Movie Night

Death Proof - I never made it out to the theater to see Grindhouse in its original form, so I can only evaluate this as a movie in itself. As such, I would say: Not bad. Certainly worth seeing, at least if you're a fan of the sort of cheesy '70s car-crash movies it pays tribute to. It's not without flaws: There's a section (apparently new to this version) in black and white for no good reason (I can't imagine even a bad theatrical print from 1971 suddenly losing color for a reel). And for a good chunk of what comes after that, it almost seems as if Tarantino forgot that he was trying to recreate the experience of watching a low-budget movie in a grimy theater in the '70s, because the picture just loses all the scratches and things he'd added to the earlier part and becomes a crystal-clear modern-looking film. There are also a few moments that felt like Tarantino just plain showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture. Overall, though, certainly not Tarantino's best work, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Having mentioned some of this movie's flaws, I also feel obligated to point out something that isn't a flaw, but which others have called such: The dialogue scenes. Someone calling himself IndustryKiller! on Aint It Cool News put it most succinctly:

Also their conversations go on absolutely forever, especially that diner sequence, which brings the film to screeching halt when tarantino [sic] take 15 minutes to say what could easily take three to five.

I swear, all I could think as I read this was, "Goddamn, have you ever even seen a Corman-esque '70s action-horror movie at all? They were chock full of long, boring, pointless dialogue scenes. In fact, as I was putting the DVD in and started up the movie, I remember wondering how Tarantino was going to deal with/recreate the long stretches of downright boredom that tended to creep into the movies he was homage-ing. Thankfully, he dealt with it by putting in long stretches of Tarantino Dialogue™, which at least tends to be more interesting to watch than what actually ended up in most of the real '70s grindhouse movies.

I've seen several reviews complaining that '70s exploitation movies were short, and thus didn't have a lot of unnecessary stuff in them, but it's just not true. Movies today are edited much tighter and quicker than they used to be. George Lucas comments on this in one of the Star Wars DVD commentaries - that he tried to make the original as fast-paced as he could, but that by today's editing practices, it's downright flabby. That also tended to be true of the kind of movies Tarantino is referencing, and often doubly so.

Not Quite Movie Reviews

Things I Learned from Hostel

1. When running a thrill-kill-for-profit organization that involves kidnapping tourists, it is best to nab just one or two members of a group at a time, allowing their friends to get suspicious and spend a day or two investigating (and potentially talking to and frightening away some of the other guest/victims at your Hostel of Doom), rather than just grab all of them at once. This is true even when there is a steady flow of paying customers coming through, requiring a constant supply of victims.
   
2. A sadist whose motivation is ostensibly his frustrated desire to be a surgeon nevertheless includes power tools as well as surgical tools in his torture repertoire. Nothing satisfies that urge to perform delicate surgery like ripping through someone's shoulder with a power drill.
   
3. A chainsaw which has been dropped to the floor will cut entirely through a man's thigh underneath it, even though all the weight of the chainsaw is at the back where the motor is, not in the blade, leaving a good few inches between the blade and the floor when the saw is at rest.
   
4. An enterprising sadist could actually make money by purchasing (non-American) victims through "Elite Hunting", harvesting all their transplantable organs, and re-selling them on the black market. According to this article, one kidney alone would fetch enough in Turkey to cover what this organization supposedly charges to let you kill a Russian. Anything you can get for his other organs is pure profit.
   
5. Despite this, if you operate a business like "Elite Hunting", you should just have your cleaning crew incinerate the bodies, valuable organs and all, rather than attempting to extract all possible profit in return for the enormous risks you're taking.
   
6. Eastern Europe is plagued by vicious gangs of small children, who will cheerfully beat several gun-wielding grown men to death in exchange for a sack full of chewing gum.
   
7. The optic nerve is actually a tube containing some sort of disgusting yellow pus, which will squirt out when it is cut.
   
8. In Slovakia, Asian women with half their face freshly burned off are apparently so common, they don't attract so much as a curious sideways glance from passers-by.
   

Things I Learned from Saw II

1. Serial killers whose M.O. involves elaborate deathtraps might, just might, have some elaborate deathtraps in place protecting their lair. The police in this film learned this particular lesson the hard way. Apparently it hadn't occurred to them before entering the building to be watching out for that sort of thing.
   
2. There exists a slow-acting nerve gas whose operation is so predictable, a timer can literally count down how much time remains to anyone breathing it. This gas also causes internal hemorrhaging, despite being clearly referred to as a nerve agent.
   
3. If I should ever find myself with one arm stuck in a box with razor-sharp blade flaps arranged in a one-way door configuration, I will simply hold the razor flaps open with my other hand and pull my arm out, rather than inextricably trapping myself by sticking my other arm into the other one-way razor door in the box. Especially if I have already spilled the life-saving nerve gas antidote that was inside the box.
   

Discworld Map

Just for fun: Although it has been years since I've done any RPG-ing, I do still maintain a copy of the latest version of Campaign Cartographer, just because I love maps. Using the tools/instructions from an installment of their "Cartographer's Annual", I threw together this map of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, in a style inspired by the 16th century maps of Gerard Mercator (click for full-size):

Note, if you're familiar with the official published Discworld Mapp, you'll see a few differences, based on the ostensible reason that the map was created by a cartographer in Ankh-Morpork. Therefore, Ankh-Morpork is near the top of the map (rather than toward the bottom, as in the official map), and the further away from Ankh-Morpork and the Circle Sea region you get, the less detailed and more inaccurate the map becomes. So most of the Circle Sea area is pretty close to "reality", other parts of the continent are fairly accurate (but not very detailed), the Counterweight Continent is pretty much right, but with a few errors, and the least-explored areas - XXXX and the Lost Continent of Ku - are wildly inaccurate.

Here's also a close-up of the Circle Sea region:

The Game Turn Indicator marker does not expend movement points, nor does it exert a Zone of Control.

Old-school wargaming has now disappeared up its own asshole: Decision Games has expanded & re-released "War in the Pacific". Seven maps. 9,000 counters. $420.00. And, and, their future games page indicates that Richard Berg is working on an updated re-release of "Campaign for North Africa", although it sounds like that one will be smaller, and much more affordable at $200.00.

BoardGame Geek

Just for fun, I've added a widget to the sidebar on here that will show you five random games from my collection, as tracked at BoardGameGeek. I've decided I want to start getting back into games - there are some really interesting ones coming out these days - and having them pop up there may help motivate me.

Told Ya!

Over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute's web site, Paul Cantor echoes my own brief comments about the film, in much more detail, in "Flying Solo: The Aviator and Libertarian Philosophy"

Zappa Plays Zappa

First of all: You know you're in for a treat when any band comes out and opens with "Echidna's Arf (Of You)". I read in a local free left-wing paper that last year's ZPZ tour focused more on the Overnight Sensation/Apostrophe' period, but that for this year, Dweezil wanted to play more of FZ's more "serious" (for lack of a better word) music, and the set list certainly reflected that. They did do some of the expected stuff from those albums, but there was no sign of "Dinah-Moe Humm" at all. Instead, we got to hear a trilogy of "Son of Suzy Creamcheese/Brown Shoes Don't Make It/America Drinks and Goes Home" from Absolutely Free, "Cheepnis" and "Pygmy Twylite", as well as the aforementioned Echidna, from Roxy & Elsewhere, "Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy", "Advance Romance", and "Muffin Man" from Bongo Fury, and even "G-Spot Tornado" from Jazz From Hell.

There were several songs that used video footage of Frank playing guitar solos, while the band on stage played the rest of the parts. This was used particularly effectively during the encore, when Dweezil traded solos with his father, in which they were both playing the same guitar. And I have to say: Dweezil has grown up into a damn fine guitar player. His soloing style is clearly heavily influenced by Frank, although it is subtly different. Perhaps more conventional, although that's not really a good description for playing that is still so FZ-esque. Great stuff, anyway. And a fine, satisfying concert overall.

Housewarming Party

Brenda & I are planning to open up our new house to anyone who’s willing & able to come by, this Saturday from 1 to 5. There’s still some unpacking left to do, but it’s pretty much a home at this point. We’d love to see any of you who are able to make it.

Please let me know if you plan to be there, if you have any drink preferences, or if you need directions or anything.

Hope to see you there!

Wisconsin Lawmakers Have Too Much Free Time

And hate dogs, apparently (though perhaps not as much as Mitt Romney). From the WSJ, via Reason:

A Wisconsin legislator wants state law to govern how divorced couples handle custody disputes -- over their pets.
...
"I wonder what it was that made someone think that they need to have a special statute for this?" asked Madison divorce attorney Steven Bach, who said he'd had only a handful of pet-custody cases in his 33-year career.
...
Nicky Symons of McFarland thinks she knows what unleashed Albers' legislation.

The legislator is married to Symons' ex-husband, Steven Anders.

In 2003, Symons and Anders divorce was finalized. The divorce included wrangling over who would have to care for and pay for their dog Sammi, short for Samantha. The dispute arose, she said, because neither she nor Anders, who married Albers this year, wanted the aging dog, but their three children did.
...
Albers' bill would prohibit judges from ordering couples to share the placement of a pet -- the arrangement the judge ordered for Sammi -- unless both sides agree to that. If they can't agree on what to do with the pet, the bill allows a judge to give the pet to one spouse or order it sent to the Humane Society.

That seemed "awfully draconian" to Brian Bushaw, a Madison attorney who sits on the State Bar of Wisconsin's family law committee.

"It doesn't sound fair to the dog, frankly," said Bushaw, who doesn't speak for the Bar.

I'm Moved In

I'm officially Moved In, and holy crap, am I tired. We're not unpacked yet, of course – the house is chock full o' boxes – but we have a functioning refrigerator, bed, and TV, so at least we have everything we need to survive while we unpack everything else. And Brenda has a job interview on Monday, at a place literally just down the street from the house.

I'm sure a house warming party will happen at some point. Give us a couple of weeks to get most of the boxes out of the way, and the living room furniture delivered, and then we'll send out invitations.

I Always Suspected This

A 42-year-old dishwasher in Sweden has had his love of heavy metal music officially declared a mental disability (thus entitling him to government disability benefits).

Pictures here, though you won’t be able to read that article unless you understand Swedish.

Artemy Lebedev Is My New Favorite Person

In addition to the infamous "Optimus" computer keyboard – the $1,500 keyboard where each key is a programmable display screen (and yes, I want one) – he’s got other stuff for sale. Like this awesome clock. And these plush emoticons. And this cool eraser.

More House Pics

Here's a Flickr album with all the pictures I have of my new home. Note that I haven't moved in yet, so the furniture in the pics is not mine...

I'm Buying a House

I've accepted the seller's counteroffer on a beautiful 2-story house in Watertown. It looks like this on the outside:


It has this family room:


But that picture doesn't even show the gorgeous wood paneling on the wall in there. You can see a hint of that in this picture of the stairs down to the basement, but even that doesn't do it justice:


Four bedrooms, finished rec room in the basement, and a four-car garage. I'm going to be swimming in garage space.

My Kingdom for a Cable Modem!

Until I can find more permanent living arrangements, I'm staying with my parents while I work the new job. Which means I'm stuck using their dial-up internet connection (at least at home - the office does have a faster connection, obviously, but for the first three weeks, I'm spending all day in a training class, so I never have more than a few minutes to do anything).

This, of course, creates a great incentive for me to find somewhere to move to, and quickly. Fortunately, I have already gotten pre-approval for a home loan, and we have been looking at several quite nice houses in the Watertown area. Life should be improving soon.

Scary/Exciting: Wisconsin Bound

It's official: I have been offered and have accepted a job at AQS, in Hartland, Wisconsin, and I start Monday. Yep, I'm relocating back to the Land of Cheese.

Brenda and I had kind of started talking about "someday" relocating up there in order to be closer to my parents. They're both still in great health, but they are getting older, and eventually they may need someone a little closer at hand to help out occasionally, and my situation seemed to be more flexible to do that than either of my brothers. Plus, we've both wanted to get away from this building we own down here in Dayton so we can stop being landlords, and we really need a lot more space than we have here. This has ended up happening a lot quicker than we had thought, but they've offered me almost $20,000 more than I made last year, which would be tough to turn down even if we hadn't already been contemplating an eventual move up there.

So, since I have to start right away, I'm going up there this weekend and stay, temporarily, with my parents, until I can find something more permanent for Brenda and I to move in to. The eventual goal is to find something somewhere between Hartland and Madison - ideally, I'd like to be within 25-30 minutes of Hartland, but a little west so that I'd be close enough to zip into Madison on the weekends now and then. Hit the farmer's market, meet up with folks for the occasional pint, that sort of thing.

So, if anyone knows of (A) a decent but inexpensive home for sale, or rent, say somewhere around Watertown or the like, or (B) anyone in that general area looking to hire an accountant or payroll specialist (since Brenda still needs to find work up there), we'd love to hear about them...

Michael Bay: Cinematic Genius

As I have said before, even in this very forum: Judged by his full-length films, Michael Bay appears to be a talentless hack. However, I believe he is a master of the short-short film - i.e., the television commercial. His "Aaron Burr"/"Got Milk?" commercial is darn good (if somewhat one-dimensional), but his Levi's "Elevator Fantasy" is, in my honest opinion, one of the Greatest Films Ever Made (assuming a broad enough definition of "film"). Yes, I am entirely serious about this. Now that it's available online (it wasn't when I made that earlier post), you can judge for yourself, if you never saw it or don't remember it:



There's also a high-res version viewable at Bay's official website.

Austrian-School Idol

Every year, American Idol has a couple of predictable "controversies", which people somehow manage to be surprised by, even though the same ones happen, as I said, every year. One of them is the mid-season or so ouster of one of the expected favorites (e.g., Jennifer Hudson), which we haven't quite reached yet in the current season. Another is the relatively untalented contestant who ends up lasting much longer than he/she deserves. This season, that is the infamous Sanjaya Malakar.

It occurs to me that this predictable pattern illustrates an argument, first proposed by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work even in principle. The argument is known as the "calculation problem", and what it says is that in a socialist system, capital goods have no prices (since all transfers of such are simply internal transfers within the government-owned system of producers), and that in the absence of the information conveyed by price signals, it is impossible to rationally calculate the most efficient use of those capital goods. To oversimplify a bit: Without prices, one cannot know what goods really are the most in demand.

This is the problem with American Idol: Voting for contestants is virtually costless (there is only the negligible cost of time spent dialing the phone). It therefore conveys no real information about the preferences of consumers. If you really wanted to know which singer people preferred, what you should do is sell singles/mp3s of each contestant's performance every week, and kick off whoever sells the fewest copies of their song. Free votes are not (necessarily) going to translate into actual sales, once money enters the equation. Without a price, those votes tell us nothing about the actual demand for recordings of one singer versus another.

Extrapolating the implications of this line of reasoning as it applies to votes in a political democracy is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Apparently, I'm Climbing Everest Every Night

I went to the sleep clinic recently to get my sleep apnea (which I knew I had - it runs in the family) diagnosed and treated. The results: Apparently they consider anything over five episodes of breathing cessation per hour to be a diagnosis of "sleep apnea", and over 30 per hour is "severe". I averaged 130 per hour. That's one-hundred-and-thirty.

My O₂ saturation levels were below 90 for 70% of the time I was asleep, and dropped to a low of 53 at one point. It seems to be typically about 80 for people staying at the main Base Camp on Mt. Everest, for crying out loud. I don't know why I haven't just suffocated to death in my sleep before now.

No Blood For Peanut Oil!

Q: What Are We Fighting For? A: Peanut Storage.

As Reason's Hit & Run describes it, the "pork-encrusted Iraq emergency funding bill" includes $74 million for peanut storage in Georgia, $25 million for spinach growers, $120 million for the shrimp and menhaden fishing industries, and various other junk, totalling $20 billion of the $124 billion spending bill.

One assumes these things don't actually have anything to do with Iraq, if only because the alternative is even more terrifying: That our Iraq strategy is somehow dependent on an adequate supply of peanuts, spinach, and shrimp. Perhaps we've decided that all we need for a stable Iraq is to get them hooked on Thai food.

Reviewin' Fool

Tideland - Terry Gilliam's latest movie: The one that about 75% of critics thought was atrociously awful, and the other 25% thought was a work of genius. Yes, it's somewhat divisive. In the opening scene, the main character of the film, a 9-year-old girl, cooks up a hit of heroin for her junkie father, and then helps untie his arm after he shoots up, and puts his cigarette out for him so he doesn't burn the house down as he sinks into a stupor. By the end of the film, she will have spent time nestled in the loving arms of his decomposing corpse, made friends with a strange woman with an uncomfortable obsession with taxidermy, and played kissing games with a brain-damaged adult male. Gilliam has described the film as "Alice In Wonderland meets Psycho", which seems appropriate. The film depicts a group of people who seem about one or two steps away from becoming The Texas Chain Saw Massacre family.

One thing that amazes me is the number of critics who completely missed the point. This is amazing because, before the movie begins, Gilliam himself appears onscreen and speaks directly to the audience (warning them that "many of you will hate this movie"), and he explicitly states the point he was trying to make, which is that children are more resilient than most people nowadays give them credit for. "They're designed to survive," he says, "and when you drop them, they usually bounce." Where many of Gilliam's other films deal with the tension between fantasy and reality, sanity and insanity, this one is about the tension between childhood innocence and adulthood. As such, there are things in it that are horrifying when seen with an adult's perspective, that are... well, let's just say "less horrifying" when viewed by an innocent child.

Personally, I would rank it somewhere between awful and genius. It's not Gilliam's best film (that would be a toss-up between Brazil and Twelve Monkeys), but it's less disappointing than his previous movie, The Brothers Grimm, and I'm frankly mystified by the extreme level of animosity some critics seemed to have toward it.

Heck, I'll Review Anything

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened - Not bad at all. First of all: It's a traditional adventure game (albeit with a 3D, GK3-esque interface, rather than 2D point-and-click) featuring Sherlock Holmes investigating a global conspiracy of Cthulhu cultists. How could I not play this game? Better yet: Despite being essentially a Cthulhu by Gaslight adventure, it also remains true to the authentic Holmes stories by not including anything that is unequivocally supernatural. The story ultimately leaves it ambiguous whether the cultists' activities would actually have awakened Cthulhu and destroyed the world, or if they were merely insane. Furthermore, this game is blessedly free of anything like the obnoxious timed stealth puzzle that intruded into the previous game in the series. The graphics are at times breathtaking, with lovely animated reflective water, bump-mapped surfaces, lovingly modeled gory, dismembered victims... Voice acting is consistently above-average for computer game voice work. I didn't encounter any game-crashing glitches. All in all, a solid game for adventure fans, Holmes fans, and Cthulhu fans. And you don't even need to leave the house to play it - it can be purchased by direct download.

However, I will say, "The Awakened" is sort of an uninspired title. I sort of prefer the original French title, La Nuit des Sacrifiés. Also, in a peculiar affectation, many of the characters in the game appear to be named after various personalities from the early history of pen-and-paper RPGs: There's a Dr. Gygax, a man named Arneson, and a couple of books authored by E. Otus and D. Niles, although they seem to have left out the obvious Petersen.

Now that the NDA has been lifted...

Here you can see a man of Gondor looking over the town of Combe (described in Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-Earth as a "village in a valley in the eastern Bree-land.")

This is, of course, a screenshot from the beta test of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. So far, I'm generally pleased. There are some Tolkien purists who object to the liberties being taken*, but so far I haven't seen anything that completely breaks it for me. I may change my mind if the "Lore-master" character class starts tossing explosive fireballs around at higher levels.

Much (ok, all) of the gameplay is virtually identical to World of Warcraft. Many people are disappointed by this. I'm not sure I am - WoW does so much right that just lifting essentially the same gameplay out of the generic-fantasy setting of WoW and plonking it down into Middle-Earth, with a less cartoonish graphic style... I can't complain very hard about that.

There are some clever and surprising touches, as well. For example, like other MMORPGs, this has a "newbie" area for new players/characters to get their feet wet without facing anything too deadly. For men and hobbits, this transitions seamlessly into the main game, but for elves and dwarves, those newbie quests take place years earlier. Actually, in the case of elves, I think it may be centuries earlier. As a dwarf, you get to start out in the Blue Mountains just as Thorin and Company are preparing to set out on their quest to the Lonely Mountain. Elves are present during an attack on the elven Refuge of Edhelion (not listed in Foster, unfortunately) by a group of corrupted dwarves, and then "return" to its ruins centuries later for the main game.

Basically, I like it well enough that I've already pre-ordered it. I'm contemplating whether I want to go all out and pay the $199 for a "lifetime membership", instead of the monthly fee - if I stay on it for 2 years, it'd be worth it, and I think I may do that. If you're interested (and have a fairly hefty computer...), they're doing an open stress test next weekend that you can sign up for at Gamespot.

And boy, it sure is pretty, ain't it?

* A particularly obtuse example: A group of characters working together in this game is, naturally, labeled a "Fellowship" (in WoW, they're called a Party. It's just "flavor" text). In this post, someone actually says, "I still am wondering why in Eru’s name a Fellowship does not consist of nine players". In other words, because the "Fellowship of the Ring" consisted of nine people, he believes that all "Fellowships" should always and exclusively consist of exactly nine people. Gaaah.

This is pretty awesome.

Technology in the year 2000, as predicted in a 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.

I particularly like the amusing image of businessmen with documents "held up for examination" over their video phones. And yet, in the very same article, they talk about 5-cent facsimile document transmission over "telegraph" lines. I guess it didn't occur to them to link those two concepts: Even in the world they describe in the article, I'd pay the nickel to send the actual document around to my videoconference colleagues, just to avoid putting myself in the ridiculous position of holding paperwork up to a video camera for them to read.

And forget the personal helicopter (I've seen how people drive on the ground): What I want is the $5000 house, where I can clean the living room just by hosing it down.

More Movies

The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch - Not as good as the original. This is mostly some new interview footage interspersed with outtakes from the first movie. There are a few good bits in the interviews, particularly with Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, and Bonnie Raitt. Unfortunately, there's also a tiresome running gag that's basically an inferior retread of an old Python bit, with Jimmy Fallon as a rival documentarian stealing Idle's microphone. Recommended for serious fans only.

The Notorious Bettie Page - Very nice. Gretchen Mol does a simply amazing job of recreating the innocent playfulness of Page's modeling and film-loop work. The look of the film is great - it's in both black & white and color at various times and places, but the color scenes were shot on old film stock, so it looks like the sort of Technicolor/Kodachrome color film available in the period (while watching, I had assumed they'd just created that look digitally during the color-balancing stage, but apparently they actually shot on old color film stock).

Creativity On Parade

"Teri Polo is set to reprise her role as Ben Stiller's wife in "Meet the Little Focker," the third installment of the movie franchise."

Boy, we sure weren't expecting that, were we?

NCR Invents Time Travel

NCR earnings up 16 percent after restructuring

The global restructuring of its manufacturing resources and market adoption of enhanced payment systems in ATM technology are among the reasons that NCR Corp. today announced a 5 percent increase in 2005 fourth quarter earnings and expects to generate 2 percent to 3 percent year-over-year growth in 2007.

Amazing how that "global restructuring of its manufacturing resources", which NCR only just announced on Jan. 11, and which hasn't actually, physically happened yet, managed to increase revenues in the 4th quarter of last year.

I should perhaps mention here that there doesn't seem to be anything in NCR's actual earnings statement or press release that attributes this past increase to the upcoming restructuring; that appears to be entirely the fantasy of the Dayton Daily News staff writer who wrote the news story.

Big Pile of Movies

Recently viewed:

Pan's Labyrinth - I'm put into a peculiar position with regard to this film. It's a good movie, but I'm forced to say I was disappointed by it, because I had read several reviews which had led me to expect it to be spectacularly wonderful, so I was disappointed when it was merely good. When someone says something like, "For several minutes after seeing the movie, the only thing I could think of to say was, “Wow!”", I'm looking for something on the level of 12 Monkeys, Amélie, or A Very Long Engagement. Pan's Labyrinth is not on that level. Yet, it is a good movie, and it was worth seeing.

Dreamgirls - Pretty impressive. I've occasionally been in movies before where the audience applauded at the end. I think this may have been the first movie I've ever been in where a performance brought about an ovation in the middle of the film. I'm speaking, of course, of Jennifer Hudson's big number, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going". What I found impressive about that, specifically, is that it would have been very easy for Hudson to let the song do all the emoting in the scene for her, but she doesn't: She acts, through the song, and she's playing simultaneous anger, betrayal, heartbreak... Yeah: She earned that Golden Globe. Eddie Murphy is also amazing, and boy, they sure didn't shy away from Beyonce's character being "loosely based on" Diana Ross, did they? There are some really recognizable hairdos and outfits in there.

Eragon - Enh. This felt like it was written by a 17-year-old D&D geek. Oh, right, it actually was... A particular favorite moment of mine was when the Good Guys are all waiting in their fortress for the Bad Guys to come and get them, and they basically just sit there waiting while the Bad Guys break through the stone wall surrounding the Good Guys' fortress. Um, guys? Why aren't you up on top of that wall, throwing rocks down on the Bad Guys who are breaking through it? You've been taking strategy and tactics lessons from those RPG nerds who played the "Siege of Minas Tirith" at Gen Con years ago, who immediately marched the entire vastly outnumbered Gondorian army outside the walls of the city and into the fields to meet the enemy (who promptly slaughtered them), haven't you? By the way, if you value your sanity, don't read that IMDB discussion thread, "Paolini or Tolkien?", wherein fans "debate" which one is the better writer.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Pretty good, despite its obvious anti-corporate, anti-capitalist bias. Early on, the narrator poses a question that goes something like, "Was this just a few unprincipled men? Or was it the dark side of the American Dream?" Well, personally, my answer is the former. I am sick and tired of people pointing to things done by individuals and blaming the entire capitalist economic structure. This wasn't a failure of "capitalism", it was that guy. Theft and fraud are not inherent to capitalist economy - they're aberrations, and these people would have found some unscrupulous way to make themselves rich at others' expense under any economic system, and I would argue that under any system other than capitalism, they would have had a much easier time of it, and would probably never have been caught. Still, the anti-corporate bias of this documentary was not quite as bad as I feared/expected, and it isn't hard to look past if you already know at least a little bit about California's energy "deregulation" and the crisis it caused.

That Ain't Half Ominous, Is It?

As you may know, the company I worked for recently announced some pretty significant layoffs, though ones which do not affect me directly. This also came shortly after the company split off a major division into a separate company.

Given this context, can you blame me for being a bit concerned about the fact that my boss just sent out a meeting notice for next Wednesday, to everyone who works for him, with the vague subject heading of "Department Meeting", and a completely blank message body?

(I have since been assured that, at least, this is not anything dramatically bad. No mass firings or the like. Still, in the current environment, he couldn't have produce any more of a feeling of looming dread if he had left black cards with our names printed in white on each of our desks...).

Big Pile of Christmas (Part Three)

This year's highlights:

A bunch of pants, some shirts, and a couple of pairs of shoes. Don't scoff, I did really need them.

Heroscape, plus a couple of expansion sets - a really cool-looking boardgame, with the added advantage that it should work well as a 2-player game, so Brenda & I can play it without having to find any other people willing to play a "children's game". It seems to be sort of a strategy-game equivalent of the old simplified-RPG-type game Heroquest (and I think it's by the same designer). I actually got two copies of the basic game set, and I was sorely tempted to keep them both, but ended up giving one to my nephew. Perhaps I'll ask for another copy next year... The primary online community for the game offers home-brewed scenarios that require up to five copies of the basic set.

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy for the PS2 - Very nice. I had the first one, and it was plenty o' fun, even being based on the crappy prequels. Therefore, being essentially the same game but based on the Good Ones, I would logically expect this one to be even better.

Only One Place of Redress - a book about how African-Americans have been harmed by government labor regulations (including minimum wage laws) through the years.

A copy of the V for Vendetta DVD, complete with a Guy Fawkes mask. Now I know what I'm wearing for Halloween this year.

Overheard on Penn's Radio Show

Sexual-Political Identity
Republicans: Don't put anything up your ass.
Democrats: You can put things in your ass, but it must be approved, regulated, and taxed by a federal agency.
Libertarians: Put anything you want up your ass, just don't call me to take it out when it gets stuck.

Big Pile of Christmas (Part Two)

Just because technology has made it possible, here is a picture of this year's Christmas haul taken earlier today:


Here's a little better view of the tree itself:


And here are a bunch of bloggers disagreeing with each other, earlier this year:

More Amazement

Here's another great one: Zappa's band covering the Allman Brothers' song, "Whipping Post". Those of you with more "mainstream" musical tastes may enjoy this one more than the other one I posted about:



This footage is from the concert video, "Does Humor Belong In Music?" The album/CD version of "Does Humor Belong In Music?" seems to use a recording of this song from a different performance, but I actually prefer the version from the video.

That's a Knife!

OK, this new Swiss Army Knife is going on my Christmas list now.



Yes, it's real.

This is Effin' Amazing

This is Frank Zappa and the (1968 lineup) Mothers performing "King Kong" on what appears to be British television. Try to ignore the cheesy '60s video effects that creep in toward the end and just listen to the glorious awesomeness.

There Are No 14-Year-Old Girls On The Internet

An Allen County schoolteacher is the 75th person charged by the Fairborn Internet Crimes Unit, police said.
[...]
Police said the science teacher at Elida North High School attempted to meet a detective, who posed as a 14-year-old girl in Internet chats during the past month, for sex.

Penn Jillette made an interesting point on his radio show a little while back: He suggested that there's a risk here that these guys they're trapping like this might never have tried anything if they had been talking to an actual teenage girl, because they might have then realized how shallow and uninteresting actual teenage girls really are. In other words, is it possible that some of these men are only trying to meet the "teenage girls" they're talking to, because adult detectives posing as teenage girls are more attractive (intellectually/emotionally) than actual teenage girls?

Big Pile of Christmas (Part One)

In preparation for this year's trip to Wisconsin for Hogswatchnight, I have created a DVD filled with MP3s of Chrismahanukwanzakah music, with the intention of letting it play in the background while we open presents, thereby escaping the dismal prison of any particular radio station's playlist, while also avoiding the need to get up periodically and change discs.

Since this DVD contains 971 songs, I'm hoping we'll be able to get our unwrapping done without the DVD player having to repeat more than the first couple hundred or so...

God Damn It

The mainstream media is at it again. A study shows short-term effects on brain activity when playing video games, and that these short-term effects are different depending on whether the game is violent or not.

"Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent, but exciting, game... What we showed is there is an increase in emotional arousal. The fight or flight response is activated after playing a violent video game," Mathews said.

No real surprise there, if you ask me.

Mathews said he hopes to conduct additional studies on the long-term effects on brain function of exposure to violent video games.

So what is CNN.com's headline on this story about (rather unsurprising) short-term effects, in which the researcher explicitly makes it clear that the results say nothing about long-term effects? Why, naturally, the headline summarizes the story thusly: "Study: Violent video game effects linger in brain"

Why, yes, that does seem to be precisely the opposite of what the study actually examined, thank you for asking.

Proposed Constitutional Amendments

If you've been reading this blog for a long time (and really, why would you?), you may remember that back in January of last year, I proposed a Constitutional amendment so that, upon re-election, any returning incumbent president would be required to append to the normal oath of office, after promising (again) to protect and defend the Constitution, etc., the new phrase, "And this time, I mean it."

I would now like to propose another amendment:

(1) Any law passed by Congress shall expire on a date five (5) years after the date on which the law takes effect. Once expired, the law shall be null and void, exactly as if it had been repealed by act of Congress.
(2) For all laws currently in effect at the time this amendment is ratified, the expiration date shall be the month and day of the original effective date of the law, with the year of expiration to be determined by the rightmost digit of the statute's number: Add that number to the year in which this amendment is ratified to determine the year in which that section of the US Code will expire.

Basically, by adding an expiration date to all laws passed by Congress, you give them something important to do. My psychological theory is, Congress needs to Do Stuff in order to feel important. If they spent an entire session just sitting around and not passing any laws, Congresspeople would feel useless and unimportant, and that's not why they went into politics.

With my proposed amendment, Congress can keep itself busy passing laws, without actually adding new laws, or at least without adding pointless or even downright destructive new laws, since they'll be able to congratulate themselves for at least keeping murder and treason illegal. And the more time they spend on actual important stuff like that, the less time they'll have to get... meddlesome.

EDIT: One other point: By setting the expiration date at 5 years, it deliberately does not match the terms of office for Senators and Representatives. This increases the likelihood that a "different" Congress (i.e., with a different balance of power) will be re-examining the law as it approaches expiration.

Movie-Film Review

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: Funniest movie of the year, certainly. I would rank this as being in the same league of funny as South Park, Team America, and Bad Santa.

I've seen some reactions that, I think, miss the point slightly. I don't think Borat is ultimately about exposing the "bigotry and ugliness" running rampant in America, though that is one element of it. I think Christopher Hitchens got it right: It's fundamentally about politeness.

We want to be polite to people, at least people as seemingly innocent and charming as Borat comes across, and to be tolerant of people from different cultural backgrounds. But the Borat character presents people with an insolvable dilemma: We want to be tolerant of other cultures, yet Borat apparently comes from a culture that is itself so bigoted and intolerant as to be, well, intolerable. You can see the tension in people dealing with this paradox, between the urge to be polite and accepting, and the urge to confront him. Frankly, I have more respect for the people who do confront him, and refuse to put up with his bigotry just because it comes packaged in a pleasantly innocent Latka-esque character. It's the folks who try to get along with him that end up pining for the return of slavery.

I'm Rich, Bee-yotch!

I'm the 155,652,174 richest person on earth! Discover how rich you are! >>

Best Onion Headline Ever

Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections

Best Headline Ever

Duct tape no substitute for a babysitter, police say

Kerry's Big Faux Pas

GOP slams Kerry for telling students to study or "get stuck in Iraq"

It appears that we have now arrived at a point where American politics is conducted entirely by outrage: Political discourse now consists exclusively of being offended by some remark made by someone on the other side. And don't mistake this as a dig at the Republicans, just because they're the ones whose turn it is currently to be offended. The Democrats are just as guilty.

I hate CSI: Miami

First of all, CSI: Miami, which has always been the least well-done of the franchise, has lately become a show that I watch mostly to make fun of. It hasn't quite sunk to the MST3K-levels of 24, but it's getting there. My private fantasy is that they will find a way to bring in William Shatner to play David Caruso's father in a cameo.

This week's episode dealt with eminent domain abuse, which is a worthwhile topic. Basically, the city government had condemned a whole street of houses, so that a developer could build a high-rise hotel there, all in accordance with the Supreme Court's recent lousy ruling in Kelo v. New London. At one point two of the CSI characters had this exchange of dialogue:

"It's hard to believe that this kind of thing can happen in this country."
"Well, capitalism opens a lot of doors."

NO! No, no, no! Armed (government) thugs forcing you off of your land at gunpoint is not "capitalism", goddamn it! If anything, it's closer to socialism than to capitalism.

Look, under true free-market capitalism, the developer would negotiate with each homeowner on that street to buy their land at a mutually-agreed-upon price. If "the city needs my hotel", as the developer asserts in the episode, then he will have no problem finding investors and backing to purchase the necessary land. The current owners will get what they feel is a fair price, they'll be able to buy a new home elsewhere (assuming that's what they want to do with the money), and the developer and investors in the hotel will make a profit (assuming they've judged the demand for hotel space correctly) - everyone wins. On the other hand, if the developer cannot find backing to purchase the land at its true value (i.e., what the owners are willing to sell for), then that is the market's way of telling you that it doesn't really need a high-rise hotel that badly.

Eminent domain takings involve the use of government force to obtain property for less than what it would cost in a free market. What makes eminent domain abuse a Bad Thing is not that it is an example of capitalism, but rather that it is violent government interference with capitalism.

Is this another "Farewell" tour?

Streisand to heckler: 'Shut the @#&% up'

There was Streisand, enduring a smattering of very loud jeers as she and "George Bush" -- a celebrity impersonator -- muddled through a skit that portrayed the president as a bumbling idiot.

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

"Come on, be polite!" the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and "Bush" exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

"Shut the (expletive) up!" Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. "Shut up if you can't take a joke!"
[...]
Once the outburst (which Streisand later apologized for) was over, Streisand noted that "the artist's role is to disturb,"

Oh, bullshit, Babs. You just thought your fanbase would all enjoy a little Bush-bashing, and when some of them expressed disapproval, you freaked out. You weren't trying to "disturb" anyone, you were trying to preach to the choir. It just turned out that some of the choir weren't on the same page.

Reviews

Movie Review: We watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night. Nice costumes and production design, but not much else. It's one of those "love stories" where the great lovers meet once, exchange maybe four sentences between them, and then spend years apart pining for each other. Which in this case is made a bit creepy by the fact that that first meeting is between a middle-aged businessman and a 9-year-old... I was also hoping for a bit more about the actual day-to-day life of a geisha, but since both the novel and the film were written and directed by westerners, perhaps that was expecting too much. Oh, and it was a little bit distracting to watch all those Chinese people playing Japanese characters - though I suppose that if the blatantly Scottish Sean Connery can play a Russian sub commander, that sort of thing can be overlooked.

Book Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett. This is the latest in the Tiffany Aching sub-series of Discworld books, aimed at younger (i.e., adolescent) readers. You know, the Harry Potter books are decent enough, and I’m glad they’ve got kids reading, and reading big thick books at that. But none of them have yet contained one of those little passages that Pratchett tends to have all over the place, that just drop your jaw with how well-written it is. The ones that hit you like a sledgehammer in the chest, like this one, which appears at the end of a chapter in which a funeral occurs, after the grave has been filled in and all but one of the mourners have left:

Tiffany sat on a stump and cried for a bit, because it needed to be done. Then she went and milked the goats, because someone needed to do that, too.

If there has ever been a more perfect expression of grief, and of the letting go of grief, in the English language, well, I've never read it. And the fact that a passage of such exquisite beauty can inhabit the same book that features six-inch tall blue highlanders shouting "Ach! Crivins!", a witch who specializes in holding her breath and swimming away underwater after being thrown in the river by paranoid villagers, and a kitten named You (as in "You! Stop that!" and "You, get down from there!"), just makes the whole thing that much more amazing.

To anyone reading this: If you like Harry Potter, you need to meet Tiffany Aching. The book to start with is called The Wee Free Men, and is followed by A Hat Full of Sky and then Wintersmith. According to Pratchett (at a convention in 2004), the fourth one will be called When I Am Old I Shall Wear Midnight, but we don't know yet when that one will be written and published.

After those, you'll probably want to consult the L-space Web Reading Order Guides and perhaps read the "Witch" sub-series, since several of the same characters are involved in those. Or just start back at the beginning with The Colour of Magic and read 'em all through in chronological order.

I wonder if they even know...

I can't tell you how proud I am to be living in Cornhole Country.

Straw Man Eaten by Crocodile! Film at 11!

By now, I'm sure anyone who cares knows that Germaine Greer took the opportunity to gloat over Steve Irwin's tragic accidental death, saying things like "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". Not satisfied with being merely insensitive, Greer spouts ridiculous, PETA-like levels of delusional lunacy.

But my personal favorite bit is this:

You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's sake.)

So, here, Greer imagines something she thinks sounds sort of like what Irwin might possibly have said, and then proceeds to criticize him for saying it. I hate to point this out, love, but you're taking issue with a "Steve Irwin" who only exists inside your own head. I'm skeptical that the real Steve Irwin would ever have said "With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse", since that statement is patently untrue.

What the Hell?

I really have nothing to add to this commentary about Ohio's plan to allow judges to designate people as sex offenders, without actually requiring that they first be convicted of any crime.

I Want This

This has got to be the coolest thing in the goddamn world.

Movie Night

Wolf Creek (Unrated version)

I'd have to describe myself as "unimpressed". It's essentially Texas Chainsaw Massacre set in the Australian outback, only it's just one guy instead of a family of psychos, and it lacks TCM's sense of humor, if you can call it that. Three young tourists in Australia get kidnapped and tortured by a sadistic psycho. Now, I’m not going to say it's a bad movie just because it's a misogynist torture-fest (that would be hypocritical: I do own a copy of Bloodsucking Freaks in my DVD collection, after all). But it’s a bad misogynist torture-fest.

It had two major problems, as well as most of the usual minor problems (characters doing inexplicably dumb things*, for example); some spoilers may follow:

1) At the start, it claims to be "based on true events". But there’s a big chunk of the film that depicts events that went unwitnessed by the only survivor, and the recap at the end says that "No trace of [the other two] was ever found." If you’re going to claim to be a "true story", you need to make sure that everything you show was either witnessed by someone who survived to the end, or could have been pieced together/inferred from the evidence the police find later.

2) It uses what I would call the "super-competent serial killer" – For example, out of a garage full of cars (from his prior victims), how did he manage to be hiding in the back seat of the ONE CAR our protagonist got into and tried to start? He’s also an absolute dead-eye shot with a rifle from hundreds of yards away. Just supremely skilled at everything he does. You can kind of get away with that sort of thing if your killer is supposed to be supernatural (e.g., Freddy Krueger), but if he's just a crazy guy, it breaks suspension of disbelief when he’s that lucky and that good at absolutely everything.

Nice cinematography of the Australian scenery, though. Probably not worth sitting through just for that. The movie does start off with some promise, because we spend about 40 minutes before anything horrific happens, just following the characters on their trip. I almost said "getting to know the characters", but that isn't really true, since they don't really have identifiable personalities, they're just sort of generic "carefree young person" templates. But once the screaming starts... put it this way: It's not the worst horror movie I've ever seen, by a long shot. But if I want to watch pretty scenery, I'd rather put on the Discovery HD channel; if I want to watch a scary/disturbing horror movie, I'd rather stick in Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and if I want to watch a misogynist torture-fest, I'd rather subscribe to one of the hundreds of S&M-oriented internet porn sites. All of which renders this film spectacularly pointless.

*By "inexplicably dumb things", I mean, for example: If you've snuck back into the killer's lair, while he's otherwise occupied, for the specific purpose of finding a getaway vehicle ("If I'm not back in 5 minutes, start walking."), why, in the name of all that is holy, WHY would you climb down into a HOLE in the GROUND underneath a water tower? And then act all shocked when all that's down there is the rotting corpses of the psycho's past victims. What did you think you were going to find? A subway station? That burrowing vehicle from The Core, maybe?

Reading is Hard!

Wasn't this an episode of "Yes, Minister"?

From Reason's Hit and Run:

In April, 327 members of the House of Representatives voted for a classified intelligence bill, thereby authorizing some of the administration's anti-terrorism measures. 96 voted against it. And according to The Boston Globe, approximately a dozen representatives read it...

It really doesn't come as a surprise to me that our lawmakers don't bother to read laws before voting on them. This certainly isn't the first time it's been reported on, even discounting BBC sitcoms. That doesn't make it any less disturbing, mind you, just less unexpected.

Understatement

A couple of minutes ago, on the TV in the cafeteria here at work, I saw Fox News running a report on current events, with a caption at the bottom of the screen reading "Mideast Turmoil".

"Turmoil"? "Turmoil"!? They're lobbing missiles at each other! That's not "turmoil", that's open warfare.

Tomorrow Belongs To Me

Who Said It: Ann Coulter or Adolf Hitler?

I got 11 out of 14...

I do think that this quiz would have been even better if it had included three authors: Ann Coulter, Adolf Hitler, and Michael Moore. Or possibly Al Franken, but there definitely should have been some representative from the left. Surely there is one who has said enough hateful things about conservatives to have been included in a quiz like this one. I'd do it myself, but then I'd have to, y'know, actually read some of the crap these people have spewed.

BTW, just to be clear: The person who created the quiz says elsewhere: "For this quiz I've replaced some of Hitler's pro-Aryan and anti-Semitic language with the words, "America", "Democrat", "liberal", and "the liberal media" to make the Coulter quotes a little more difficult to spot."

I mention this because some witless Republican (posting in the thread on Reason's website where this was linked to) pointed this out, saying "Jesus, people, do you all believe everything you read? [...] Liberals are not only liars, they're also gullible and stupid" (apparently mistaking "libertarian" for "liberal").

To which one of the libertarian Reason readers responded, "you need to have another web site tell you that Hitler didn't actually make statements about liberals in America, and you're calling other people stupid?"

Lions and Tigers and... Oh, my!

Ok, now CNN is clearly just reporting stories that are specifically targeted to get mentioned on "The Colbert Report":

Study: Warming turns bears into cannibals
"Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century."

I ask you, was there ever a news story that sounded more like it was deliberately designed to get Colbert calling for people to do their part to increase global warming, now!?

On a slightly more serious note, I really think someone ought to do a study of news reports. I could swear that the number of actual, serious news reports involving bears has increased dramatically since "The Colbert Report" started airing.

What a bunch of [FILL IN REACTIONARY DESCRIPTION OF GRANOLA-LOVING HIPPIES HERE]

I can't think of anything else to say about this story:

Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.

"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the "threat" posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.

But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

Whoops, Apocalypticism!

Pic is coming

That picture from our little get-together is coming, it's just a little slow because, when I got back to Ohio, my PC didn't work. The replacement should be arriving soon...

Dolphin Suffrage Now!

Dolphins have names, "making them the only animals besides humans known to recognize such identity information, scientists reported on Monday."

"It's a very interesting finding that encourages further research, because they are using whistles as referential signals -- that's what words are," said Sayigh, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "Dolphins appear to be using these arbitrary signals to identify another dolphin."

As a general rule, I don't agree with animal rights activists. Dolphins are an exception: I think it's possible they should be treated as moral agents with rights, and that the only reason we haven't recognized them as such is our inability to communicate with them. Their cognitive abilities are impressive: Tool use, self-awareness, and now the use of verbal names. Perhaps more importantly, the stories of human divers in trouble being rescued by dolphins, who sometimes go so far as to attack sharks to keep them away from the humans, suggest at least the possibility of moral development, in addition to cognitive development. Given the possibility of moral agency, I'm inclined to treat dolphins as sort of provisional-persons: I can't really grant them full person-hood without more evidence, but at the same time I think we ought to avoid really egregious abuses, such as hunting them for food/sport, just in case.

Unnecessary Travel

Just to let the Madison contingent of my fan base know, I will be up in Wisconsin for the weekend of May 19-21. If anyone wants to get together, we'll probably try to hit Madison at some point. I'll be fresh from seeing "Spamalot" on stage in Chicago.

You Will Pay the Price for Your Lack of Vision

I don't want to be too disparaging here: Putting a tiny pair of eyeglasses on a housefly does require a certain mad kind of genius. But if you're going to all the trouble of laser-etching a pair of fly-sized glasses, why, oh why wouldn't you go all the way with it, and make them Groucho glasses?

Addition to Previous Movie Post

After watching Brokeback Mountain, we loaned it to someone Brenda works with. It seems she had wanted to see it, but her husband was too embarrassed to rent the infamous "gay cowboy" movie at the video store.

Pansy.

So, before loaning it to this person, I whipped up (so to speak) the World's Gayest DVD Cover* for it, just to annoy this guy I've never even met. For those who might also have some use for it, here it is (it's an insert for a DVD thin-pack, not the full-size DVD cases). Click for full size:


*Well, gayest without actually being gay porn, anyway. I do have some sense of compassion...

Oscar-Nominated Movies

Brokeback Mountain - I was about as unimpressed as I expected to be. This is one of those movies where people have intense, emotional conversations with each other while gazing off in opposite directions, instead of looking at each other. Y'know, the way people in the real world behave.

It also struck me as very obviously being a movie about homosexual men made primarily by heterosexuals. It contains/reinforces a bunch of heterosexual misconceptions about gay relationships - e.g., it's basically all about the sex, the sex is rough & macho, etc. I never got any sense of a romantic connection between them - it's a very Ancient Greek conception of homosexuality, where they're basically masculine camping/hiking/fishing "buddies", except they also have sex.

I can see why it had some mainstream appeal - it's a very safe movie for straight people. Sure, they're gay, but they're also basically disgusted by their own behavior, at least at first. It certainly doesn't present their relationship as in any way normal, which would have been much more groundbreaking and risky. And, at the risk of giving it away, it follows the normal mainstream Hollywood Rule of Gay Relationships: It must End Badly, preferably with the death of at least one partner.

I guess I've just seen so many other good little independent movies actually made by gay men, that this just seemed unrealistic and stereotyped, and surprisingly prissy about it all.

I Must Be a Violent Dope Fiend By Now

Violent video games linked to risky behaviors. Well, um, sort of.

First of all: I applaud the researchers for actually matching similar games for their violent vs. non-violent comparison. An earlier study I'm aware of compared playing Quake to playing Myst, and it's hard to imagine two games more different from each other in every conceivable way, leaving many, many uncontrolled variables other than merely "violence level". Here, they matched Grand Theft Auto III against The Simpsons: Hit and Run, which has very similar gameplay to GTAIII, but cartoonish instead of gritty & violent. Bravo.

But what effects did they actually observe? Those who played the more violent game:

1. Immediately afterwards, were less cooperative/more competitive.
   
2. Immediately afterwards, were more likely to interpret others' attitudes as hostile toward them.
   
3. Immediately afterwards, expressed more permissive attitudes toward alcohol/marijuana use.
   
4. Only among those with higher exposure to real-life violence, elevated systolic blood pressure.
   

Once again, we have a study that measures an effect (or several effects) immediately after playing a violent video game, but makes no apparent attempt to measure whether/how quickly this effect normalizes over time. Is there still a measurable difference an hour later? A day? Is the effect permanent and cumulative? We don't know...

Now, about the headline: It's a complete lie. The study has not in any way linked violent video games to risky behaviors. It has linked violent video games to permissive attitudes about risky behaviors. I'd like to see how the question was worded: It could be that violent video games just make players more forgiving of risky behaviors in others, but not more likely to personally engage in such behaviors.

It's also unfortunate that Reuters doesn't report any more information than one can glean from the abstract of the actual study. I don't really want to pay $15 just to find out the actual magnitude of these observed effects. How much more competitive? How much more permissive?

What Did You Do At Work Today, Daddy?

Boy, if you're familiar at all with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge, these pictures drawn by children of BATF employees/agents are really disturbing.

Random Rules

Just because I think it will be fun, I'm doing a "Random Rules", based on the new occasional feature in The Onion. To quote their explanation: "In "Random Rules," we ask our favorite rockers, writers, comedians, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to "shuffle" and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping allowed."

So, here's mine:

Kronos Quartet/Terry Riley - "Salome and Half-Wolf Descend Through the Gates to the Underworld"
Nice modern/minimalist string quartet. This is from a long work called Salome Dances For Peace. I first heard part of it that was included on one of the Kronos Quartet's albums ("Half-Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight", on Winter Was Hard). Frenetic, I think would be the word to describe most of it.

Peter McConnell - "Blue Casket Bop"
This is from the soundtrack for the computer game, Grim Fandango. The game is, I think, the closest anyone has ever come to producing Literature in the video game medium, and the musical score is one of the best I've ever heard in a game. This particular bit is a cool jazz number.

Devo - "Booji Boy and General Boy/We're All Devo"
This is basically just a short "filler" track from their best-of anthology, Pioneers Who Got Scalped. Not much to say about that.

Frank Zappa - "Run Home Cues #3"
Some of the incidental music Zappa wrote for the obscure movie, Run Home Slow, which he included on the album The Lost Episodes. I've never seen the movie. The music is somewhat unusual: For some reason the Run Home Slow music reminds me of Mahler more than most of Zappa's other orchestral music, which usually sounds more like Stockhausen.

Frank Zappa - "Stinkfoot"
Well, my MP3 player is pretty heavily loaded with Zappa right now, it's only natural he'd be repeated. This particular track is from a bootleg concert recording - 23 May 1975, El Paso County Coliseum. As always, the musicianship is phenomenal. Decent guitar solo. This is one of Zappa's better band lineups, although my favorite lineup (at least at the moment) is probably the slightly-earlier Ruth Underwood era.

That's the usual five songs, but as an added bonus, here are the next ten that popped up, without comment (along with the album title they come from), just so you can see what a typical playlist would look like on the hypothetical Coolest Radio Station Ever:

nine inch nails - "All The Love In The World" (With Teeth)
Trey Parker - "The Trapper Song" (Cannibal: The Musical - Soundtrack)
Tom Waits - "Tango Till They're Sore" (Rain Dogs)
The Clash - "Police & Thieves" (The Story of The Clash, Volume 1)
Michael Nyman - "While You Here Do Snoring Lie" (Prospero's Books - Soundtrack)
Frank Zappa - "Intro" (Donna You Wanna)
Beastie Boys - "Alright Hear This" (Ill Communication)
The Chieftains w/ Gillian Welch - "Katie Dear"
Frank Zappa - "Muffin Man" (Kreega Bondola)
Frank Zappa - "Montana" (Cuccurullo Brillo Brullo)

Want some cheese with that whine?

"Insufferable self-importance", indeed.

(Disclaimer: This is not a comment on the relative quality of the actual films. I have not yet seen any of this year's Best Picture nominees.)

Movie Review (aka My First Netflix Rental)

Walk The Line - Wow, this was actually really disappointing. Perhaps I just had unrealistically high expectations from all the praise lavished upon this film, but I found it to be just a very average, run-of-the-mill musician biopic. All the formulaic elements are there: The pre-fame struggle, the "quit following your dream and get a real job so you can take care of me & the baby" scene, the "here, try some of these pills" scene, the "please respect me now, Dad" scene, and, of course, his entire life revolves around a single tragic event from his childhood. The performances are good, I suppose, although I never for a moment forgot that I was watching Joaquin Phoenix and not Johnny Cash (or listening to him, for that matter: For all the praise of Phoenix's singing, Cash was still much better). Probably worth seeing if you're a Johnny Cash fan, but I can't really recommend it much otherwise. As someone said, it's Ray with white people, except I would add that Ray was a somewhat better movie.

Weird Picture

In the Onion's review of the movie Ultraviolet, they display this still from the film:

What's weird is that this picture looks almost like a 3D rendering to me, except that I can't think of any good reason why they would CGI a character standing calmly doing nothing. I think it's the shadows - for some reason, the picture looks like a sample render designed to demonstrate ambient occlusion shadowing. For those who don't know what I mean, here's a quickie example I whipped up in Poser 6:

Because of the way ambient occlusion is calculated, it tends to over-emphasize certain small details like the belly-button. I left mine with the flat look Poser 6 gives with the default IBL/AO lighting (it lacks specular highlights), just to emphasize what I'm talking about. If I spent more time on it, matching lighting and so on, I suspect I could come up with something that looks even closer to the other pic. You can see some of the kind of "show-off the ambient occlusion" sample renders I'm talking about at this gallery page on e-frontier's Poser pages.

I don't think the Ultraviolet image is actually CGI, but I wonder if they've deliberately lit the scene in some way to make the live-action shots look as much like CGI as possible, in order to better match the CGI special-effects shots. And if so, I wonder how they did it.

I also think it's impressive that consumer/hobbyist-level software like Poser is now capable of producing output like that. Poser up through version 4 (and even 5 to some extent) was a whole lot less realistic than it is now.

Vote For Pedro

So that's why I was so unimpressed by Napoleon Dynamite: It's clearly just a rip-off of "Homestar Runner". I don't know how I missed that.

I'm not sure who it was that said it, but my favorite description of Napoleon Dynamite was that it is "an 'Independent Film' for people who don't really like independent films". Personally, though, I would be even more specific: It's Welcome to the Dollhouse for people who don't have the balls to really like Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Pen Stolen

Today on CNN.com, a headline on the "front page":


Now, I will admit to watching "American Idol". I'm not proud of it, but I'll admit it. Last night, four of this season's semi-finalists were eliminated: The two men and the two women with the lowest numbers of votes. None of the eliminated contestants even sang well this week, so even the specifics of which people were voted off didn't come as a real surprise.

So how in the bloody Hell is this news, when a television show proceeds exactly as planned? If they had booted four contestants because they found them participating in a Satanic ritual goat-sacrifice, that might be newsworthy*. What's next: "Price Is Right Contestant Wins New Car"?

And yes, the title I put on this post is a reference to a classic Onion story, although it was in their pre-Internet days, so it's not in their online archive.

*Not "front page" newsworthy, but probably worth mentioning. A Satanic ritual infant-sacrifice, now, that I'd put on the front page.

Still Here

I haven't posted much lately, because I've been busy at work. Having said that:

Is there any way we could do what we do with motorcycles, and require a special license to drive an SUV? In particular, as part of the test to get an SUV license, could we require that the driver demonstrate the ability to keep their SUV inside one goddamned lane?

And My Opponents Eat Puppies, Too!

To clarify my remarks from last night, here is the relevant passage (taken from the full text here):

We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. [...] [E]very great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

OK, "great ideological conflict" = War on Terror, obviously, of which the war in Iraq is ostensibly a part. There are some who advocate pulling out of Iraq now, while President Bush believes we need to "stay the course" and finish what we started. So it seems to me that by drawing parallels with prematurely ending these noble endeavors of history, the President seems to be comparing the war in Iraq with Martin Luther King's march from Selma. He is implying that those who disagree with him about how to conduct the War on Terror, are engaging in the moral equivalent of allowing slavery, segregation, and the Holocaust to continue unimpeded.

Mr. President, just a suggestion: This is why so many people believe you are monstrously arrogant, because you engage in this sort of naked display of monstrous arrogance.

Holy Crap!

Ok, now I only saw about the last minute and a half of the State of the Union speech, but... did President Bush just compare the war in Iraq to Martin Luther King's march from Selma?

Happy Holidays

Yes, we're a little insane. By my estimate, we had a total of about 300 presents under that tree. It took us six hours to open everything. Here we all are preparing to start opening:

Here is my leftist/commie brother Mike playing with the talking Ronald Reagan doll Brenda & I gave him:

Not quite as perfect as the talking Ann Coulter doll he got last year, but that's tough to top.

Here's my other brother David and his wife Diane opening stuff:

Here's David's daughter Julia. She tried, seriously, to watch the entire 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon last year, so we had to get her this shirt:

This is David's son Byron watching my mom open something:

Here's my dad proudly displaying a cookbook we got him:

And this is Byron again wearing the Coolest Christmas Present Ever:

Yes, I did buy myself a Voice-Changing Darth Vader Helmet at the same time I got the one for my nephew. What of it?

As for my own haul, I got one of these. It's probably going to take me a while to fill that 20 GB drive, although I may just be able to do it without buying any more music than I already own.

Between Brenda & I, we also got:
All three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books (now I need to finish Cryptonomicon...)
A vacuum food-sealer
A deli slicer
The From the Earth to the Moon DVD box set
The Hanzo the Razor DVD box set
An obscure nunsploitation movie.
A whole bunch of rabbit-related books and calendars
And, let's be honest, a whole lot of other stuff