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.

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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.