BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: February 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Book Review: Temple of the Winds
Temple of the Winds is the 4th book in Terry Goodkind's ongoing Sword of Truth series, and the first book by him that I've read. I don't recommend starting a fantasy series at book 4, but this is the only one I had, and I had no trouble getting into the story even without having read any of the others.
I have blogged about Goodkind before, but mostly just to make fun of his eloelable author photo. That picture really is him, and it really is on the back cover of this book. Unfortunately I've got the hardcover, and I took off the dust jacket while carrying this one back and forth to the gym for the 2 weeks it took me to get through it, so I didn't have his picture available to give me a laugh or pep me up mid-workout.
Ridiculous, "Kneel before Zod" author photos aside, he's a fairly popular fantasy author, with one of the bigger fantasy series going, to his name. As my goal is to read something from every major fantasy author/series, I had to get through one of his books at some point, and since I'd had this book lying around for several years since getting it free at a library giveaway, I finally got to it. I enjoyed it, I guess. It wasn't very good, but it wasn't awful. I've read worse, though I've certainly read better.
After writing the below review, I looked at the Amazon.com page for the book, to see what the fans thought. Most of them are fans, and most of them love it. The book's got 257/444 5-star reviews, and a 4-star average. That said, I'm looking over some of the 5-star reviews to see what the lovers love it... I'm coming up blank.
I'm on the 4th page of them now, and I've yet to see one actually argue why it's a good book. They're all fanboy (more often fangirl) slop. Short reviews by people who love the whole series, and think this book is great cause it's more of the same. This doesn't mean their opinions aren't valid, but it does mean that they're useless for my purpose, which is to be convinced of the book's quality by a fan. A few argue against the common complaints about his books/writing (which I suppose I made myself), but most just talk about how much they love the characters, and how emotionally-affecting the book was. Personally, I thought the characters were flat and forgettable, and the book's emotional scenes were usually forced and tear-jerking, and were more told than shown. Which probably explains why my review scores are so much lower than theirs.
To the scores:
Temple of the Winds, by Terry Goodkind Plot: 4 Concept: 6 Writing Quality/Flow: 4/6 Characters: 4 Fun Factor: 4 Page Turner: 5 Re-readability: 7 Overall: 6
This was the first (and probably last) novel I'd ever read by Goodkind, so all of my impressions of it, and him, and the series, came from this book. All I'd heard about him in the past was that this series is popular, but that it's getting less so as it stretches on to books 8 and 9. The complaints I've read are that Goodkind has gotten progressively more preachy as the series has gone along. In the more recent books he's inventing entire civilizations of wimpy non-fighters solely to serve as straw men he can demolish in his argument against pacifism; that sort of thing. I've not read those books, so I don't have an opinion on that issue.
As for this book, it's the 4th in the series, but I had no trouble starting off here. Background information is presented as necessary (usually more than necessary; I think a lot of the exposition would have been very boring if you'd read the first 3 books) and it's such a Fantasy 101 type of world that nothing really needs explanation anyway. The characters are all human and they all act in basically contemporary, secular ways. No one is motivated by unknown, unseen, bizarre things. Basically, there's no learning curve to get into the flow of the story. This is sort of a good thing, since it makes the book accessible to a new reader, but it's also lame, since it speaks to the general mediocrity of the creativity of the series. I think that a new reader should be somewhat lost if they start off with the 4th book in a long fantasy series, since enough of the world should have been built that new readers won't understand what's going on in at least some of the instances.
For a chance, I'll go over the rating points one by one, since this is probably the only Goodkind book I'll ever read, and I might as well be thorough.
Plot: 4 What plot? I think I would have been thoroughly bored by this book if I'd read the others in the series. As it was I thought the story dragged quite often. The hardcover is 520 pages, and 350-400 pages would have been more than sufficient. Maybe 300, if things were really tightened up. The editing would be a pain though, since it's not like there are whole chapters or sub-plots to dump. Everything in the book is very linear; 95% of it takes place in the one capital city and stars the two main romantic leads, Richard and Kahlan. The other 5% is usually more interesting, since it does much more to advance the world state, talk about the larger war that's ramping up, present action and suspense, etc. Richard and Kahlan aren't exactly boring, but they're very conventional and feel like cardboard cut outs from some generic stock of fantasy novel characters.
The book's structure is similar to most of the books in the Wheel of Time series, though much less sweeping or involved. There are a few hundred pages of miscellaneous mundane activities, the narrative jumps from plot thread to plot thread (though the vast majority takes place in one location with 2 main characters), and then with about 50 pages to go the stagnation suddenly ends and everything comes suddenly to a head with a series of wild climaxes of action and conflict. This book doesn't end in a ridiculous cliff hanger, as most of the Wheel of Time books do, but the mad rush to tie up all of the loose ends in the last 20 pages certainly felt familiar. This was welcome coming after hundreds of pages of blandness, but the pacing was sub-optimal. More interesting stuff all throughout, next time. Kthxplz.
Concept: 6 I probably gave this too high a score, but since this was the first novel (for me) in the series, all of the setting and world and type of magic and other elements were new to me. The actual plot events and happenings were pretty blah, though. Richard is trying to rule the land he's just unified, he's hoping to marry his love Kahlan, he's trying to learn to master his magic, enemy spies sent by the evil Dreamwalker wizard have released a plague, and a sadistic killer is loose in the city. The book is kind of about all of these things, but never really feels deeply involved with any of them, and there's not really any suspense or weight to the decisions made by the characters.
Writing Quality/Flow: 4/6 Very workmanlike. Nothing very well-written, but it's not awful. If Goodkind has any quirks or trademarks as a writer, it's that he over-explains. Many times, especially over the first half of the novel, a chapter starts off with a paragraph of action (not that it's action-y action; usually just people walking around the castle, talking), and is followed by literally 2 or 3 pages of exposition in some character's thoughts. What's happening, why it's happening, how that character feels about it happening (this most of all), what might happen next, etc. This stuff is never entirely necessary, and I suspect most readers end up skimming it. I know I did, since I just didn't need to know it, and I wanted to get on with the action. Such as it was.
Goodkind's biggest writing weakness is the classic "telling rather than showing" issue. He almost always has characters talking or thinking about how angry, or in love, or scared, or desperate, etc, they are. It's never convincing, and I never felt any real attachment to the supposed love between the leads, since every page from one of their POVs has them repeatedly saying how much they are in love. It feels forced, like they're trying to talk themselves into it.
Goodkind doesn't always do this either, and it's much more effective when he does not. Towards the end of the book one character is being controlled by the evil Dreamwalker wizard, and while it's made very clear that the voices he's hearing are driving him to do evil things, it's left slightly to the reader to figure it out. The character's madness is therefore much more convincing and interesting, since we're not being beaten over the head with pages of him (or someone else) thinking about how oddly he's behaving, how he's changed without explanation, how it's almost like someone is giving him orders he can't help but follow, etc.
The other odd thing about the writing is that it's very bland and chaste and commonplace, and then every now and then we get a scene of fairly pornographic/sadistic violence. They're not quite shocking, since they seem consciously designed to titillate, but what's odd is that they feel out of place. The easy comparison is to martin's Fire and Ice series, where there is equally (or more) graphic violence and sex, but there it feels like a natural extension of the very adult, serious, realistic world. The gruesome scenes in this book, especially a torture/murder near the end, come out of nowhere and have a very different tone than the rest of the vanilla writing.
The analogy that came to my mind was deleted scenes on a DVD. It's like this book was edited to be PG-13, and was then released on an "unrated" DVD. It's the same movie, but several scenes of intense graphic violence were dropped in over the formerly hint and subtlety-filled scene from the family-friendly version. They were somewhat shocking in their different mood and tone, but they didn't feel an organic part of the whole, which ruined their impact.
Characters: 4 It's odd; the characters were interesting in almost inverse proportion to their importance. Almost all of the minor characters in the subplots were far more interesting than the leads. Richard and Kahlan are totally blah. He's strong and heroic and determined, she's loyal and loving and fierce in a matronly way. Not awful, not Mary Sues, not boring, just very predictable and familiar. I felt like I'd seen them both in 50 novels (fantasy and otherwise) before this one.
The oddest thing about the book and the characters was how contemporary they all felt. Not in a fresh, vivid, realistic way, the way the characters in Martin's Ice & Fire series are; the characters in this one felt like actors in a mediocre movie. Never really possessed of strong emotions, not entirely sold on their parts, and usually just going through the motions. More than once I felt like it was sort of a reality show set in a Ren Faire. Like real people had been placed into a fantasy world, given light amnesia, and told this is who they really were. So they were living it, but without complete conviction or a real sense of authentic belonging.
This was partially due to the setting, since it felt like the modern world, set in castles with some magic. Male and female attitudes towards life were basically contemporary, no one was really scheming or vile, no one had archaic attitudes (as I expected), etc. It was kind of like Harry Potter in a way, or perhaps Harry Potter reversed. The fiction of that world is interesting since it's the modern world, with magic overlaid. So the characters, especially the kids, are very contemporary, but they use magic sometimes, and the reader is fully aware of the odd juxtaposition. In Goodkind's world the reverse seems to have happened. It's like modern characters are put into a magical world, but they're not allowed to be, or aren't supposed to be, modern.
In a way this book made me appreciate more some other fantasy series. I'm pretty hard on Jordan's Wheel of Time, but it's got so much better characters than this book. Jordan's are frustrating and maddening with their repetitious and predictable mannerisms, but they're distinctive and memorable. I already can't remember anything about any individual character in this book, and I finished reading it 2 days ago.
Fun Factor: 4 Page Turner: 4 Bleh. I read it at the gym, an hour a pop for about 2 weeks (I didn't go to the gym every day) and it held my interest, but I was never exactly eager to go an extra half hour on the cardio machine to get through another few chapters. I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't dislike it either. It was serviceable, but I've got no need to hunt up other books in the series.
Re-readability: 7 I'm being generous on this one since if you enjoyed it and had read the rest of the series, you'd want to read it again to get every nuance. My personal score on this is a 0, since I'll never read it again, nor do I plan to read any of the rest of the series.
Overall: 6 Again, kind of a generous score. This wasn't an awful book, and I read it without too much complaint (only the over explaining and over thinking early on disturbed me enough to groan and roll my eyes), but I can't recommend it and it's not in my top 10 fantasy world series.
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. - The mayor of a small Southern California city who was criticized for sending an e-mail showing watermelons in front of the White House says he will give up the mayoral post but remain on the City Council.
Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose heard calls for his resignation this week when he forwarded an e-mail showing a watermelon patch on the White House lawn under the title: "No Easter egg hunt this year."
Grose has apologized and said he wasn't aware of the racial stereotype that blacks like watermelon.
None of the news items on this show the image in question, and it's not even clear if it was a picture or a cartoon. I assumed it was a cartoon, but I tried some google image searches and didn't come up with anything. This picture showed up several times though, so maybe it was the image in question.
I laughed not at the image or the joke, which is such a tired racial trope that it's not even worth a guilty smile at this point. No, I laughed at the cracker mayor, with his, "I didn't know there was a racial connotation between watermelons and black people?"
If he didn't know, why did he forward the email? It wouldn't make any sense. What if the picture had oh, a pumpkin patch, or a barnyard, or a carrot farm? No one would forward that since it would be pointless and nonsensical. Obviously he knew, just like this dumb bimbo back in October, who was, you'll note, a fellow Orange County Republican
BTW, don't let the "Southern California" location of Los Alamitos fool you. Yes, California on the whole is a blue state, but this cracker mayor is from Orange County, which is just south of LA, but very white and very conservative. California has a stereotype as a hippy liberal place, but that's only true for most of coastal NoCal, and parts of LA. SoCal is mostly white and conservative, especially Orange County and northern San Diego (home of a fairly strong white supremacist movement). Most of the people in Cali live in the metropolitan coastal clusters of cities around LA, SD, or SF/Oakland/San Jose, but while that's at least half the population, they're clustered into maybe 1/100th of the very long, very large state's land area. You go more than 10 or 20 miles inland anywhere else in California, and you're neck deep in redneck ranchers and farmers, with a generous sprinkling of and pot-growing anarchist survivalist kooks in the redwood forests.
It's been a while since I've posted anything here, and while I've been putting up cell phone stuff on my twitter pretty regularly, 1) most of you don't look there, and 2) 140 chars at a time isn't that fascinating anyway. This may be a long post, since I've got several points to make, but I don't have the time to really do it right, with lots of background info links. I was out most of the afternoon, and this evening I'm trying to finish a column for the D3 site in time to have a couple of hours after that for fiction, with dinner and an hour at the gym sandwiched in between. So imagine the following post being more explanatory, with links to historical information on shamanistic societies, exorcisms, LDS cosmology, etc. And then pretend I wrote it like that in the first place.
Obama gave his first speech before both houses of Congress this week. It wasn't a "state of the union" since presidents don't call their first speech that anymore, but Obama's talk was fairly sweeping and quite formal. I thought it was a good speech, but nothing surprising leapt out at me. Nice oration and some good turns of phrase, as Obama always does. Watch it here, if you've not already.
The bigger news (at least amongst political types, as opposed to real people who actually care about the results instead of the horserace posturing) of the night was the almostuniversally, bipartisianly-condemned response from the Republican governor of Louisana, Bobby Jindal. I haven't been able to bring myself to sit through it, but Chris Matthews' pithy and excoriating commentary on it seems to sum things up pretty well. (Skip to about 1:00 for him, after Maddow hamina-haminas.)
Matthews comments have been overshadowed by his accidentally-on-mike "Oh god!" reaction to Jindal's Lurch-like entrance, and conservatives are fulminating against him because of that, and because it lets them change the subject from Jindal's awful speech and the total lack of alternative policy proposals on their side of the aisle. That puts Matthews in his usual role, since 90% of the time I've heard of him has been after he's said something outrageous -- most often something that outrages the left, rather than the right. For instance, during the last presidential campaign he famously said that Hilary owed her career to sympathy votes over the fact that her husband fucked around on her
Matthews is very id; for a newscaster he has some amazingly large gaps in the filter between his thoughts and his words, and he's prone to blurting out his honest opinions.
As for Jindal, I know almost nothing about him. I've heard that he's one of the smartest Republican politician around (that may be an oxymoron). He's also a young, thin, articulate immigrant (he's Indian), and as a rising political star the comparisons to Obama are obvious. Jindal was mentioned frequently as a potential VP nominee in 2008, and he's one of the leading potentials for the 2012 Republican slot.
What makes him interesting, from the little I've heard, is that he's an extremely devout, old-school Catholic. How devout? He's written, in all seriousness, about participating in exorcisms. He contributed a long article about one such event to the conservative Catholic Oxford Journal Review in 1994. The article is behind a subscription wall, but it's been widely reported upon and excerpted from. For instance. It's worth skimming that to see the circumstances of Jindal's alleged exorcism, since they're pretty telling.
Nickle summary: A girl Bobby knew was very depressed and emotional during a hard patch in her life. Her best friend had recently committed suicide and she was having severe health problems. She was in a social group of very religious Catholics, and was actually at a late night prayer meeting when she collapsed and started freaking out. They all prayed over her for hours, physically restraining her when she tried to escape, and after a great deal of resistance they finally broke her will and she acquiesced to the group's wishes, succumbed to amnesia to block out the hours of psychological torture, and happily read parts of the Bible to get them to let go of her, etc. Bonus; they cured her cancer in the process!
It's a fairly riveting account if you share Jindal's belief in the cosmology and mythology of Catholicism. Demons exist and possess people, causing illness and insanity, and they can be forced out by concentrated prayer and devotion and Biblical passages. I'd say it was a relatively harmless ritual/mass delusion, except that nuns and priests doing this sort of thing routinely murder the mentally ill in their misguided efforts. Not to mention withholding or eschewing actual medical treatment in preference for medieval magical remedies.
If that sounds harsh, look at the situation with fresh eyes. Imagine you've never heard of Catholicism or Christianity, and use your modern knowledge of what causes mental illness, how people react when they're disturbed, etc. It becomes a classic example of brainwashing and indoctrination. A large group with a firm belief in imaginary monsters physically and emotionally restrains a mentally disturbed individual, repeating simple mantras over and over again until the afflicted person breaks and gives in, or goes completely out of their mind. Is there any way you wouldn't consider it a criminal form of torture if it happened to someone you knew, who had fallen into some oddball cult?
If you can't imagine the person going along with it, backtrack a bit. They were indoctrinated into the mythology/religion from their earliest childhood, and they've grown up in a society where those beliefs are honored and respected. The mentally ill person has heard for years that some special types of illnesses are caused by demons and spirits. The person doesn't want to be sick or crazy, they would love to be healthy, and they would love to find some external cause of their misery. After all, most mental illness diagnoses are a life sentence. You don't cure schizophrenia; you just find behavioral or pharmacological ways to ameliorate the symptoms. How tempting would it be to reject that diagnosis and to say, "There's a demon in me. If I pray enough it'll go away and I'll be all better." Talk about faith healing!
The other aspects of exorcisms, and needing an exorcist, are well-documented; see any history about the Nuns of Loudun, for a good case study. Being "possessed" allows repressed people who are forced to live a very controlled, regimented, powerless life to rebel completely. It's seldom something they choose consciously, but when under the control of demons they can let loose in ways they are never permitted at any other time. They an scream, curse, express sexual desires, fight back against untouchable authority figures, etc. As most of us know, it's extremely satisfying to do things we're not supposed to do. In that light it's obvious why most "possessed" people have always and will always be women or children in traditional, patriarchal societies. If demons are in them they can let loose, completely freak out and after blowing off some steam they're able to calm down and return to normal. I'm not saying these people are faking or pretending; many of them are legitimately mad, at the time. It's just a fairly predictable form of madness, given the circumstances that drive them to it.
Furthermore, this approach (exorcism) has long worked, for some people. Everything in religion is very well refined by evolution and thousands of years of trail and error. Things that don't work or that the faithful don't respond to get jettisoned and replaced. (Or the religion hobbled by maladaptive practices is replaced by one that's more responsive to human needs.) If exorcism never worked, it would have long since fallen into total disuse. (Note that "worked" in this instance doesn't mean it necessarily helps the afflicted. We're talking about the survival and furtherance of the religion, and that result may or may not coincide with the exorcism helping the afflicted. If the exorcism victim dies and the community concludes that it was because they were possessed, and that conclusion strengthens the society's belief in the religion and ritual, then the "treatment" was successful, in the evolutionary success of the religion/meme.)
The placebo effect is well known, and it can certainly work on mental illnesses as well. If the sick person sincerely believes that they will be cured by holding a magic feather, or breathing special smoke, or reading certain lines from a sacred book, there's a good chance they will be. Especially when their illness is something undefinable and internal, like mental illness. Now obviously they won't be cured of the chemical imbalances in their brain that brought on their behavioral abnormalities, but they can certainly achieve temporary amelioration of the symptoms. They just to believe. Like Dumbo.
Also, needless (I hope) to say, the fact that someone believes in something strongly enough to be cured (or made sick in the first place) by it proves nothing about the veracity of the belief or belief system in the first place. There's a timeless and very appropriate Nietzsche quote about that one.
Every human culture has always had some crazy people, so the organizing, controlling, and explanatory mythology and belief systems of cultures have to address it. All religions that last for any length of time are refined and improved upon, so obviously they have to provide some answers for, or at least explanations about, inexplicable phenomena like mental illness, (as well as offering counsel on marital relations, parent/child conduct, conflict resolution, weather, world origins, and death explanations, etc). I can't go into a whole discussion of the function and evolution of religion, but it's a fascinating topic. If you don't want to read books, check out this lecture on the issue by famed historian Jared Diamond, author (more recently) of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I thought of exorcism, though not of Bobby Jindal, when I was visited by a pair of bright-eyed, red-cheeked, fresh-faced, quiet, polite, and very sincere Mormons. They were both white males of about 20, and they came gently knocking at my door one rainy afternoon last week. I saw them before they arrived, since they walked past my front window to my next door neighbor. I could have ignored the door, or refused to answer, but I got up and spoke with them for a moment. I was in the middle of some website work, so I didn't have that long to tarry, but I did enjoy a brief chat.
I don't resent them or feel threatened by them; on the contrary, I'm so content with my (non) religious views and opinions at this point, with all of the evolutionary and cultural understanding I have of the ways and functions of faith, that nothing anyone says about their beliefs is going to sway me. I find the psychology of belief and the function of religion quite interesting (as should be obvious from how often I blog about it), so I'm curious to interact with true believers. People who are devoting their lives to something that's clearly got no factual veracity, but that provides them with other benefits, are quite worthy of study.
I'm not much of a charity case, so I'm not concerned with trying to deconvert them, or trying to shake their faith. As the famously irreligious Thomas Jefferson said, what nonsense other men believe in neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. (Except maybe it does one, or both of those things. I'll get to that in a minute.) If they want to waste major portions of their lives wandering around Northern California, trying to get people to switch their magical belief from one sect of Christianity to another more modern one... who cares? Imagine if Yankees fans went door to door, trying to talk people out of rooting for the Red Sox or Cardinals, and into wearing the pin stripes? (Substitute the sports teams of your preference if you're outside of the US or as uninterested in baseball as I am.) You'd think it a fairly ridiculous pastime, but would you really care? Would you argue with the Yankee advocates about the falsity of their beliefs, the error of their fraternal adherence, and the walking stain that is A-roid?
Well, perhaps. I did to the Mormons, at least a little. I didn't go into a whole rant about the evident falsity of their religion, though it would have been easy to do. Anyone can; spend ten minutes making the most cursory evaluation of the life of Joseph Smith and you know enough to view the historical foundations of the LDS as a Scientology-esque scam. Joseph Smith was a convicted forger and counterfeiter with a long (legal) history of frauds and rackets, who one day just happened to find some golden tablets written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, which he translated with the aid of a magic stone given him by the angel Maroni, which told an absurd history (effortlessly debunked by any real historian) about the origin of the American Indians as lost Israelites. It's literally LOL quality religious fan-fic, as is the frequently redundant and error-filled, slightly-updated version of the New Testament Smith dictated, I mean translated from the golden tablets. Which Maroni eventually whisked back up to heaven before anyone else could see them.
I left out a bunch of the more absurd details, but trust me, it's literally unbelievable. No one, who wasn't raised from childhood to overlook the absurdities, could grant any belief system that stemmed from such dubious foundational events a drop of credence. The Mormon eschatology is equally ludicrous, with the risen and returned Jesus making stops in Missouri. Where the Garden of Eden was located. (No, really.)
But all that given... who cares? The foundational events of other religions are no less ludicrous, and are frequently more so. Most benefit from having origins that are more shrouded by the mists of history, but they're no less obviously invented fictions. Of course gods and religions are man made, instead of the other way around. No open-minded individual who has made it through a semester of world/comparative religion, or has read a fair amount on the subject, can doubt that. To do otherwise shows an extreme solipsism and self delusion.
"Every other person to have ever lived on Earth grew up believing the religions and mythologies of their society. None of them could have known any better, and they were all wrong and they all believed in false gods. What does that have to do with me? After all, the religion I happened to grow up practicing is the one true one. Lucky break, that. See you in Heaven!"
So no, I didn't go into those details when speaking to the Mormons, but I did ask a few questions about Jesus returning to Missouri, and I mentioned the golden tablets of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Comments which earned me blank stares. I don't think they were faking; they'd just been kept ignorant of the events that purportedly laid behind the foundation of their religion. A wise decision, for men who wished to maintain their blissful belief in their particular highly-organized system of nonsense.
I pointed out earlier that the sincerity of a belief does nothing to testify to its accuracy or veracity. As a corollary, I'll argue that the falsity of a belief system doesn't necessarily have detrimental effect on the consoling potential of belief in it. The fact that Mormonism is nonsense on a fundamental level doesn't mean that people who do believe in it don't derive great comfort, consolation, and peace from their beliefs. Santa Clause puts five year olds into a pretty blissful state too. This point is fairly obvious on a macro level; most people on earth believe in at least one religion, and most people say that their religion gives their life meaning, order, structure, etc. Let's be generous and accept their testimony without cross examination, but that just shuts the trap. If everyone believes in different things, there are countless different things, and most of those things are incompatible, then most people believe in nonsense. It's just math.
Returning to the Mormons, the second guy didn't talk much, but he eventually took his best shot, and he aimed with a non-factual gun. He said he'd give me his "why I'm a Mormon" answer in thirty seconds. I told him to go for it, and he did a decent job. He basically said that he felt the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in his heart, and that he had a personal relationship with Jesus and that he knew He had sacrificed himself because he loved the world, etc. It was basically a happy-times, modernized, historically-ignorant version of the moral of the New Testament, and more amusing to me, it was entirely nondenominational. Nothing the guy said had any special relation to Mormonism; his exact speech could have been given by any type of Protestant or Catholic.
Eventually they asked me what I believed in. I felt rather Christian by that point, and avoided saying, "reality." I instead asserted my opinion that nothing in the world required supernatural explanations, and that I was quite sure that religions were man's inventions to explain things, and that everyone eventually found a religion that helped them get through the night, and answered the questions they found most vexing. The two missionaries nodded and smiled, I think not even attempting to grasp the larger meaning of what I was saying. And after a few minutes and a pair of limp handshakes, they went on their way.
Talking about it with the IG afterwards, her opinion was that they weren't hurting anything or anyone, and if their belief gave them comfort, then it was best to leave them to it. I didn't bring it up at the time, but occurred to me that she was basically giving a very kind version of Daniel Dennett's "belief in belief" argument. It's a condescending opinion, when you boil it down, since it's essentially saying, "I don't need fairy tales to get through life, but those other small-minded people do, and we should just leave them to their little delusions."
I countered, basically to devil's advocate, that they were wasting 2 years of their life on the mission, and that rather than advocating for a different flavor of mental floss, they might have been doing something with actual use and consequences in the real world. No, they weren't likely to cure cancer at 19, wandering around San Rafael with zits on their foreheads and magical underwear under the black Dockers, but couldn't they be in college, getting an actual education and preparing for the real world?
Hypothetically, sure. Said the IG. But she pointed out what I already knew; that most people of that age (and every age) are wasting their lives anyway. And I couldn't argue that. Most guys their age are working some stupid pointless job, taking college classes they don't care about, living off their parents and playing a lot of video games, etc. Compared to that, proselytizing for the Yankees instead of the Dodgers, or vice versa, might be a worthy pursuit. At least they're developing some social skills, learning to talk to people, giving some thought (however misguided) to the larger questions in life, etc.
Yet at the same time, I can't help but think of charts like this, when I think about people devoting years of their life to one mythology or another.
This is somewhat hyperbolic, and humans were continuing to experiment with methods of metal fabrication and attempting architectural advancement during the Christian Dark Ages, but it's not an entirely flawed analogy, either. For most of the sixteen or seventeen centuries between the Romans and the Enlightenment, the vast majority of educated human effort went to improvements in military equipment, or the arguing of theology. Building better swords/guns/boats/cannons/etc had nothing but death and destruction as its immediate goal, but long term those technological advances were useful in constructing the foundation for modern society. What did 1500 years of "angels on the head a pin" do for us? Then or now? It's not as if something magical changed on earth that made building semiconductors possible in 1950 that wasn't there in 1550. Or 1050. Or 550. What changed was the human societies became supportive of intellectual endeavor by non-monks, for non-theological purposes.
Arguing applied philosophy is great for sophomores up late in the dorms, before they do something important in chemistry lab the next morning. When every educated person in Europe spends 500 years at it, to the exclusion of anything of any actual material importance, it's kind of retarding of human intellectual evolution. (And yes, there were advances being made in China and parts of Mesopotamia, but very little that did more than tread water on a technological progress scale. Gunpowder from China was a key advance, but it still took centuries for the chemistry to advance it significantly, and that wasn't accomplished until recent centuries. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel for more on when and why these advances occurred.)
And here's where the clever conclusion would go if I'd written this in anything other than stream of consciousness. Perhaps I'll read over it later tonight while grabbing a quick post-gym dinner, and see if I can fix it up a bit and bring it to a better ending than one of those lame pop songs that just fade out while repeating the chorus 50x.
Informative article about the growth of Facebook, its reach and power, and the actions of its young, didn't take the money and run, founder and CEO. I assume everyone reading this knows about FB by now, but here's the intro, just to give you the flavor.
Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")
A chiropractor and acupuncturist, Lichtenstein was already a member of a few professional web-based user groups. The last thing he needed was another message box to check. Then a buddy posted a link to photos from a trip to Thailand and India on his Facebook page and flatly refused to distribute them any other way. The friend's assumption: Duh - everyone's on Facebook.
And so Lichtenstein, 57, recently became an official member of the Facebook army, 175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's.
Since the write up is from Fortune Magazine, most of the rest of the article is about the business implications of FB, and the ways they're trying (with middling success) to monetize the service. I'm not going to delve into that aspect of things here, but I enjoyed reading the article.
Personally, I've got no use for FB. In one way, I've been online too long. I've been running this site since 2001, I was working on other websites several years before then, and I went through my "lots of online friends" phase in about 1998, when I had like 150 contacts on my ICQ. One key difference between then and now, was that back then everyone tried to be anonymous online. No one used their real name, no one posted pictures or locations or other easily-identifiable info, and the concept of a FB style page with your real name and contact info would have seemed like madness.
I gave up on the anonymity thing after a few years, and I've always had my own name and photos on this website, but I still feel sort of weird about it, at times. And I'd never consider posting my phone or address online, though I'm sure people could spy those out if they searched databases. NetSol won't help, though, since the address listed for this site's owner info is like, 3 apartments ago.
So it wasn't delusions of semi-anonymity that kept me from embracing social networking sites. It was a non-desire to contact online with people I knew in real life, but the state of those sites in the early days didn't help either. I agree with the quote from the chiropractor at the start of the quote article; I checked out MySpace early on, and quickly rejected it as a joke. Geocities style technicolored unreadable crap for (and by) hyperactive 14 y/os. Even the professional sites by rock bands and companies were basically unviewable, to anyone with an adult visual sensibility or some experience doing web design. I might have put up with that, and been the one person with a non-hideous scroll-fest of a myspace page, but I didn't see the use or function of it. I had a real website, after all.
Thanks to my disinterest in MySpace, I didn't pay any attention to FB when it started to get hype a few years ago. "MySpace for college kids," I dismissed it as, though I researched it a bit a couple of years ago, when I was finishing up my degree and talking to students who were on FB, as well as looking into ways to publicize my misbegotten HGL fansite. FB failed on that front since it didn't seem to have any way to form user groups by interests; just by location or real life experience. I signed up anyway (I don't even recall with what name) since a couple of girls I liked in college were on the service (as is every college aged kid in the US) and I knew their names but didn't have any other way to contact them outside of class.
I didn't do anything with my FB beyond filling in some of the info boxes and uploading some photos, and haven't checked it in months and months, at this point. Looking at the service now, I can't see when I'll ever want to use it, since it's all about connecting with people you know or knew in real life. Frankly, I connect with everyone I want to connect with in real life already. And none of those connections are handled online, other than via occasional emails. I know one person I went to high school with, and haven't heard from, seen, or thought of anyone else from HS since before I moved to the Bay Area in 2003. (Not that I wanted to see anyone from HS back then either, but I'd occasionally see someone I vaguely remembered while I worked at the stadium.)
I haven't seen or talked to anyone from my first college experience when I was 19-21 since then. I didn't socialize much then, my friends were generally adults in their late 20s, and my main reason for not wanting to go to college after HS was that I didn't like people my own age and wanted not to be around more of the giggling idiotic bullshit that made HS such a waste of time. At this point I can't remember anyone from college other than 2 girls I hooked up with and was friends with for a year or two during the process. And some fond memories aside, I don't want to meet either of them again. They were both at least half a decade older than me, and I'm betting the years have not been kind. I'd much rather remember then youthful and desirable than wrinkled and motherly.
I worked at the stadium in SD for over a decade, but I never once socialized outside of work, and while I enjoyed talking to some of the guys on the job, I didn't even consider getting anyone's name or number when I was overjoyed to quit abruptly and move up north to live with Malaya.
I knew lots of the kids in my recent college career were on FB, but other than setting up a page to try to get a couple of dates (one of which sort of worked out) I never used it for anything. The age/maturity/interests difference was too great, since I could get along with 20 y/os talking to them in class, and obviously I wanted to tap some of the delightful young ladies, but I couldn't socialize with them. They were too young, too immature, so caught up in their little living on campus college dramas, and I wasn't interested in immersing myself in that world even when I was that age, so I certainly wasn't now.
I could continue, but you get the idea. I've always been much more into having a few close friends than a wide circle of acquaintances, and I've never cared about gossip or following other people's real life activities. And since I don't want to reconnect with people I knew in HS, or college, or work, or college again, I don't have any use for FB.
Ironically, I know a lot about FB for two reasons. For one, a lot of the women I've had dates with lately, via my online dating efforts, have been on FB. And when we talk about our lives over drinks and I mention my online exploits, that's what most of them counter with. Real people don't have websites or know that much about the Internet. They just do some emails and YouTube; and FB, these days. Lots of people use it for work, or have to use it through their work, for networking or other such purposes. That's the only way I can see me ever getting into it, actually. If I got more into my writing career, published some books, did some fan activities, went to writing conventions, etc. It would be a useful networking business tool then, though I think that's the level I'd keep it at; actual friends I'd continue to interact with directly via email or phone or personal meetings.
My other source of FB exposure has come from the IG. She was not one of the two women I signed up to FB to pursue, but now that we've been good friends since Fall 2006, I've heard her talk about FB many times. It's been informative. She loves it, but keeps trying to quit it, Brokeback Mountain style. She hates the time sink nature of it; how it leads her into reading stupid pointless bullshit written on the walls of her friends and how she feels compelled to reply to dumb comments just to be sociable. She wishes it didn't lead her to semi-stalk friends by checking who has been talking to who, or make her feel jealous or bitter or ignored when someone doesn't reply back to her, or comment on some update she's posted. And she really hates the cliquey nature of it, the gossip and cat fighting it creates.
Demographically and geographically, she's an ideal customer. She's 22 now, so she's got a circle of high school friends, lots more from college, others from her various jobs, etc. And then she expands that to friends of friends, business contacts, friends or children of her parents, and so on. All of which is exactly why the service works, and why there are 175m registered users, even if only like 40m of those are still actually active.
I'm not saying it sucks or that it shouldn't exist, I just think it's not suited to me. Or more accurately, I'm not temperamentally suited to it, with my preference for real life relations with a very few close friends, and much more occasional and superficial online relations with a much wider, entirely digital circle of acquaintances. YMMV, and in fact it probably does. And no, you may not "friend" me. Don't worry, I shall return the non-favor.
Years, ago, back when I used to post a long, multi-topic update 4 or 5 days a week, occasionally ran a feature called "Flux says no." As best I recall, it generally involved a quick comment on some new item about which I was especially dubious. I'm not going to resurrect that feature at this point, but for some reason I happened to see several news items today to which, "no." seemed the best reply. So here they are.
If you're going to smuggle some underaged party girl sluts you knew in high school into your army barracks, where you will ply them with booze and drugs while you and a few of your buddies can bang them eight ways from Sunday... do try not to actually kill them with alcohol poisoning. It makes the clean up, not to mention repeat visits, problematic.
ORT LEWIS, Wash. – A 16-year-old girl was found dead and another teenage girl was discovered unconscious in a barracks on this Army base south of Tacoma, the Army said Monday.
In a statement issued about 36 hours after base emergency personnel responded to a 911 call early Sunday morning, Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek said a Madigan Army Medical Center doctor declared one girl dead at the scene. The second teen was taken to Madigan for emergency medical care and was reported in stable condition Monday.
...The Army is investigating what the girls were doing in the barracks and whether drugs or alcohol were involved, he said. The presence of the two civilian girls "in the barracks at 3:30 a.m. is likely a violation of any of the units' barracks visitation policies," he said.
I like the closing quote there. Yes, I think we can safely assume that two comatose, alcohol and semen-soaked 16 y/o girls in an all-male military barracks at 4am is "likely a violation" of the visitation policies. I don't ordinarily associate dry wit and ironic understatement with military mouthpieces, but I might have to rethink that prejudice.
Elsewhere, we find a man who was not content to let drugs and alcohol do his dirty work for him. Not when he had religious/cultural guidance, and a big, sharp knife.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The founder of a U.S. Muslim television network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network's Web site and local media reported.
Muzzammil Hassan, founder and CEO of Buffalo, N.Y.-based Bridges TV which launched in 2004 with a mission to show Muslims in a more positive light, was charged after reporting the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, on Thursday night.
After Hassan, 44, told police his wife was at the Bridges TV offices, in the village of Orchard Park, they found her body there, beheaded, The Buffalo News reported.
Authorities said Aasiya Hassan, with whom Hassan had two children, had recently filed for divorce and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of February 6.
I don't have an irony-o-meter, but if I did I'm pretty sure this case would break it. Yes, he launched an entire TV network in 2004, its "mission to show Muslims in a more positive light." A necessary task, since the popular perception in the US of Muslims in the US is that they are violent, backwards, medieval-minded religious fanatics who tend to behead people in their power. Oops.
It's a shame, since that perception is created by sensationalistic news coverage of the violence and terror perpetrated by a minuscule fraction of Islam's adherents worldwide. A number that you wouldn't expect to include American television entrepreneurs, but there you have it.
Knowing nothing about this case other what's in the news article, I'll speculate anyway. The guy seems to have been very Westernized and he was not a religious fanatic. I don't think we can blame the murder on the (unreformed) Bronze Age ethics that animates the writing in the Koran and the Hadith. True, we hear about "honor killings" by Muslims all the time, but this wasn't a daughter being murdered for dating or apostasy. This was a controlling, violent husband killing his wife during a nasty divorce; that happens all the time to people of all, and even no, religion.
So he lost his temper and killed her, probably not even with a machete, or an axe, or whatever he used to sever her cranium. It was only afterwards, while sitting over her cooling corpse and contemplating how it had come to this; how he'd let jealousy and stupidity destroy his life and his family and his career, that he thought about beheading. He'd surely seen plenty of videos of it, and it's in the news all the time; news his network reported on. And he got to thinking, and madness took hold.
On the other hand, I could be completely wrong and the manual guillotine was the execution method. In that case I'd still think he was just another impotent ex-husband who couldn't get over his wife wanting to leave him; he just chose a technique with an unfortunate cultural connection, given his TV network's mission statement.
Speaking of asshole ex-husbands, these two articles made up the scariest and most surprising back to back links I've seen this year. You will legitimately gasp at news item #2. Here's #1, with a very short summary of events. Skim that and then click link #2 before you read lower, or you'll spoil the shock.
Nutshell version of story #1: Wife shot her husband with one of his own guns. Husband was, by all accounts, a complete asshole. Abusive to his wife, nasty to everyone else, a neo-Nazi (literally), liar about his business life, obviously deeply insecure, as evidenced by his gun collection, his Hitler worship, and his habit of swaggering around the house in a leather trenchcoat. It would be pathetic, if not for the death and human misery inherent in the tale.
Story #2 comes a couple of months later, and it discusses what the cops, and then the FBI, found when they were searching the house as part of their murder investigation.
BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”
...The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings.”
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups.
Well. Then.
I first read this a couple of days ago, and I'm still coming up a bit short as I grasp for a witty retort. I'm prepared to read about white supremacists hording guns and terrorizing their wives and daughters... but building dirty bombs in the basement? That's a bit more than you expect to stumble over in a bougie suburb in Bangor, Maine.
If you must have a laugh, look at the comments. The first dozen are the expected, "Holy shit!?" type remarks, and then "greyhawk1" shows up and launches into a pre-packaged diatribe about how Obama is going to use this as an excuse to "tik-r-gunnnnnsssssss!" And how the real dangers are the sleeper cells of communists and Muslims and Latino gangs and other left wing terrorists all across the US. And how the FBI shouldn't waste time investigating this lone kook. Really, I'm not caricaturing his remarks at all. If anything, I'm downplaying the paranoia animating them. Scroll down and see for yourself.
This one is unrelated to greyhawk1's diatribe, except ideologically. If you follow the US news at all, you must have seen all of the debate and struggle over the first stage of the anti-recession efforts. Obama pushed hard to get an economic recovery act through, and it passed, but only because the Democratic party enjoyed huge gains in the House and Senate during the past two elections, thanks to all of George Bush's fine work in the White House. Republican opposition to Obama's plan was fierce and nearly unanimous; it didn't matter in the House since the Democrats hold more than 60% of the seats, but in the Senate there are just 58 reliable Democratic votes, so enough apparently concessions (tax cuts, primarily) had to be put into the plan to get a few Republicans to vote for it. (The way that all bills must now get 60% of the vote to pass, since anything less than that = an essentially-unbreakable filabuster is a ridiculous state of affairs, but is a topic for another post. And another blogger, most likely.)
That the Republicans opposed Obama's plan isn't surprising or unusual; they are the opposition party, after all, in America's woefully-unrepresentative two-party system. I didn't like that the Democrats rolled over and let Dubya and the Republicans do whatever they wanted during his first six years, so I can't very well deny the Republicans some credit for serving their nominal electoral role. Besides, I like most of Obama's policies, but I'm not an economist, so I don't really have an opinion on the various bailout plans and recession counter-measures. It's clear we're in dire straits, and I think that something should be done, so I know enough to disregard those (primarily on the Right) who say that nothing is wrong, or that more tax cuts are the solution, since they say that about every economic situation, boom or bust. Only having one answer, whatever the situation, is the same as having no answer.
The worst comments and opposition though, have come from those on the right who have suddenly rediscovered their core principles of thrift and saving and limiting government spending, now that there's a president spending money on something other than foreign wars and corporate welfare. If only we could encapsulate Republican fiscal policy, and reflect upon their audacity in making their current complaints, in one simple chart? Oh wait, I guess we can.
Ford did economic damage, Carter largely reversed it, though he failed to cure the oil price spike recession of the early 80s, which helped to get Reagan elected. And that's when the real ideological economic meddling began. Reagan's men saw where it was leading after his first term and they behaved like adults, exercising fiscal prudence and slowing spending while raising some taxes during his second term. Bush the 1st returned to the irresponsible "free lunch" approach of constant deficit spending and tax cuts for the rich, and the resultant economic slump propelled Clinton "It's the economy, stupid!" into office. His policies concentrated benefits on the lower and middle classes and you can see the Mt. Everest-like results. And then peace and prosperity created complacency, the media hated Gore, he ran a horrible campaign, and we got Dubya. Who immediately put the usual modern day Republican voodoo economic policies in. With predictable results. And note that the chart is only up through 2004, before Bush's mad spending really began setting records for deficit and economic collapse.
Can Obama reverse this trend? Before it's too late(r)? I have no idea. Opinions differ on what should be done, which is to be expected. The arguments I object to are from long-serving Republicans who suddenly oppose spending and want to cut the debt. Republicans who enthusiastically voted for every Bush-era policy that created the mess we're in now. We've been doing what they wanted. Their (disastrous) efforts created one of the largest sudden shifts in political power in American history, over the last 2 years. They fucked up so badly that a vaguely-liberal black man named "Hussein" got elected president. Kthx. Shut up for a while, now.
Finally, to go out on a laugh I checked out Hanzis Matter yesterday for the first time in months, and the top post had me laughing and wincing at the same time. Of course most of the symbols are errors, and the whole thing has no meaning; it's just random words. That's kind of sad, but really, is anyone who would get something so huge, ugly, and tasteless on their back going to be concerned with the characters being drawn correctly, or actually meaning anything?
It's clever in a way; tattoo naysayers always try out that tired old "It'll look terrible when you're old and wrinkled." This guy, and others like him, are negating that problem by getting tattoos that look horrible now. Honestly, time, wrinkles, and gravity can only improve this homage to a bathroom stall in a seedy gas station.
Thanks to my discovery of a fairly inexpensive DVD outlet in the San Rafael area (as narrated via my Twitter stream) I finally got a copy of Batman 2, and sat down to view it that very evening. I watched it on my laptop while lying in bed, a movie viewing technique that has rapidly become my favorite, since I first embraced it in hotel rooms on my recent termite-tenting sojurn. I don't remember the last time I had my TV on; certainly before Xmas, since the DVDs I've watched since then have all been on my laptop, either while lying in bed or if at my desk, watching through the 24" flat screen I obtained during the same after Xmas sale period as the laptop.
I've been thinking about just getting rid of my TV, or at least moving it out of my living room, but I'm not sure where to put it, and I don't know what I'd put in its place. Besides the TV, which is old, not very large, and the bulky CRT type, I've got a DVD player, a VCR, a tuner, and a CD player, plus 3 speakers and yards of associated wiring. The CD player and VCR have sat inactive far longer than the DVD player, but they just add to the weight and annoyance of these technological tombstones. All of those are on a large, two-level TV-stand type table, for which I'd also have to find a relocation destination.
Which is why I'm trying to ignore them rather than going to the trouble to remove the whole heap of stuff. Much though I'd enjoy the clutter being gone from my small and otherwise over-cluttered living room, it's not worth the effort to move it all, when I don't really have anywhere to put it. Besides, Jinx perches atop the TV for at least an hour a day, and her life is stressful enough with the hyperactive hellion dildo little kitty I've inflicted upon her these last months. And yeah, I'll blog about the new cat at some point. Or so I keep telling myself.
Returning to the point of this post, the Batman... It's hard to judge a movie under such circumstances. I've heard about how great it is for months, there's all the Heath Ledger memorial Oscar discussion, it pulled in the second biggest box office in US history, etc. I had managed to avoid reading much about it or hearing anything too spoilery about the plot, and if you're in the situation I was a few days ago, you should stop reading now, since I'm going to discuss the movie as though we've all seen it.
I'd heard that the Joker devised all sorts of fiendish psychological challenges, forcing the heroes to choose who lived and who died. There is that element in the film, but I was expecting it to be more explicit, like the dilemmas presented to individuals in the Saw films. I was glad they didn't go too far in that direction, since the impossibly scheming criminal genius thing is kind of overplayed. That the film had that element in it, but didn't take it all the way to fruition, was a theme.
I'll post (or at least write, since I don't seem to get around to actually posting film/book reviews much anymore) a proper review at some point, but here's my short take on. The movie wasn't sure what it was, or perhaps it was sure and it's trying to redefine various genres. It wasn't ever a superhero/action film, since the action was always too weighty and serious to be joyous. It wasn't smart enough with enough plot twists to be a crime thriller with devious crime bosses matching wits with police. The Joker was wacky and enjoyable, but he wasn't insidious and twisted enough to be a genius in a psychological thriller, like Hannibal. Batman was determined and conflicted, but he wasn't so animated by vengeance that it was a revenge thriller (as the first Batman kinda was).
The movie seemed to be very jack of all trades, but in a good way. It wasn't a great movie in any particular genre, but it was a very good one in lots of them. The director's goal to make a was good/quality film, rather than a fun/action picture. I think he succeeded; I just don't know if he made the best choice. I'd be curious to learn how Ledger's death changed the editing process. Did they expand the Joker's role, and try to make it more about his motivations and actions, and de-emphasize the action and remove the fun and humor so as not to break the intense, serious mood? Did they think a more jolly, typical action movie wouldn't serve as Ledger's epitaph? Or was this the plan all along, and Ledger's death only helped to focus the viewer's attention on his anti-hero role?
I did enjoy the movie, I'm just not sure how much. And if I think it could have been better if it had focused more on on or two genres, instead of venturing into so many. I definitely think the PG-13 rating hindered it. The lack of blood and gore definitely held back their presentation of the Joker's madness, and lowered the overall seriousness of the film. The Joker was scary and compelling as it was, but if they could have shown him just drenched in blood a few times, or shown him actually cutting someone, and giggling as he murdered, that would really have turned up the psychological level.
Hannibal is erudite and brilliant, but every film has him committing horrendous acts of violence, on screen, at least once or twice. He doesn't just delegating them, or dance up to them and leave the rest to the viewer's imagination. Knowing that he won't just hold a knife to someone's face, as the Joker does several times, but that he'll use it, and take pleasure in the mutilation, and that you'll see it happen, adds a lot of weight and menace to his character. The Joker could have been 100% more violent and 50% crazier and that would have improved the film, for me. Blowing up empty hospitals and burning money and killing a few of his henchmen in amusing fashion didn't convince me of his ruthlessness. He could have arbitrarily blown away a few of the rich people at the fund raiser, or just tortured someone for fun, or slaughtered indiscriminately. Why is he tying up and gagging captured policemen? Abbatoir time, Joker. You've got your reputation to think about.
Anyway, I'll think it over and watch it again and then write a review. As always, feedback/disagreement is welcomed.
I saw the link while browsing recent Caption This winners on D-listed, and after a quick look, I knew I had to blog it. It's called This is why you're fat. Dot com. It's a collection of absurdly-fattening user-submitted foods, with photos and descriptions. I've only looked through three pages so far, and nothing has blown my mind, but oddly, nothing has made me DO WANT!!1! yet either.
I'm not going to take the easy step and say that's why I'm not fat, but it might be related. I'm not an especially picky eater, but few of these "throw 5 things together and call it a new entree" appeal to me. I like a lot of the various ingredients, but when I look at the whole I envision soggy, greasy, get-cold-before-you-can-eat-it-all, clashing tastes and textures, etc. Plus there's just such a focus on oily flesh that a lot of them make me feel sort of queasy. I can enjoy a strip of bacon from time to time, ideally turkey since pig is a filthy animal, but does anyone really want a taco made from bacon?
Well obviously someone does, since a restaurant (or booth at the state fair somewhere) is selling it, but I have negative desire to put that into my mouth. There's nothing on the first 3 pages I would actually buy, even if price were no object. A few things I'm kind of curious about, but they tend to be the less mutated offerings. The cheesecake on a stick (dunked in chocolate) looks interesting, and the seven-pound breakfast burrito would be good (though I have no idea what would I do with the remaining 6 pounds after I was stuffed; reheated burrito isn't exactly appetizing), but the rest... eh. YMMV, of course. Here are a few samples:
The Nacho Burger Five beef patties weighing five-thirds of a pound dressed with crushed Fritos, lettuce, sour cream, and a gigantic pickle on a sesame bun.
Mega Pizza A pizza with a hot dog wrapped in bacon pigs in a blanket crust. The center is filled with italian sausage, ham, bacon, bacon bits, sliced tomato, mushroom, onion, peppers, garlic chips, basil, black pepper and tomato sauce. It can also be flavored with maple syrup and ketchup.
The Garbage Plate A combination of either cheeseburger, hamburger, Italian sausages, steak, chicken, white or red hots, a grilled cheese sandwich, fried fish, or eggs, served on top of one or two of the following: home fries, fries, beans, and mac salad. The plate is adorned with optional mustard, onions or hot sauce.
On the other hand, how much of this is just cultural relativism? If pizza didn't exist, or chicken nachos supreme, and someone described them to you, how would you react?
"A garbage can lid-sized wheel of dough, covered in tomato sauce and an inch of cheese, with beef, pork, pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, black olives, and peppers on top. And you eat it without utensils."
I've gotten out of the habit of reading The Onion at least a couple of years ago, and I'd never previously watched any of their ONN video pieces. I might have to rethink that approach after this video, which I laughed so hard at I had to 1) take off my shirt since I was overheating, and 2) watch a second time to hear half the dialogue I'd missed the firs time. It's fantastically profane and is therefore NSFW, but as is the case with all the best of The Onion, it's psychologically brilliant and much of it seems to have been taken directly from my own thoughts.
If I hadn't seen this on Pharyngula, with a link to Yahoo Sports, I would have assumed it was an article from The Onion. The quote is from Kurt Warner, the quarterback of the Super Bowl losing Arizona Cardinals. He's a fundie, and he wears #13. No problem, sayeth Kurt:
For Warner, spirituality allows no room for superstition
Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner is a born-again Christian whose faith informs his every decision, right down to his jersey number. By choosing No. 13, Warner means to send the message that his spirituality allows no room for superstition.
He was one of five players on the active rosters of the 32 N.F.L. teams to wear No. 13 in 2008.
"A lot of people believe 13 is an unlucky number," Warner said, "but I've kind of embraced it."
He added: "A lot of negative things come with the No. 13. My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God's in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions."
The punchline pretty well writes itself, but just to hammer it home, here's everyone's favorite t-shirt logo, this time supplemented by some cheesy images. (I didn't add them to the famous saying; this was just the first version of a jpg of this caption that came up on my google image search.
I had dates Sunday and Monday evening, and both went pretty well. I'm not going to talk about Sunday night since I liked her and hope to see her again, which is an entirely realistic possibility at this point. Plus she was very smart and sarcastic and aware, so there's not much weird or wacky to write about. Yet.
Luckily for the blog, Monday night was more entertaining on that front.
She was smart and had a sense of humor, and was aware of the bullshit that goes with online dating. I mailed her last week, she replied a few days later and suggested we meet for a beer, I said sure and suggested a place near Berkeley, she agreed asked if Monday or Tuesday was better, for me, I said Monday, she said 8pm, and that was that.
In my earlier days of online dating (a period that ran from around October, when I signed up, until about um... last week) I wouldn't have considered that sort of accelerated schedule or almost blind date status upon meeting as a viable strategy. I wanted to let them get to know me via my writing, I wanted to read emails from them, I wanted to gradually work up to a phone call and if that went well a RL date, and I wanted to plan cool stuff for the date. Find a fun activity, a restaurant we'd both like, maybe an idea about dessert afterwards, etc.
I was souring on all that preparation even before events on a date a couple of weeks ago entirely killed the concept. Now I'm very much coming from where the two women I just dated came from. I mailed them (and various others who didn't reply) early last week, they replied a couple/few days later, we were adult and honest about being somewhat interested but not really trusting what we saw online, and we all agreed that it's about the face-to-face meeting. You can email and even phone call forever, but you never really know what it's going to be like until you meet in the flesh. Personality, sense of humor, attraction, chemistry, etc. All can't be adequately replicated in other ways, and all are essential to liking someone enough to take the next step and trying to get to know each other/starting a romance.
This is, of course, anathema for me to admit. I'm a writer, I should be able to communicate my personality through just words, and should be able to draw out or at least divine (between the lines) theirs, from emails. Or at least from a conversation or two. That's what I thought for the first couple of months, anyway, and I had nothing but bad or boring dates with women who weren't at all what I'd been hoping for (and who apparently returned that favor). So now I'm a new me with a new approach to this bullshit, and it involves spending far, far less time in the pre-date foreplay, and cutting right to the chase.
It's not just impatience or a sop to people who can't write/email, either. I'd be quite happy to do emails and texts and such with someone after we meet and like each other. That's a valuable way to learn more about each other and deepen the relationship, and it's enjoyable. But that's with a person when we already know we like each other and want to date more. It's pointless with someone before meeting, since if you don't hit it off in person, all that knowing and sharing and interacting = wasted time. I suppose it could ease the first date meet and greet and give you some more info going in, but I don't think that would ever make the difference in deciding to keep dating or not, since as I said, that's about chemistry and attraction and other things that are only measurable once you're face to face.
The question is, how do I project this to future potential dates, especially the ones I make the first step to contact? Women are in a buyer's market with online dating; there are lots more guys seeking than women accepting, at least on sites that allow pictures and window shopping. (The ratio is supposedly much closer to 50/50 on eharmony.com, since there the match making is all done by computer algorithms and you don't get to pick or choose, or view photos before you make contact. I don't want to be cruel and stereotyping, but it's pretty easy to say that's where goeth all the ugly, fat, shy women who know they won't succeed in an open market. Hence the even-er numbers. Hence me not being there.) Every woman I've dated so far has told me they get tons of emails and winks, most crude and stupid and horrible, most from men who appear fully live up to the quality of their initial communication. One would think it would be easy to stand out in such an undistinguished field, but I've gotten replies to maybe 10% of my emails thus far, while I've replied to more like 50% of the winks or emails I've received from women. Even though 3 of the 4 women I've met who mailed me first were probably not women I'd have mailed myself, if I'd seen their profiles first.
All that said, Monday night's was nearly a blind date. We'd see pics of each other and we both had pretty interesting/informative profiles, but we'd only traded a couple of rather non-interactive emails, and some quick phone texts. That was fine with me, since it was just for drinks, and I had a good enough vibe about her personality and intelligence that I figured I could at least last an hour of chat, with the ready aid of alcohol. I wouldn't have committed an afternoon to her based on our interaction going in -- I've learned that lesson -- but that's what's good about meeting for drinks, or the (inferior) coffee chat. Cheap, informal, and quick, if need be.
The date was fine, but pretty early on I was decided against pursuing her further. She was nice and smart and had a sense of humor, but I didn't feel any sparks or chemistry, and I wasn't attracted to her. She wasn't ugly, but she wasn't especially cute either, and and was dressed in a huge, bulky turtle neck, a fleece ski jacket, and very baggy jeans. She appeared to be slender, under all that camouflage, but who could tell? No makeup, no jewelry. I felt almost overdressed, even though I was just in an Oxford style shirt and slacks. What did I know; I figured the point was to look good for a date? Amusingly, I more jewelry on than she did, with my 2 new ear piercings and a silver necklace. (I only own one necklace and 2 earrings, but I was wearing them both. I can't take out the earrings for another 4 or 5 weeks yet, either.)
I won't play by play the whole thing, since there's no physical action and nothing really weird from the conversation. We got our drinks (I bought the first round) and sat at a quiet table outside, under the heater, and sipped and chatted in agreeable fashion. Forty minutes in she volunteered to get the second round, and per my request, had the bartender make me a mystery drink. I never did find out exactly what was in it, but it was brownish in color, rum-based with a fruity kick, and the date said there was brown sugar and a splash of bitters for variety. I enjoyed it, but not so much that I'd order it again. Even if I knew what it was called. One nice thing about dates is that I can keep trying mystery drinks and maybe I'll find something I like best of all?
So, what about her? Here's the amateur psychology part. Over the course of our conversation the woman revealed to me that she was recently separated from an LTR. They'd been together for upwards of four years, and had broken up in May 2008. She'd instigated the break up, since she loved him and wanted to be with him forever, but he didn't want to marry or have kids, and she did. He refused to change his mind, he didn't want the responsibility or burden, and he was already 43 so he wasn't going to mature into it any time soon. She was 33 or 34, and with her clock ticking she decided she had to cut him loose and try to find her future husband/baby-daddy elsewhere.
The juiciest thing about their breakup is that while they "officially" broke up in May, they lived together until August, when she finally got her own place. She delayed moving out since she was paying most of the bills and she waited for him to land a full time job, but during their 3 or 4 months of roommating, they were still... intimate. I didn't bring it up at the time, but my thought then, and now, is this. How are you broken up if you're still living together and fucking? Maybe she'd decided in her mind that she was going to find someone else, but she couldn't really start looking while she was still living and sleeping with her ex. Who wasn't technically her ex yet. And who, I might add, was getting exactly what he wanted. Retaining emotional and sexual access without having to grow up or worry about marriage or kids. Talk about letting him down easy!
That info didn't come out until well into our conversation, but once I had that much of the rest of her behavior became clearer.
She had really rigid, controlled, uneasy body language. Even crossing the street to the bar, she was walking hunched over with her arms crossed. I met her in front of the bar and she gave me a weak, one armed, slightly surprised and awkward hug, and seemed to have some issues with maintaining eye contact for most of the night. We took our drinks outside and sat at a square table, and for the nearly 2 hours we were there, she never budged from her seat (except when she got up to get the 2nd round), and sat the entire time very upright, legs crossed, arms crossed below her boobs. I sat adjacent to her, but varied my posture frequently. Leaned in, slouched back, turned my chair so I was sideways to the table and could look at her while sitting with my ankle on my other knee, etc. I didn't actually pull up an empty chair for a footrest, but would have been happy to do so if she hadn't been so rigid and uptight with her body language.
The only time she varied her posture was when she talked about her ex. Then she'd uncross her arms and start pulling the neck of her thick turtleneck up over her chin, almost to her nose. She'd pull it up, then let it slowly slide back down, before pulling at it again. Her eyes would wander while she did this, not making much contact with me, and the motion was clearly entirely unconscious. I don't know quite what/why that signified, but it was interesting to observe, when she remained motionless 99% of the time.
This isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes quality work, but I thought it was pretty clear she wasn't at all over him. She still loved him, and she didn't want another guy. She wanted him to change his mind and grow up and accept responsibility. She never showed any anger or frustration with him; and spoke very calmly about things, but she had to be torn up over it, after nearly 5 years and then having to dump him for that reason. I'd guess that she's forcing down a bunch of anger and frustration she'd do better to release, but that speculation has me standing on tip toes on my pop psych shoebox.
One other bit of data for the analysis. As we brought things to a close and got up to head out a bit before 10, I cut right to the chase. I can't quote myself, but I said something like, "So... we had a nice chat, but you've been honest about what you're looking for, and he isn't me."
She was a little put off by my directness, but she rallied fairly soon, perhaps since my tone of voice was very matter of fact and I clearly wasn't broken up over things. She agreed that yeah, that was pretty much the size of things, and the funny part was that once we'd established that, her demeanor totally changed. She got much calmer and looser, and gave me a big spontaneous hug when I walked her out to her car. We ended up talking while standing beside it for another 10 minutes, and she felt far more relaxed and chatty then. It was like a load went off of her shoulders at that point; she wasn't trying to replace her ex, she was just chatting with a guy, and she could be herself. I can't say much about her body language change, since she was standing up at that point, but I metaphorically at least, her arms were uncrossed and she was calm and acting more like herself.
The real irony would be if that version of her was so much more attractive that I was immediately swayed and decided that I wanted to be with her after all. It didn't happen, but it would be a nice punchline if it had.
Also, I want to congratulate myself on the fact that I handled the situation smoothly. I essentially gave her a modified version of "It's not you, it's me." and she bought it. I wasn't interested in dating her, so it was handy that she reciprocated my disinterest, but the way I played it I didn't have to come out and say that. I focused entirely on her interests in an immediate candidate for an LTR, and how that wasn't me, and she took the bait. It wasn't just bait, it was true, but this way I didn't have to reject her or give her any reasons why I was okay with our 2 hour chat being the total of our lifetime interaction. Not that I deserve a medal or anything, but I'm new to dating, so any successes, even in rejection, are noteworthy.
Tragically, I've got no dates lined up going forward, unless/until I can entice Miss Sunday Night into another go 'round. I am going to start sending out more emails this week though, if I can figure some way to work around the obvious contradiction in my newfound attitude. "Let's just cut to the chase and have a drink since it's all face to face that matters. Now look at my profile and see if you're interested."
I have thus far, sometimes with the aid of muffled screams, avoided ranting about the experience of using Windows Vista on my new laptop. Gladly I would have continued with XP, but this one came pre-installed, and I can't be bothered to strip it all out and redo everything. The point in getting the laptop was to boost productivity and activity, not to spend hours/days reinstalling everything.
At any rate, Vista sucks, but not horribly. At least not once I overrode all of the default settings to not display extensions, or file paths, or file types, or all of the other user friendly, child proofed bullshit they layered in to keep people who know what they're doing from actually being able to use the computer. The first couple of days were fairly maddening though, and I still hate how the directory structure is set up, with nothing on the actual root C: drive, and (almost) all my stuff in an "Eric" subfolder.
Not everything is there, of course. Lots of applications do install to the root, but not all, which makes hunting down the actual location of files and programs something of a hit or miss endeavor. The most annoying this thus far was importing all of my email archives from my old computer. I'm using Thunderbird on both machines, and the format of the files is unchanged, but Vista stores them in a different location, multiple layers deep, and it's one you'd never guess by logic. I only found it since the Thunderbird wiki had a help page with the location.
I also hate all the default folders and locations for files. I don't want to put my pictures in the pictures folder. Or my videos in the videos folder. I have pictures in dozens of different folders depending on what they're associated with. I have photos for this website, diablo 2 and 3 photos, personal photos that don't go online publicly, pictures for school and other projects, etc. I can see the utility of the photos and other folders for some users. My dad, for instance, saves pictures from email and the web into whatever default directory opens up in XP, which results in him never being able to find them again. I save them where I want them, and can therefore (usually) find them again. I resent and resist the default folders for these functions, most of which I can't delete, or don't dare, since Vista forces some applications to partially install there, or to store their images there by default. So they remain, cluttering up my otherwise pristine and organized directory stucture.
There was a bunch of other bullshit that tripped me up early on, but I've mostly forgotten it by now. Largely with the aid of alcohol.
Today though, I've finally found something I had to blog about. I've been doing picture editing for the Diablo I wiki; cropping bosses and other interesting illustrative events out of screenshots. They're shots from old D1 or Hellfire, which stores the screenshots in .pcx format, which nothing default of Windows can view. Annoying, but Windows couldn't view them in Win95 or WinXP, so Vista failing there isn't exactly a surprise. Besides, I have to crop all the shots in photoshop anyway, so I just open them there, crop or otherwise manipulate, and then save as .gif. I could save as .jpg, but the shots are only 256 colors, so what's the point, when gifs have better image quality at that color depth? Besides, I have to dick with the "Image > Mode > RGB color" first, before it'll let me save .pcx files as .jpgs. (Yes, I should just set up a quick PS macro to automate that menu-cruising bullshit.)
Helpfully, Vista "upgraded" of the picture viewer, and in addition to various removing useful features, (no more zoom icon, making it impossible to zoom in on any location; you've got to zoom the whole image and then click/drag to see the part you want to close up on) they took out the ability to view gifs with it. Why? Good question. Because they can?
So now I've got a folder full of gifs that I often need to click through to find the appropriate one. And no, of course the thumbnail view isn't detailed enough to see what I want to see. Not when I'm running 1920x1200 resolution. At first I thought they must have inadvertently left it off of the default "open with" option. The first gif I clicked on opened in MIE, which I hadn't otherwise run on this machine. Which showed that gif fine, but was useless since I couldn't use it to navigate through the other shots in the folder. So I closed it and right clicked "open with"... and Windows Picture Viewer isn't an option. I could browse to add it... but how the hell would I do that? It's a Windows application, and I've got no idea where it's stored on the machine, since Vista is purposely designed to make finding such applications almost impossible.
I was going to look online for the location, but just for the hell of it, I tried the Windows help first, and after digging through a few pages I found this explanation about Photo Gallery (which I was hoping would have some way to revert to the WinXP style, which was much better):
Photo Gallery is intended to show and edit digital pictures from cameras and scanners, so some older file types that are not commonly used for digital pictures today will not appear in Photo Gallery. If you have picture files with .gif extensions, for example, they will not appear in Photo Gallery and can't be edited using the Fix pane. If you want to see these pictures in Photo Gallery, you should change their file type to a format that Photo Gallery can display (JPEG is recommended).
You'll be unsurprised to learn that Vista does not include any utility to execute such a "change" of file type. Nor that the help doesn't say how you could do that. (I can obviously do it with Photoshop, but most users don't have such a program, or know how to use it.) That's beside the point, though I'm sure it's provoked some outrage in people who had gif images that they could no longer view after installing Vista. The real point is why? What possible reason could there be to disable viewing a very common file type? This sort of thing is why people hate Microsoft. It's not just their incompetence and avarice; it's that they seem to go out of their way to fuck you, sometimes. Just because.
So, anyone got any recommendations for a useful 3rd party freeware tool that works like the Windows Picture Viewer and will show non-.jpg images too? I'll have to search one one later today, cause converting hundreds of gifs to jpgs is out of the question, as is using a browser window to view one image at a time.
All that said, I'll give Vista credit for one thing. It's better with higher resolutions. I could not get text to display properly on my old desktop, into the new monitor at 1920x1200. Text, in documents or through the browser, was always too large or too small. Too skinny, mostly, so I'd increase the size until suddenly it went super bold, and read like a huge block lettered random note. Plus, the text on different web pages showed up in very different sizes. Some would be disclaimer fine print size, others like the top row in an eye chart. None of this is a problem in Windows. Pages look just fine, consistent in size, 10 point font is very readable in my documents, etc. I don't know what it does or how it equalizes the visual volume levels, other than using some kind of truetype ability to scale up the text, but it's much appreciated.
There, I said something nice about Vista in the end. (And I bet there's some kind of update to XP I could have downloaded to give it support for better text readability at higher resolutions. I never looked, since the desktop was dying anyway.)
BTW, this was the 1000th post I've made using the Blogger script. Yes, I'd hoped for something more as well. Still, Microsoft bashing never goes out of style.
Update: The most popular image viewer on download.com was something called FastStone Image Viewer, and it's working nicely. It kind of mimics Explorer in layout, showing all the images in thumbnail size, but when you click one it shows in a resizable space to the lower left, below the file tree. And with my big monitor and high resolution, I've got plenty of space to view the full sized 640x480 images there, which is convenient. I don't think it would be that great for going through a library of larger images; you can't just view them full size and next/back through them easily, but it's great for this working-with-gifs project I have underway.
