of the characters change their minds, hearts, and almost their identities, several times.
Most of the elements that became Barker's trademarks are present in this novel, some of them developed at length for the first time. The (apparently) evil characters with god-like powers who become humanized and partially-redeemed over the course of the book The young female who discovers magical powers she never knew she possessed. The magical world existing just beneath the visible surface of our mundane one. The long, multi-act plot structure, with plenty of time for revelations, false dawns, and ultimate world-changing revelations/resolutions. The dynamic characters, almost all of whom change and grown considerably during the course of the book. The lack of embarrassment about frankly sexual sensuality, and the unflinchingly gory and gruesome, but seldom sensationalized, violence. And the almost incomparably-brilliant prose which turns many passages into literary wine tasting; where words, descriptions, and phrases must be sipped slowly to let them impart the full flavor and depth of the presentation.
In
Weaveworld, as in most of Barker's work, I frequently found myself pausing to marvel at how well a description was turned, or a scene was presented. Barker isn't a great storyteller, (his multitudes of ideas prevent him from presenting a streamlined, focused plot) but his writing, the actual arrangement of the words, is as good as I've ever read. This is kind of a writer-y thing though, and is not appreciated by everyone, but if you enjoy the masterful play of the English language, you'll find a lot to like in Barker's best work.
CharacterizationAnother writerly technique Barker uses is to make almost every major (and some minor) characters very dynamic. That tendency runs further amok in
Imajica, and forms the core of my very few criticisms of that novel. It's not as pronounced (developed?) in Weaveworld, but at times characters seem to change just for the sake of change, and the fact that almost every character escapes certain death on multiple occasions, then returns invigorated and/or greatly-altered by the experience, can be distracting. I think it makes Barker's novels very non-comfort food, and probably has something to do with why he's been less successful than many far less talented horror novelists.
Personally, I love the style he uses, and found it hugely influential when I was 18. I still enjoy it, but I can now see the limitations (re: book quality and marketing) a little more clearly. Reading the book now, I still like the idea, but it seems overdone at times, and I think it's a big part of what makes some people not Barker fans. When every character changes, and the overall plot is fluid and ebbs and flows in different directions, readers who want a strong central theme and a traditional plot structure feel lost at sea. Like the book doesn't know where it's going, and neither do the characters.
It's interesting to compare Barker's style of dynamic characters to another author who does it very well. In George RR Martin's ongoing
Fire and Ice series, the characters appear to be dynamic, but in retrospect I don't think they are. Some are, of course, but what usually changes in that series isn't the characters, but the POV of the reader. The Lannisters; Tyrion and Jamie and Cersei, are basically the same characters in book 4 that they were in books 1, when they appeared to be outright evil and almost every reader hated them. What's changed isn't the behavior of the Lannisters, but the view the reader has of them, since Martin wrote numerous chapters from their POV in books 2-4, and as we got to know them, we started to see things through their eyes. As a result Cersei is now more hated, Jamie is an interesting, complicated, and conflicted character, and Tyrion is one of the most popular characters in the series... even though he's just as cruel and sarcastic and hated by the other characters as he was in book 1.
This is not (usually) how Barker does his characters. He sometimes uses this technique, where characters who appear to be the bad guys from a distance become more sympathetic once we get to know more about them and see their POV on things, but more often he really does have his characters change during the course of the novel.
Barker's a big fan of characters discovering unknown powers within themselves, and he's not afraid to throw them entirely into the maelstrom when they do. Barker doesn't stick to the conventional comic book style of characterization, where Peter Parker becomes Spider Man, but is still basically the same nerd before and after gaining new abilities and just wants to keep living his same life, rather than embracing his new abilities and totally changing his stupid, boring life. Barker's characters find new powers, and are dramatically changed by them. Or someone nearly dies and consciously decides to change their life afterwards. Or they get a glimpse of some magical reality they'd never before imagined, and become obsessed with obtaining it, throwing away their former existence.
I'm not debating how realistic Barker's characterizations are, and I don't think that "realism" is a very useful word to use to evaluate them, since the settings and events of his books are usually so fantastic. But his style is inventive and bold, and I admire it, even though I think he sometimes overdoes it.
The other arguable weakness of
Weaveworld is the meandering plot. Barker was an accomplished playwright and prolific writer at the time he turned out
Weaveworld, so he didn't just stumble into the plot structure. He made a conscious choice to use it, and it's not bad, but it's very atypical and perhaps overlong. My hardcover copy of
Weaveworld is 584 pages long, and the first time through the book, it looks like it's absolutely got to end around page 350. Everything is coming to a head, the enemies are assembled, the good guys are battling them, the weave is about to be undone, and chaos is going to break out. And it does, but then nothing is really resolved, the bad guys are sort of defeated but the good guys are not triumphant, and then everyone scatters in different directions. Then comes a sort of intermission/interlude of about 6 months time (in the book) during which almost nothing happens. We get some brief mentions of characters moving around, forgetting their original purpose, not interacting, before the action starts to wind up again, and a second, final conclusion is reached, then followed by 30 pages of a long, largely unnecessary epilogue, before the third ending is tacked on.
This would be an interesting book to study in a literature class, just to analyze the structure and flow and arrangement of events. It feels like a 350 page novel with a 150 page novella tacked on, a long short story thrown in as connective tissue, with an epilogue added for padding. I don't think it entirely works, but I can see Barker's intent.
In theory the first novel is a thriller rushing towards an awesome climax, and then the reader is given 50 pages to catch their breath before events begin to build up again, towards the more shocking and final finale. In practice, it feels discordant and somewhat disconnected, like two mismatched halves written by different authors, or by the same author years apart.
Like so much else in
Weaveworld, this stylistic attempt is elaborated on, more successfully, in
Imajica, and I'll be discussing that, and much more, when I post that review later this week.
Labels: book review, clive barker
Friday, June 20, 2008
Happy Birthday to Me...
So it's that time of year again, and as usual, it's nothing special. I've been 29 (again) for 5 hours now, and eh... The two people (women) I enjoy spending time with are both out of town, and will remain there for several weeks yet, so in a way, my b-day will take place in late July and early August, when I get to do a couple of celebration events with Malaya and the IG. (Those will be separate events, needless to say.) Also, I was treated to several excellent meals and social events a few weeks ago, when my parents were in town for my graduation weekend, and that kind of felt like an early birthday.
Still, it would have been fun to do something birthday-esque on my actual birthday. Instead the day was like most others, if a bit hotter. In fact, it's finally cooling down nicely now, @ 5am, and I've had 2 fans going since it got dark/cool around 9pm.
I worked some during the day, and ran various errands, and never really gave a thought to the next day (today) being my birthday. That date did enter more into my consideration as midnight approached, and I weighed doing more work vs. having a few drinks and watching a movie. The movie won out, and it was an odd experience since I dug out an old video tape to watch my favorite Anime ever,
Ninja Scroll. I've had a rapturous review/evaluation 2/3 finished for like, 4 years. I'll finish it and post it someday. Or maybe not. I've seen the film far too many times to remain objective; I don't want to review it -- I want to convince other people to watch it. You might as well ask an evangelist to "review" the Bible.
Watching it while sipping the mostly frozen second half of my peach pleasure Jamba Juice, which I'd well-mixed with Absolut, I enjoyed it as much as ever. Once I remembered how to run the VCR. I hadn't actually used that device since oh... September? Maybe December; I had Malaya tape some football playoff games for me last year (I've not had/wanted cable since the fall, and don't care enough to just go buy a rabbit ears antenna) and though I never got around to watching the NFC/AFC Championships or the Super Bowl, I think I FF'ed through some of the first and second round action in late December or early January.
Those memories didn't serve me very well tonight though, since I've got some rather complicated wiring on my "entertainment center," and it took some doing to figure out how to get sound to accompany the VCR picture. My TV is very old and possesses just 1 set of video/audio out (and no in) plugs, and the DVD half of my VCR/DVD combo machine is broken. So to play DVDs I have an old DVD player, but it's hooked into the VCR/DVD combo as if it were a video camera, and there's only sound for it through the tuner, where it's connected in the phono slot. (I do not have a record player, thankfully.) The sound for the VCR comes through the tuner too, on the TV input, but only if I first unplug the DVD (from the video camera input). Yes, this was a lot of fun to trial and error my way through while sipping a vodka slushy.
It's been more fun to write about, though probably not to read, since I'm now enjoying my nightcap; a glass of exceptional port. It's ruby port (sort of) which is a shame since I can't enjoy the walnuts and chocolate that pair so well with tawny port. But it's such a good wine that I can't complain. My dad brought up two cases of wine when he came for graduation, and since I like ports he emptied his extensive cellar (almost all of which he gets for free as a professional wine judge) and brought me 4 or 5 bottles. This is the first I've opened, and it's the best ruby port I've ever had (as well as the most expensive).
Read about it here, if you want wine words.
A blend of Petite Sirah, Zinfandel and Syrah with flavors of blackberry, cassis and blueberries complemented with notes of dark milk chocolate, this is sweet and viscous in the mouth, blanketing the palate with a fine, velvety tannin.
What he said. It's an amazing drinking experience, thanks to the mixture of wines. Port is a dessert wine with very high sugar, but this one has high alcohol content too. It's 20%, and no, you don't see a lot of 40 proof wine. That's actually impossible in most vintages, since sugar that high kills the yeast that causes the fermentation that turns grape juice into wine. They do cold pressing and other tricks with port to give it kick while keeping it sweet, and the mixture of grapes in this one is amazing. It's got the usual smooth and sweet port taste, and then there's a kick of an almost Cab-esque tannins, and yet it's still got that fruity Zin in the palette, with a chocolaty finish. It's unusual for ruby port in that it does go well with dark chocolate, if not quite as perfectly as a tawny.
I'll have to get some good sharp cheddar and a baguette tomorrow, to have more apt food to pair with it. I'm allowed to splurge; it's my birffday!
As for other birthday plans... dunno. Probably nothing. I've been sporadically chatting with an interesting female, but she's too busy and too spotty on her email replies and lives too far away to make any plans for RL encounters with. I'd consider a movie, but there's nothing worth seeing in the theaters for at least another week. I don't think I'll be motivated to go out and eat by myself, and I don't really do dessert (other than dessert wine) unless I've got someone to split a sundae with. Plus, there's the weather. I know my birthday is the hottest day of the year; but must that be taken literally?
97!? I'll sleep as late as the temperature allows, stick close to the a/c during the endless hot afternoon, snack on the bread/cheese/wine, try to get some work done, and then splurge on a pizza in the evening when it cools down enough to eat hot food. Want to get me a birthday present? Make it be winter again already.
Perhaps next year I'll be more fulfillingly involved with an interesting female, and with her assistance I can engage in the more traditional dinner/movie/blowjob trifecta. June 20 falls on a Saturday in 2009, so I'd better start planning early. Happy birthday to me!
Labels: personal, wine
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Top 50 Websites
While I'd visited most of and heard of virtually
all the top blogs, I must admit to being largely perplexed by Time.com's
listing of the top 50 websites. I saw the link on
Penny Arcade, a plug which has catapulted them head and shoulders above the rest (and perhaps they are the best site on the entire Internet, and therefore deserve it?), but my main question is about the selection criteria for this list? I've never heard of 80% of the sites, have only a very vague familiarity with the most of the rest, and I certainly do my share of surfing.
Mostly on blogs, it would appear?
I suppose the Time.com list is actually a pretty good resource. Looking over the capsule descriptions they have for each site, it looks like they found a bunch of semi-obscure sites that offer good features or services, and since most of us have never heard of most of them, it's like a good links page. And it's been updated since 2003,
unlike mine.
They were silly to make them rankable by popular acclaim though, when Penny Arcade probably has more daily readers than the rest of the top 50 combined. It turns the contest into a golf tournament; everyone's playing for second behind Tiger.
Labels: links
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Movie Review: Day Watch
I've got notes and scores jotted down for at least a dozen reviews, and I'm reading 3 books right now, and have 2 more unwatched DVDs on my stack by the TV, so I'm tasking myself to spend an hour every day writing reviews. Here's today's effort, a disjointed, conflicted review of a disjointed and conflicted film.
Day Watch is the sequel to
Night Watch, a Russian action/occult film that did huge business in Russia and parts of Europe, but came and went with hardly a ripple in the US. That's a shame, since it was far more inventive and exciting than 90% of the formulaic action film crap Hollywood churns out, and
I rather enjoyed it, even with its flaws.
Day Watch is more of the same, and while it's more inventive in some ways, it has more flaws and is much more uneven and confused, a fact that forced me to score it a bit less generously. To the scores:
Day Watch, 2006
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Physics Believability: NA
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
The 7 is largely for effort. This movie was mess, but had so many individual moments of awesome coolness and invention that it deserves credit for going there so fearlessly, and for trying so hard along the way. It's a brilliant film in many ways, but it's also very frustrating and confusing and crowded and hurried and overlong.
It felt like the script needed a couple of more passes through the editing process, to cut out extraneous scenes (most of them action-based), and to make the characters more believable and sympathetic. It's kind of a freak show now, with lots of weird magical people doing weird things, but little reason for the audience to care about them, or to root for any particular outcome.
The movie is both too long, and too short. At 132 minutes it's at least 30 minutes too long, but at the same time most of the plot material felt rushed through. In most of the human interactions and plot twists and character dynamics,
Day Watch felt like it had been edited down from a mini-series. It reminded me somewhat of
various anime movies; especially the ones made to cash in on long-running OVA series, where every character from the 50 episodes has to make an appearance in the film, and as a result there's no way to logically work them into the plot, or to provide the movie-watcher with any information about them. So they just flash through, doing their fan service thing, and fans enjoy it and movie watchers new to the intellectual property have no idea who those people were or why we should care what they did.
Day Watch had a bit of that going on, and a lot of "wouldn't it be cool/funny if we did ______" stuff. So you get random action scenes that are unnecessary and have no impact on the overall plot, and characters switching bodies just for temporary comedic confusion, and people fighting to the death at one minute since the director wanted to blow up a bunch of cars, then talking calmly the next since the plot needs to be advanced.
As for the story... hard to follow.
Day Watch assumes you have a lot of familiarity with the first film. It's set about a year later, all of the characters return and continue their actions and interactions from
Night Watch, and if you don't remember who is who and what they were up to in the first film, you're going to be somewhat lost here. I'd seen the first film just one, in theaters a couple of years ago, and as a result I had to struggle to remember who the people were in
Day Watch, when there's virtually no introduction given. The
plot summary on wikipedia is pretty good, and it's not that the plot is full of twists and turns, but that the film is so stylized with pretensions of artsy-ness, and constantly intercut with chaotic scenes of destructive action, that it's hard to dig down to the plot through the eye candy and visual flair.
Some comments by category:
Script/Story: 5A big step down from the script of the first film. Which was insane and confusing, but had narrative pull and kept the viewer interested. The weird occult/magic stuff was everywhere, but it served the plot and fit neatly into it. In the sequel quite a bit of the occult stuff is just thrown in for bonus points, and isn't required by the plot, or actively disrupts it. Plus, where
Night Watch had a whole mythology to establish and worked towards an ingenious plot twist conclusion,
Day Watch is largely random weirdness for the sake of random weirdness. I never had any anticipation for the ending since I didn't care, since I had no characters to root for, or against.
There are a lot of characters dong dramatic things, but the audience is given very little reason to form an emotional investment. So we've got lovers going crazy trying to bring their love back to life, but we don't know either of the characters so we're indifferent. We've got a dad supposedly torn between his son and his new girlfriend, but he hardly interacts with either of them, and seems far more concerned about his job than any humans he knows.
The new female lead is supposed to be a "great one," one of the strongest "others" ever, but she never does anything to show this potential. Plus, her being so powerful cheats the plot revelations of the first film, when it was made clear that the young boy was a great one, and that his birth was a legendary event, and that whichever side he chose (the dark or the light) would be strong enough to gain the upper hand in their eternal struggle. He chose the dark, through the clever plot twisting mechanizations of leader of the dark side, and that was the key climactic event of the first film. But nothing seems to have changed thanks to his decision.
Acting/Casting: 6No one is horrible, but no one is very good. This score is more about the plot really, since it doesn't give us enough reason to care about anything or anything, so their acting is kind of irrelevant to the whole package.
Action: 7Lots of cool stuff, but quite a bit of it is very gratuitous and time filling, whereas most of the action in the first film seemed integral to the plot. It felt like the director knew the action was required by fans of the first film, so there were pointless chunks of it inserted almost at random, such as the motorcycle/truck chase/battle near the end, which could not have mattered less for the ultimate conclusion of things. But there hadn't been any car chases, so they had to throw one in.
Physics Believability: NAI debated this score for a bit, before deciding not to calculate it. It would be something like -14 on a 1-10 scale, but it's intentional. It's not that there's magic in the movie; a film with magic could get a 10 on this scale, if the way the magic worked was handled consistently and believably. The Harry Potter universe is all about magic, but it's relatively consistent (except when Rowling has to invent new things, like time turners, that are used in one book and never again when they're needed to advance the plot) so it would get a fair score on this metric.
Day Watch has cool magical powers, but they is no consistency to them. All of the Others, Dark and Light, have different types of spells which they use interchangeably. If someone needs to be invisible at one point, they can be, or they can teleport through a billboard, or they can assume a new form at will. But other times they don't seem to have any powers, or they can't use them properly. The characters have whatever powers the story requires them to have, and this varies from scene to scene. It's inventive-but-lazy scriptwriting, I think.
Eye Candy: 7Nothing in the film is especially attractive, but quite a few of the special effects are very creative. The architecture and geography of Moscow are pretty ugly, even with about a meter of snow covering up the trash and detritus on the ground, (it looks
cold) but the special effects stuff is so cool they pull the score up unjustly.
Fun Factor: 5This could have been a 9, but the movie is so disjointed and confusing that it puts the viewer off, preventing you from enjoying the action and bizarre mythology of the world. This score might increase on subsequent viewings, especially if alcohol were involved.
Replayability: 7I'm guessing about this one. I'm not eager to view it again just yet, but it seems like this would either be a 2, or a 9, depending on how much you buy into the mythology and/or can unplug your brain during the repeated viewings.
Overall: 7A score given largely on potential and effort. I was bored during a bunch of the movie, since the plot doesn't pull you in or build towards a climax, but it's got awesomely cool moments all scattered throughout, and the ending is pretty clever and somewhat redeems a lot of the treading water confusion that filled the middle of the film.
Labels: movie review
Monday, June 16, 2008
Pay per byte
I haven't checked to see, but if this story isn't perfectly designed to generate an outraged 50,000 post new thread on Slashdot and Fark, I don't know what would. Bill Gates buying Google and Firefox, maybe? Anyway, the news is that TimeWarner is going
to start charging by the byte for internet access. Higher rates for people who download more. Comcast and AT&T are following suit, through trying slightly different approaches.
Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000. In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a 20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from $30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with higher caps come with faster service.
...The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.
In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use took off and the online world started moving to the center of people’s daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited amount of capacity, at least from the consumer’s perspective.
But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent, arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too much; the company did not have a ready answer. Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet metering that would apply to all online activity.
The article quotes TimeWarner saying that 95% of their users don't go anywhere near the 40gig/month cap, and that effectively those 95% are subsidizing the usage of the other 5%. Naturally, there's no mention of lowering prices for low bandwidth users while raising them on bit torrenters and online gamers. Also, while the article does (very briefly) mention file sharing and online gaming, there's not a single mention of porn, despite the well-documented fact that porn accounts
for 40-80% of total bandwidth consumption online. (Probably less than that now, since those estimates were from several years ago, before YouTube and Hulu RedLasso and streaming video sites really took off.)
If this becomes the industry standard, it could have an interesting effect on a lot of online businesses, including online gaming. If you're paying $1 a gig and 4 hours of WoW burns 10gig... that's going to add up in a goddamned hurry. Online games would have to start considering bandwidth delivery in their programming, perhaps offering the option of lower resolution graphics and less detailed game worlds, the way people used to have to turn down the image quality to make games playable on slow computers, or over dial up.
Still, internet use by the gig isn't going to cripple the industry; plenty of people in countries outside the US still pay by the byte (NZ and Oz, for instance) and they aren't exactly boycotting YouTube and surfing with all the images blocked. Besides, do you really need to continue clicking every single cute/funny video link you see? Of course not, not if our corporate overlords tell us not to.
Labels: business, the internet
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Status Report
A paucity of posts lately, and I can't say that's likely to change soon. I'm trying to get into a good working mode during the (hot and hated) summer; paying work in the day, fiction at night. I'm ordering it in that fashion since I dislike existing during hot sunny days, and never feel less creatively inspired than when I'm sitting in front of a fan and my ass is sticking to the chair. It's seldom that hot here, and my apt has a small A/C unit that can slightly cool one corner of the living room (which is, not coincidentally, where my chair/desk are located), but even when I'm not actively sweating, I am fighting off my usual June-September
reverse-SAD, which results in far more time spent squinting out the windows and wishing it would hurry up and get dark, than time spent working productively.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier working in some horrible office, down in the bowels of a big office building. Far from any windows, unaware of the sun or heat, ensconced in air conditioned comfort. The stale, recirculating, filthy office air would suck, but I'd probably find it easier to get lost in a work project without the bright sunshine in my peripheral vision.
Of course in such a location I'd be expected to do work for someone else, instead of doing my own website maintenance or fiction writing. Which would kind of defeat the purpose.
At any rate, I've been sporadically successful at doing my website work in the day, but less successful at doing the fiction and fiction-promoting work (which is really all that matters) at night. I feel creative and energized after dark, especially once it gets cold past midnight, but it's hard to focus or concentrate then, as my body emerges from the stupor it was hibernating in all during the hot, sunny hours.
Adding to the fun, I wrenched something in my lower back last fall, and it's been bothering me ever since. I had several chiropractic visits during the week I was in San Diego over Xmas, and that helped a bit, and I don't remember it bothering me much during January-March, but for the past couple of months it's been a constant bother. It feels like my right hip is jammed, but the pain radiates up from there towards my tailbone, and into the muscles on my flanks below the ribs. It's worst when I have to stand around for a while, and lately after a day spent running errands and standing in lines, it's been quite painful.
This wouldn't matter for my working, except that when it acts up I can't sit comfortably. I have to really slouch down, almost reclining, or else sit leaning way to the left or right (or alternate). I've rearranged my desk, moving the tower out from under it so I can stretch my legs out to the right or left, and I get up and stretch out pretty often, but some days nothing really helps, and I end up crashing on the couch to watch a movie, or sitting/lying in bed reading. (No TV, by choice.)
This sucks for getting work done, (or blogging) but it's been pretty useful for my "read more books and watch more movies" summertime recreation plan. I've gone through a number of new and borrowed DVDs, and have made some progress into my summer reading list. One classic down:
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. I just finished it tonight, and I'd like to bang out a review, but I really need to think it over first. It was magnificent, very informative of the era, thought provoking about European history and religious history, and more than enough to galvanize anyone to oppose the imposition of a ruling theocracy.
It's one of
Hitchens' central anti-theistic arguments, but when you see it in action (even in historical fiction) you can't help but realize what an incredibly evil form of dictatorship a theocracy is, through its ability to accuse (and try, and convict) anyone of the thought crime of heresy. They will burn you at the stake if you don't believe in the correct imaginary old man in the sky...no, actually it's much worse than that. If you don't believe in the currently-ascendant interpretation of the endless and eternal interpretative debates about how the incoherent and contradictory holy texts should be read, they will torture you and burn you at the stake. That's theocracy, in its purest form.
Parts of Eco's book depressed me, but not so much for the historical evil done by the devout, but more for how it demonstrated the incredible effort humans once (and still) put into theology and doctrinal arguments. The depiction of the most intelligent and educated men of their day devoting their lives to (essentially) arguing whether the
Emperor's New Clothes are fringed in gold or silver tassels is painful to contemplate. As I read through pages of detailed, impassioned, 14th century arguments about whether or not Jesus was poor, or really, really, vow-of-poverty poor, I found my attention drifting as I imagined the progress human civilization could have made by now if most of the brightest individuals in human history hadn't wasted so many brain hours on rival interpretations of the dominant mythologies of the day. (All of which seem utterly absurd and naïve to read today, even to believers who share their faith in the actuality of that particular mythology.)
And yes, I'm getting way ahead of myself by discussing it in this fashion, outside of a more comprehensive review. And since my back is aching this night, to the point that I'm constantly shifting in my chair and have had to get up to pace around and stretch couple of times just writing this post, that review won't be coming any time too soon. I've got a bunch of reviews to write, and I've put down some notes/thoughts on the books/movies, and done my scoring matrix for each film/novel, but haven't taken the time/pain to flesh them out, yet.
No ETA on any of that, sadly. I can say that I'm probably going to seek out a chiropractor next week, if this doesn't let up. I can't afford it, but I can't afford not getting much work done either, and what good are savings if you don't spend them on something you need? You can't buy happiness, but you can sometimes buy an end to pain, which is about the next best thing.
For an amusing side note, let me point out how hard it is to stretch your own legs. Short of buying some of those hooked ski boot things you can use to hang, bat-like, from an overhead bar, there aren't many convenient, at-home ways to try to pull your own leg out of its socket. The hard part is that you can't be straining your muscles, or you'll tighten up and that defeats the whole stretching, adjusting purpose. I thought about trying to hook my foot under the couch, or around a doorway, but when doing that I'd be pulling with my arms, and that would tighten my back, which is the whole problem.
I have a pull up bar suspended from the eaves on my back patio, and dangling from that helps sometimes, but I feel like I need more weight on my leg; like it's jammed into the hip and needs to drop down half an inch. Earlier this week I was especially sore, and tried that, and then tried tying a dumbbell to my leg. That's quite an exercise in of itself, especially when the dumbbell weighs 30 pounds, and the pull up bar isn't so high that you can dangle without your toes touching. I eventually managed to use a belt to lash the weight around my leg, just above the knee, but that was less than satisfactory. Oddly, what actually helped in the end was doing the kid-on-the-monkey-bars trick of flipping upside down and hooking my legs over the bar behind the bent knees. That hurts my legs, since the bar is thin and bites into my tendons, but it actually did help my leg feel less jammed, which made my back stop (somewhat) hurting. In fact, I'm going to hit that up now, before I go to sleep, in hopes the (probably futile) hope that I'll wake up tomorrow in less
pain discomfort than I am in right now.
Labels: personal
Friday, June 13, 2008
The Blogopticon
Beware this link, for it will automatically full width your browser (assuming you don't surf with it full screen width already), but
it's definitely worth a look. It's a chart of most of the top blogs online, of every type, mapped along an XY axis. From News to Opinion, and from Scurrilous to Earnest. Usual distinctions such as right wing and left wing are irrelevant, what's ranked is the content and the delivery style. I am familiar with most of the 60ish blogs listed, and I can't really quibble with too many of the placements. The whole list is pressure mapped, so you can hover on every logo for a clickable link with a capsule description to boot.
The main point of contention over this is, I suppose, the scurrilous/earnest metric. I'd put a number of the blogs they have to the right (earnest) further left (scurrilous). Michelle "Stalkin" Malkin, for instance, with her perpetual attacks on anyone (which means almost everyone) to the ideological left of her, and the shameful way she goes about them; posting
people's home addresses and phone numbers so her crazed readers will harass and threaten them, digging through people's trash and
peeking into their windows to try and discredit them, etc. Those actions are far more scurrilous than the Fug Girls snarking on whatever beglittered trash bag one of the interchangeable, unnecessary, and shapeless Olsen Twins is wearing this week. On the other hand, Malkin (and the other political sites) are quite earnest about their scurrilousness, so maybe it's more about the attitude of the bloggers their style? So if the Fug Girls stopped making jokes, and solely delved into serious analysis of the clothing various celebrities stumbled along red carpets in, would they swing all the way to the right on the Earnest axis?
Another nitpick of the list; that they apparently cherry-picked the list to get blogs that could be firmly categorized, and by extension ignored some popular ones that were too hard to slot into a specific location. This blog is infinitely far from the popularity required to merit inclusion on such a list, but if BlackChampagne were listed, where would it go? I sometimes post news, but when I do I always include much opinion about it, and while I often write about scurrilous topics, I'm usually quite earnest about them.
To expand on that concept, perhaps that's a lesson for bloggers wanting to build a more popular blog? You need a brand of some sort; a market identity. And you're unlikely to get that covering everything under the sun, since even if you cover it well (not that I'm saying I do) half your readers will still skip half the entries. This could probably be made up for by sheer quantity, so people could pick and choose what they read and find your site worth a visit even if they skipped half the updates, but even then you'd probably be more popular just posting one half, or the other. Imagine a site that was half crazy celebrity gossip, ala Perez Hilton, and half dry, studied journalism, ala Media Matters? Who would view that sort of digital schizophrenia? More importantly for traffic, who would link to it?
Labels: blogs
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Complaining, because I can.
The laundry room at my apt complex has 3 washers and 4 dryers. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since the washers aren't very large and when I've put full loads into them, the dryers have never failed to completely dry them by the end of their 42 minute cycle. (It's a dollar for the full cycle; you can't just get X minutes per quarter.) But the dryers stack two-high, so it fills the available space and when one dryer breaks, there are still enough to dry all your washing at the same time, so I can't complain about the redundancy.
What I can complain about is this. One of the washers was broken for the past 2 months. It was just sitting there, a hand-depth of tepid soapy water lurking in it like a dragonless moat, just waiting for some careless person to start loading in clothing without noticing. They finally replaced it yesterday; I saw the industrial-sized truck parked down there, a ton of old washers in the back. Better yet, they brought in a new machine, rather than just fixing the old one. There are complications, of course:
The new machine (which has environmentally-friendly stickers on it, which means it must be true) runs a 44 minute cycle. A long time for an industrial washer, and quite desynched from the two old washers, which take 36 minutes. Saving the whales takes a bit of extra time, apparently. It's not so bad though; I just have to remember to start that one washing first, and there won't be too much wasted time when I go back to put my stuff into the dryers.
What's more annoying is that they brought in a new machine yesterday... and now one of the old ones is broken. It takes money, but just keeps displaying, "Add $1.00" no matter how many quarters you feed in. I put in 3 before noticing, and the coin box sounded quite fat-bellied when my coins dropped in, so it's probably paid for its own repair already. Which will likely take place in about 1 month, 1 day before the whale-saver breaks.
On a related front, whenever I'm washing clothing I wonder what it'll be like when I'm living in a house again, with just one washer/dryer. It's been over a decade since I had that option, and I've grown completely accustomed to going 3 weeks, then washing 5-7 loads at once. Partially due to this fact, I never have a "favorite" shirt or pair of pants, since I wear it once (or twice, if I'm not sweaty that day) and then it's in the hamper for a fortnight. I'm sure I own more clothing than I would if I lived in a house with a washing machine I could run every other/three days, as needed. Workout clothing especially; I usually have 2 loads just of nylon and polyester pants/shirts/shorts every time I do laundry (one benefit is that they are dry in like, 15 minutes. This is less of a benefit with my "1 dollar for the full time" dryers.
Yet despite my habits, I realize that lots of people wash clothing just about every day, and can therefore wear the same clothing multiple times a week. This fact was brought to my attention by a girl in my speech class last semester, who 1) parked near where I did and usually walked out of class a minute or two ahead of me, 2) had a spectacularly tight ass, which 3) she encased in the same pair of jeans every week. Yes, I
noticed that they had wear marks in the same places, the same loose thread on the pocket, etc. *cough*
I see the same habit with the IG; when we were seeing each other several times a week (we had a class Tues/Thurs) she would often go a month with the same pair of black jeans every day (her favorite, clearly). This was no mystery, since when we'd txt at night she'd often mention that she was washing clothing again, since it gave her something to do while she procrastinated about starting her homework.
It's an odd thing to think about for me, but why not? If you've only got a single washing machine, and multiple people in the house, of course you're going to wash clothing almost every day. And at that rate, you might as well just keep wearing your favorite pants or shirt, since you're washing them every other day anyway. When I visit my folks around Xmas, I stay at my dad's house and have perpetually clean clothing, since he runs a load every other/third day. I never remember this before I leave though, so I always end up overpacking, since I'm used to thinking "7 days = 7 outfits, plus extras for sweaty tennis, hiking, something dressy, etc."
Questions:
- It's probably been studied, but is there evidence (rather than just anecdote) that people with their own washing machine wear a smaller percentage of their clothing?
- Does the ability to clean and wear the same clothing several times a week necessarily mean that you wear the same clothing time and again?
- Do people with washing machines make a conscious effort to cycle through their wardrobe?
- Does the greater closet space in a house (vs. an apt) make homeowners lazier about optimizing their wardrobe to its fullest extent (If I own something i figure I should wear it, since there's only so much space.), since they can just stick stuff in the spare bedroom or the attic and maybe dig it out come winter?
- Do people who move from an apt into a house/condo with their own washer miss the ability to go weeks without washing anything, and the ability to wash it all in a couple of hours, multiple loads at a time?
Finally, does anyone else use their laundry as a referendum on their social life? When I do my 5-6 loads, I can't help but notice how many dress shirts are in the mix, vs. how many t-shirts, workout shirts, etc. And when I do 3 weeks worth, as I'm doing today, and there's not one dress shirt to hang up, it's a grim scene in my closet. True, I don't always dress up on a date, and it's been hot, and I had to wash about 10 such shirts last time after the various graduation/parents visiting festivities, and the IG has been in a foreign nation since mid-May, but still... bleh. More decent nighttime dates to decent restaurants, plz.
Labels: clothing
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Cable News...
I've not watched any TV in months, and even when I did watch TV I didn't watch cable news, since I found it uniformly insipid. But even with that background of disgust,
this might be the stupidest thing I've ever read. Even aside from the not-so-subtle bit of ongoing smear/slander against Obama, can you envision anyone with an IQ over 80 watching this without feeling like part of their brain was leaking out their left ear?
From the June 6 edition of Fox News' America's Pulse:
HILL: A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says.
[...]
HILL: First, the president of America chest bumps an Air Force graduate. Next, Michelle and Barack Obama fist bump or fist pound -- people call it all sorts of things -- but what happened to the old pat on the back? A handshake? A hug? Today's body language and what we can glean from it. Janine Driver is a body language expert and joins us now. Janine, thanks for being back with us.
DRIVER: Hi, E.D. Nice to be here.
HILL: OK, tell me about this whole thing. Let's start with the Barack and Michelle Obama, because that's what most people are writing about -- this fist thump. Is that sort of a signal that young people get?
DRIVER: I'm sure it is, without a doubt. And it's a connection that they have together. It's something just personal between the two of them, like "I'm proud of you." You know, my husband and I, if we're walking down the street and he's proud of me, we have our own little method. He squeezes my hand three times, which means, "I love you," and I squeeze his four times, saying, "I love you, too." It's something intimate between them, but I'm sure young people in this country are going to kind of like them kind of representing a little bit.
HILL: Uh-huh. Has our communication style changed as a culture in America?
...
HILL: OK, let me ask you about this then, because I -- you know, George Bush is a little older than Barack Obama, and he did one of these -- look at that. Look at that, folks. Stop. Turn around. Look at your TV screen. He's doing that chest bump. Now I see that in the end zone in NFL games after somebody scores a major touchdown. I don't normally expect to see the president of the United States doing it. What does that mean?
DRIVER: E.D., you know, it's funny. When I saw these pictures, and your producers sent them to me today, I really cracked up laughing. You know, I -- these pictures with George Bush are being taken -- the president, George Bush -- are being taken out of context.
I realize it must be difficult to fill 24 hours a day on a US cable news channel, where the focus seemingly has to be only on US events. (Why they can't do world news half the time, I don't know?) That kind of "coverage" of the US inevitably leads to idiocy like this, with a body language expert required to "explain" Michelle and Barack Obama giving each other a fist bump of the type every single baseball player has exchanged after a home run for the last fifteen years. But how can a person paid to be on TV ask, in a credulous tone of voice, "has our communication style changed as a culture in America?"
What? Next thing you know our cultural values, vocabulary, food choices, and entertainment interests might change over time as well. Better keep electing old white men to the presidency, just in case. One with some dignity, apparently, since Dubya's succumbed to the same creeping cultural rot!
Labels: politics, the media
Friday, June 06, 2008
Public Relations
A waitress in Canada shaved her head for a cancer charity fund raiser, to be in solidarity with a girlfriend who was fighting the disease, and got fired by her boss when she showed up to work with her Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta look. Needlessly to say, people are pretty much outraged at restaurant's actions, and though
this limp article from the CBC doesn't get into anything interesting, I did laugh at this quote:
Nathaniels owner and chef Dan Hilliard issued a statement late Thursday saying Fearnall did not advise him that she was planning to shave her head.
"Mr. Hilliard had indicated that this is an employer-employee matter and such matters are not to be dealt with in the public," the statement said.
Yeah, I imagine the owner is pretty eager not to have this matter dealt with in public. Can you say boycotts, picket lines, and bankruptcy? There's a bit
more detailed article about it online from the local Owen Sound paper, and it says Baldie has standing offers to appear on just about every news program in Canada, and that she's been flooded with job offers and support from strangers. In defense of the restaurant, the article has quotes from other employees who say the owners are great and very understanding and supportive. They judged, probably correctly, that having a bald female waitress would put off some of their probably old, conservative clientele.
What they didn't judge so accurately was the inevitable public reaction to this event, when/if the employee went public with the news. And now they're knee deep in it, with nothing to offer but pathetic pleas that this highly news worthy item not be on the news. Good luck with that one, eh?
Labels: misc
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Bush Lied, People Died, etc...
Looking at the notes from the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II
report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, which has finally been released after Republican senators kept it from public consumption for several years, and it's um... yeah. Remember when Clinton lied about oral sex with an intern, and the country (well, the Republican party and the media) was consumed with impeachment talk? For lying to keep sex secret from his S.O., something 99% of the people on earth have done at least once
in the last six months their lives?
Consider that, and try to figure why Bush, Cheney, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and most of the rest of the current administration aren't being brought up on charges right now? A few highlights:
Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
No matter how seriously you take the issue of extra-marital sex, can anyone argue against the fact that every single one of these points is of infinitely more importance than who did or did not gobble the Clenis? That they had incalculably more importance, that they led directly to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundred of thousands of Iraqi civilians? Etc?
I think Bush and co are benefiting from outrage fatigue. Everyone hates Bush; he's got the lowest approval rating in the history of American presidential approval ratings (
really), people are shell shocked by gas prices, interest rates are shooting up as the housing crisis deepens, the Iraqi occupation has dragged on so long people are just inured to it, etc. When you put the fact that Bush and company consciously lied in the process of instigating the Iraq Attaq on top of all that, it feels almost irrelevant. Like finding a cockroach on your shit sandwich. And since Bush's term is almost over, everyone just sort of wants him to go away. Democrats want him to fall off a bridge, Republicans want him to just vanish without pulling down the ratings of their entire party, and no one really has the heart to stir up impeachment proceedings, no matter how richly they might be deserved.
The American people are like Smeagol when he was talking to Gollum/himself in his good phase in the
Return of the King movie. "Go away, and never come again." And take nominee McBush with you.
Four more years = DO NOT WANT!!1! We'd rather just forget about you than spend the time to try and punish you as you should be punished.
This is almost a "how to" lesson for future political criminals. If you do such a horrible job that people spend most of their time trying to forget that you exist, you're unlikely to be held accountable for your sins. The Republicans had to try to bring Clinton down since he was a very popular president. Bush has brought himself down to the point that attempting impeachment at this point would probably make him look persecuted and give him a popularity boost.
Labels: bush, politics
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Sexcess and the City
The
weekend box office results are out, and much to my surprise,
Sex in the City made a fortune. No where near
Oldiana Jones 4 or
Iron Man opening weekend business, but it did clear $55m, an exceptional take for a non-action movie or cartoon. I can recall a few comedies making more than that their opening weekends, but most rom-coms
are lucky to break $25m, and for this one to more than double that without young stars, bankable stars, or any hot cultural consciousness is quite an achievement. I'm guessing those neutered
Sex in the City reruns they show on basic cable must be doing pretty well in the ratings?
I haven't spent much time thinking about the box office prospects of this film, but I thought it would flop. Well, not flop, but I didn't think it would be a big success outside of the fairly small demographic of clock-ticking, 40-something, designer label-obsessed, fantasy-of-being-an-upper-class-woman, women it seems designed to appeal to. Admittedly, I know next to nothing about the property; I've never seen an episode of the show, the only one of the actors/resses I could name is the blog-dubbed "My Little Pony Parker," (and only her since she's on celeb blogs a lot with jokes about Michael J. Fox feeding her sugar cubes) and the only reason I had any awareness of a
Sex in the City movie was because of the news a few years ago that one of the four actresses on the show was balking at appearing in the movie. She was channeling David Caruso, apparently, and once the reality of the career prospects for a 40-something white female who wasn't even the biggest star on her ex-cable show sunk in, she snapped to her senses and signed right up.
My theory that the movie would flop was largely
based on the trailer, which I twice tried to watch online, without success. I was mildly curious about the property, but I got so bored with the trailer's approach of simply showing random scenes of characters I didn't know, that I clicked it off halfway through. Both times. I did eventually see the whole thing in a theater, but that complete viewing just reinforced my presumption. This was a movie made for the fans, without any effort or interest in appealing beyond that core audience. I thought it was one of the worst trailers I'd ever seen, but intentionally. There's not even a hint of a plot or a conflict, there's no effort made to introduce the characters, no one in the film is especially attractive or blessed with screen presence, and it quite clearly states its purpose: "This is a continuation of a TV show. If you want more of it, you'll want this movie. If you don't know the TV show, you've got no reason to see this or interest in doing so."
I've been trying to think of another movie trailer that went with that approach, and the only one that jumps to mind is
The Matrix 3. As best I recall, that trailer made zero effort to appeal to the non-initiated. It was just a bunch of scenes of stylish people in black leather and sunglasses holding intense conversations, mixed with big explosions, robots with shiny arm cannons, etc. I guess that trailer might have appealed to non-Matrix, action movie-fans who liked the imagery, but were there any such people at that time? Probably not, at least not in demographically-significant numbers. And by that light, it was an an effective trailer, since its purpose was to announce that the 3rd Matrix movie was coming soon. No one was finally going to see their first Matrix movie with the 3rd one, released 6 months after the 2nd one, and years after the first one had set DVD sales records, been shown on basic cable hundreds of times, and pretty well become a cultural icon.
In contrast,
Sex and the City's glass slipper makes a much smaller cultural footprint. It's a movie based on a cable TV show that never had more than a few million viewers in its heyday, that had been off the air for years, and that appealed to a fairly narrow demographic in the first place. I didn't think a movie version of it would necessarily fail; I was just surprised how the trailer was constructed, since other
movie adaptations of TV shows have gone a more traditional route. The trailers have always been introductions to the world, and tried to seduce new viewers while reassuring the fans that what they want will be there. I expected the
Sex in the City trailer to give the usual quick introduction to the main characters, segue into the plot of the film (the horsey one
is apparently galloping off with
Robert Goulet), hint at some of the typical rom-com misunderstandings and difficulties, before telegraphing the requisite happily-ever-after ending. The trailer does none of those things. It just leaps right into lots of scenes of botoxed, 40-something white women living in palatial NYC condos, lounging around a pool making jokes about hunky waiters half their age, marrying rich men old enough to be their fathers, etc. The theater I saw the trailer in sat in silence until it was done, collectively hoping something more entertaining would come on next. But clearly we were not the target audience for this film, or for its trailer.
It makes me wonder if this success might portend a marketing swing in future TV/movies? Why go the traditional introductory route and try to appeal to everyone with your trailers, when
Sex in the City did so well with what amounted to a greatest hits clip reel? Just sell the atmosphere, rub the audience's noses in the fact that it's their last chance to see their old TV show favorites, etc. I wouldn't have thought that, "More of the same, but on the big screen!" would have been such a compelling offer, but $55m don't lie...
Update:
Ebert's Review (which is not, shockingly, 3-stars) sounds a lot like the one I'd probably have written. Except I wouldn't have gotten the Diane Arbus joke.
Labels: movies
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