BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
One last descent into the Palin-drome...
Tuesday night at the gym I exhausted my reading material (a printed out chapter from my ongoing novel) while still on my warm up session on the stepmill. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover a copy of the current issue of Rolling Stone sitting neatly on the very elliptical machine I was planning to spend the next 45 minutes grinding away on. I grabbed it, and hopped on.
I've never regularly read Rolling Stone, not even back when I was 20 and thought I had a responsibility to care about new bands, but I've flipped through copies often enough in doctor's offices and car repair waiting rooms that I figured I could get half an hour's amusement out of this issue. Especially since it had a cover article on Metallica, whose new, supposedly-super-heavy album I'd just downloaded obtained that afternoon.
I disregarded the table of contents and just started flipping through it, a decision I began to regret around page 30, when I'd not yet seen anything I was interested in reading about. Plus it's not so easy to turn pages while doing 200 strides per minute on the swinging arms elliptical. I did at last get to the Metallica article, and read it, but came away unimpressed. They were my favorite band in the world in like, 1990, I still think Justice for All is the best metal album of all time, and I've got all their other albums (most on actual CDs, though 99% of my music listening is to ripped versions on my computer, tracks on my ipod, or burned CDs in my car), but I haven't found much to like on the last few. A good song here or there, and the heaviness can still move me, but nothing that catchy.
My last conscious thought about the band Metallica was when the Some Kind of Monster documentary was out. I never saw it, but the reviews all talked about how crazy and dysfunctional the guys were, how they had to see a therapist to resolve their band anger issues, and how they might break up at any moment. I hadn't processed the fact that that was more than 4 years ago, and that they were still together and releasing a new album, so obviously they'd worked things out to some degree. The Rolling Stone article covered that, and talked about how they do intense jam sessions in closet-sized rooms before every concert to get themselves in synch and charged up. After the shows they all travel separately, flying on their own planes, jetting back to Paris or Norway between the shows in their European tour, etc. Not a bad life, for the proverbial blister on your little finger and/or thumb.
That article exhausted, without greatly adding to my information about the world or reducing the remaining time in my elliptical session, I flipped back to an earlier piece in the magazine, about Sarah Palin. I don't go out of my way to read about her, and I can't watch her talk anymore. Just the 2 and 3 minute clips of SNL's Tiny Fey channeling her incoherence are more than I can take, and only the fact that she could soon be an irregular heartbeat away from the presidency compels me to push out some old football trivia for long enough to contemplate her existence.
I've blogged in the past (too lazy to find a link) about how humans judge intelligence, and how we're clearly biased towards our own strengths, or at least our own aspirations. For example, I greatly admire people who can speak extemporaneously and remain coherent and literate. I'll listen to Christopher Hitchens discuss almost anything, just because he can do it real time and keep his words and concepts as clear and intelligent as a well-written essay. Even when he's defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the most misleading, obfuscating, goalpost-shifting terms, he's so erudite doing it that I'm almost seduced. (Seduced into believing that he's being sincere, rather than making a coldly-calculated argument.)
This, I think, explains (which I just Freud-ulently spelled "expalins") a lot of the revulsion I feel for Palin. She's not qualified for her job (current or aspiring) and she's unable to speak clearly about anything. Why her inability is particularly galling to me I'm not sure; she's not articulate and doesn't seem to be very bright, but neither was Bush, and listening to him never annoyed me that much. I didn't agree with many of his ideas, and thought he was entirely uninformed about the actual results of his policies, but he seemed sincere about them, and did his best to explain them. It was like he had enough information to justify what he was doing; he just wasn't able to spit it out. It seemed like he was doing the best he could, and sort of knew he was in over his head, but was trying to rise to the challenge. Like he took the responsibility seriously.
Palin seems very different. She seems to feel entitled and smug and cynical. I don't get any humility or humbleness from her; she's all brassy surface growl. She seems like the wound-too-tight hockey soccer mom whose smile never reaches her eyes, who relentlessly spoils and estranges her children, and who drives her husband crazy with an endless litany of hateful gossiping and bitching about anyone who (in her twisted world view) dares to cross her. In the real world, she'd terrify any teacher who tried to tell her the truth about her mediocre, underachieving children, then scream at her kids all the way home, before suffering a breakdown when some little old lady took "her" parking spot at the mall.
Pop psych aside, I read this blog entry this afternoon and thought it was fairly brilliant on the whole, and in its summation of Palin's question answering "ability."
My initial reaction to the “in what respect, Charlie?” moment was that it was like watching a student try to fake a term paper in real time: “well, the Bush Doctrine, Charlie, is a doctrine developed by George Bush. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘doctrine’ as ‘a: something that is taught; b: a principle or position or the body of principles in a branch of knowledge or system of belief,’ and the Bush Doctrine has taught us much about the body of principles in George Bush’s system of belief, which is to defend America and never blink, Charlie.”
Doesn't that sum it up just about perfectly? She's an undergrad, faking a term paper in real time. Unprepared for the issue, without the intelligence to segue into something she does know about, she just spits out catch phrases and talking points without any real connection to the question at hand. "Don't blink. Keep America strong. Tax relief. Win the war in Iraq. etc..." Whether this makes you feel sympathy for her or horror for what she might become depends primarily on how much agreement you have with her alleged political leanings. I thought Tom Tomorrow's comic take was pretty funny too, if less accurate. If only I could think of an appropriate analogy for her speaking style!
As for the Rolling Stone piece, it's worth a mention just for how lacerating it is. It was written after Palin's triumphant debut speech at the RNC, when she read an angry, cynical, sarcastic speech that was almost entirely an attack on Obama. She threw verbal red meat to the crowd of aging carnivores, and was greeted rapturously by the faithful. Literally and figuratively. The RS article isn't so much about Palin or her speech, but more about what her popularity says about Americans. The author is neither impressed, or forgiving. A couple of quotes that had me laughing and shaking my head at the gym.
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket.
...
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
Ouch? Well, it made for some decent gym reading, at any rate.
In other news, blog posting will (continue) to be light and erratic for the foreseeable future. I'm going to be in San Diego on semi-vacation for the next week, before driving up to Anaheim next weekend for BlizzCon, where there had better be playable D3 machines on the floor, or I'll be one unhappy attendee. Even if I'm there on a free ticket and even Blizzard's dime for the hotel. They're still excessively secretive, but they're PR has certainly become more supportive of fansites in the years since we covered D2 and had to get everything directly from Blizzard North, since Bliz Irvine PR was Dilbert's pointy-haired boss-esque in virtually their every (in)action.
My downstairs neighbor moved out a couple of weeks ago, and after spending every day last week gutting the apartment, this week they've begun to restock it. When I say they gutted it, I am not exaggerating. They took out (and left piled on the back patio, where most of it still remains) the fridge, dishwasher, all the carpet, all the lightning fixtures, the ceiling fan, all the bathroom and kitchen cabinets, the sinks, the linoleum floor from the kitchen and bathroom, and possibly the light switches and doorknobs. It's like a Cadillac left in a bad part of town; there's nothing left but the frame; cement floors and bare walls, which are sure to be repainted the same colorless off-white that every other wall in every other apartment in California is inflicted with.
The stripping was pretty annoying, since they began at 8am, and they were not gentle. It usually sounded like they were using a crowbar and hammer to pry the ceiling loose, and since this was going on about 6 inches below my bedroom floor, no, I didn't find it all that enjoyable to try sleep through. Today was even better, since they were putting in new cabinets and cutting the faux-granite counter tops to fit, on site. Well, out on the sidewalk, directly below my living room window. I've never heard stone cut with a hand saw, and I doubt I ever will since stone is too hard and has to be cut with special tools in a mill. The faux-granite epoxy counters they put in apartments though, are just huge slabs of plastic. They can be cut with hand-held circular saws, though not without tremendous high pitched screeching sounds.
In a happy coincidence, today was the first day in about a week that it was cool enough to leave the windows open all day, instead of closing them and running the A/C. Nice that I had such a quiet, peaceful day to work on a novel and enjoy the peaceful, quiet suburbs.
Worse yet, it turns out that drinking too much red wine with leftover lunchtime pizza doesn't allow you to block out the sounds. At least I tried, damnit!
Adding to the fun, the couple that lives next door are moving out, in the slowest moving out process ever seen by man. Friday they had two big guys over to help, and they carried out the couch and bed and dresser and other large objects. I don't know how many they had; their apt is just a one bedroom like mine, but there certainly seemed to be a lot of trips moving past my front window and down the stairs. They didn't rend a truck, just stuffed the junk into the back of someone's pickup.
There were few signs of life over the weekend, but today the moving out continued, with the aid of the woman's mom, or so I judged by the similar appearance, ethnicity, and 30ish year age difference between her and my neighbor. (She's white, mom's white, husband's short and Hispanic.) I've seen at least 40 or 50 trips up and down the stairs, usually while burdened with hardly more than a shoebox, or a bunch of clothing on hangars. The husband just struggled down the stairs with two bulging trash bags full of uncrushed aluminum cans, FFS. Way to plan ahead, kids.
I have no idea how it can take so many trips for 2 people and an assistant to clean out a one bedroom apt, but I guess if you don't get big boxes at a U-haul store, don't pack stuff neatly into them, and don't get them all ready in advance, it can pretty well eat up an entire day/weekend, then spill over into a Monday spent grabbing whatever you can lay hands on and carrying it out to an SUV, thus requiring dozens and dozens of trips up and down the stairs carrying 10-15lbs a trip, instead of 10 trips with 60 pounds each. Up to, and including, bulky bags of aluminum cans you should have recycled last week, when you had nothing better to do.
It's silly too, since someone's always moving into this apt complex, and there are always stacks of perfectly good moving boxes in the trash area. I've got 25 or 30 of them (flattened and folded) in my storage space, scavenged from various stacks left out for free/trash in the year and a half I've lived here. I don't know when I'll move from here, but when that blessed day arrives I do know I'll rent a goddamned U-Haul, press some friends into labor, and do it all in one trip.
I think one bedroom apts bring out the worst in our "do it ourselves" instincts. No one tries to move a full house by themselves, or by borrowing a friend's truck, etc. You hire movers, since there will be dozens and dozens of big boxes, couches, beds, furniture, tools, small appliances, vacuums, dishes, lawn equipment, etc. You've got to spend weeks before you move and months after you move packing/unpacking and organizing, but no one in their right mind tries to do it by making a bunch of trips in some friend's pickup. And not just because when people move houses, they're generally moving further than across town.
A lightly-furnished two-bedroom might bring out similar DIY stupidity, but even then I think the necessity of renting a U-Haul would be evident. No one's got a friend with a pickup that will hold 2 beds, 2 mattresses, 2 box springs, dressers, etc, not to mention all the rest of the household furniture.
Which leaves one bedroom dwellers as the only ones who can try to get away with moving on the cheap. If you've got Ikea furniture and are handy, you could theoretically disassemble bulky objects like beds and tables, stack up bookcases and chairs and desks, squeeze in boxes of clothing and books and dishes, and move in several trips. Of course, as anyone who has moved in recent years will tell you, your stuff always takes at least 50% more space than you anticipated. But if you live not too far from where you're moving, and you have access to the new place at least a week before you've got to be out of the old one, and you don't mind the drive, and you've access to a truck for the big stuff, it's probably doable. It's not wise; it will consume dozens of hours of your time and keep you from doing just about anything else during the weeks beforehand, but it's doable.
Even then, I'd recommend renting a U-Haul. You can easily put an entire one bedroom apt into one of their smaller trucks, providing you've obtained big moving boxes and packed them wisely, and the money you'd spend on gas making a dozen trips will easily add up to more than the one day or weekend truck rental will cost. Not to mention the dozens of hours you'll save not making all those back and forth trips. I think psychologically it's better to move all at once, too. Plan in advance and spend an entire day packing. Get everything stored away, logically and neatly, leave out only the necessities, and then the next morning when you load it all into the truck you'll empty your entire apt in order. No running out of clean clothing since everything's packed, none of that "which box did I put the toaster into?" bullshit as you drag out your moving for a week. And when you get to your new location, you've got everything ready to unload and sort out. And you'll do it, since you need to unpack to go back to living your typically over-stimulated, utterly possession-reliant, modern Western Civilization lifestyle. Whereas if you move in pieces, you'll have the stuff you use most often out first, and will just leave boxes of other crap sitting around for weeks.
Oddly, given the obsessiveness of this post, I've not seriously thought about moving any time lately. I do consider it now and then; just because I don't currently have anything (job, relationship, college) really tying me to the Bay Area, and I could live just about anywhere else for far less money. Just for instance, there are countless nice 1 or 2 bedroom apartments in Denver for $500 or less a month. I'm paying $1100 for a nice 1 bedroom here, and there's nothing in the area for less than $900, unless you want to dodge bullets in Oakland or live way, way east by east east East Bay. (And rents were higher 2 years ago when I moved, before the housing bubble burst.)
I've got no reason to want to live in Denver, but there are plenty of other places in the country I could probably be just as happy as I am here. And even if not, $600 a month would buy a fair amount of happiness. Or at least massage whores and Tanqueray, which are just as good.
I've been trying to look away from the train wreck that is VP candidate Sarah Palin, but like the proverbial locomotive derailment, it's damn difficult. It was easy for a couple of weeks, when McCain's people kept her hidden and away from the media so she could cram for the VP debate and the eventual necessity of speaking on her feet and not just reading a speech off of a teleprompter. They've let her out a bit lately, but just for a quick interview with a kid gloves-wearing Katie Couric. The results were pretty much disastrous. Check out this bit of transcript, or see the full post for the video.
Couric asked Palin, "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"
Palin, in a rambling and largely incoherent response, responded, "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."
...Worse, if you watch the clip, you might notice that Palin was intermittently referring to notes. In other words, this is the kind of response she offers on a question about the Wall Street bailout with help.
I don't even know what to make of that. I'd make a comment about "a heartbeat away," but I don't think Bush could have answered the question much more coherently, and he is the heartbeat.
Still, comparing anyone's answer to something George Bush might say takes "grading on a curve" a bit far, so let's look a little more closely at Palin's answer to this fairly simple question. Her point is... um... yeah. Moose! Drill drill drill! Lipstick pitbull!
Most of her answers from the Charlie Gibson interview a couple of weeks ago were un-nuanced, regurgitated Republican talking points, but at least they were basically related to the questions. This one isn't coherent, and not only isn't it related to the question... I can't think of a question it would be related to? Honestly, what question could you ask that would make that answer seem appropriate? Near as I can tell she's advocating trickle down socialism. We're supposed to nationalize our failing banks without actually taking control of them; we just give an almost incalculable amount of money to the same rich people who ran their former financial institutions into the ground in the first place, let them go back to business as usual, and that somehow helps the rest of us. Kthx! Plz drive through.
I'm not sure which I find more perplexing. That Clay Aiken has fans, or that some of them are surprised to find out that he's gay. If you join me on one or both of these counts, you'll probably enjoy some of the posts quoted from a Gayken fan forum in this post on D-Listed. One quote:
"I just feel rather silly now having spent the last 5 years drooling over and being fan girly for a singer I thought was straight and now finding out he is gay. It does change my perception of who he is and how I see him. We always called him our boyfriend and that won't be happening anymore."
Now you feel silly for spending 5 years drooling over Clay Aiken? Now? I mean sure, better late than never, but JFC.
BTW, for any new (hah!) readers who don't know my stance on homosexuality, I could care less if he's gay or not. I think his music is horrible and his fans are idiots, but the man's sexual preferences are entirely irrelevant to me.
The say that necessity is the mother of invention. By that token, financial desperation and bankruptcy is apparently the mother of lots of probably-illegal property and mortgage schemes. During the last few years, as the housing bubble was perpetually inflated by 100% loans and other crazed financial practices that (inevitably) crashed and may yet bring down the world's banking system, I occasionally received spam urging me to buy now before prices rose even higher, but it wasn't that common. Every week or two a couple such mails would slip past my junk filters, but they weren't anything that special. Their advice wasn't even that crazy. They might have been less enthusiastic than any realtors' organization, or the financial advice delivered daily on TV by respected, mainstream financial analysts.
Now that the house of cards has collapsed and the operators are golden parachuting out while the US tax payers are going to get stuck with $700b in a bailout, desperation has set in for those who were formerly making money gaming the system, and my inbox is bearing the brunt of their death throes. I'm getting several emails a day along these lines; all full of unclear promises and intentionally vague language.
Need a catalyst to increase your originations?
Need to separate yourself from the competition?
Contact us now and well reveal to you how to OVERCOME the interest rate objection that all borrowers have due to lowball marketing by the dreaded wholesale lenders.
We offer a ONE-TIME only enrollment fee to our borrowers, that means if they re-finance, move or their loan gets sold AT ANY TIME, we will transfer their account FREE of charge, NO re-instatement fees.
Once your client has paid off their loan (typically 7-10 years early) they can use their Bi-Weekly account on any loan product they wish for LIFE. They can even pass on their account to a family member.
We pay YOU! - 300 Dollars per enrollment AND we can show you how to add this easy option to every loan file just like Greg Frost and many other top producers do.
To see a YOUTUBE presentation FREE go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul5w7eG8urE
ACT NOW and we'll reveal the secrets of overcoming the interest rate objection
I'm not even sure what this is selling. Something to do with lowering your mortgage payment or cutting the interest on it, apparently. I don't see how that's going to help people, since the problem for most is that they bought a house during a bubble (or recklessly HELOCed themselves into the red) that's now worth substantially more than they paid for it. And if they did it with one of those poison pill adjustable rate mortgages, they basically got 2 or 3 years of paying less than half price on their mortgage, in exchange for higher payments down the road. We're now down the road, and since (surprise) housing values didn't continue to increase perpetually, those people are fucked. They can't pay their mortgage once the discounted rate expires, and they can't sell since their house is worth less than they paid for it. I guess, in such dire straits, emails that provide a "catalyst to increase your originations" might be pretty tempting. Which is why various weasels are sending out a million of them an hour, half a dozen of which are slipping through my junk filters.
As for the housing/sub-prime/banking crisis, it's pretty simple. The banks were deregulated and instead of remaining solid, safe, financial anchors, they turned into used car salesmen. They wanted quick profits, so they junked all the sensible loan requirements and started throwing money to virtually anyone who could point to a house they wanted to buy. The banks had nothing to loose; since property always went up, they didn't care if people could afford their zero down mortgage, since they would just sell it to some other sucker in 18 or 24 months. It was nothing to give someone a loan for 80% of their mortgage, knowing some other bank would give them the other 20%, and then throw them another HELOC for $80k in 8 months.
The problem came when the carousel stopped spinning, the bubble popped, and there were suddenly millions of new home owners who'd taken out $600k, $150k, and $80k on a house they'd bought in 2006 for $750k, had appraised for $850k in 2007, and now found to be worth $450k. And falling. People who owe almost $900k on a house worth far less than that, who have almost none of their own money in the deal, and who are looking at a $7000 monthly payment on a house they could rent for $3000, aren't real likely to stick around. Ruined credit rating or not.
There are several examples a week of exactly this phenomena documented on the schadenfreude-soaked Irvine Housing Blog. It's a hell of an issue to resolve, since people are greedy, banks enabled their greed, and now tons of people are losing homes they couldn't really afford in the first place, or defaulting and costing the banks hundreds of millions of dollars a week. Allowing the banks to pay the price of their stupid loans by going bankrupt is the natural solution, but they would not do it in isolation, and their failures would create huge ripples that would probably bring down much of the rest of America's, and the world's financial system. Whee.
I hadn't read News of the Weird in months, and while clicking through the recent archives, I found this item too weird not to comment on.
David Steffen was convicted in Cincinnati in 1983 of murdering a 19-year-old woman and sentenced to death because the jury found that he also raped her, a violation that was an added devastation to her parents. Steffen confessed to the killing but vehemently protested for almost a quarter century that he did not rape her, and, finally, a 2007 DNA test of semen backed him up, disturbing the family even more (and calling Steffen's death sentence into question). In July 2008, the prosecutor learned that the DNA belonged to 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas, who is not a suspect in the murder but who was a morgue assistant in 1982 when the woman's body arrived and, said the prosecutor, had sex with it. Though the statute of limitations likely prevents prosecuting Douglas, the woman's parents seemed somewhat comforted that, after all, their daughter was a virgin. [Cincinnati Enquirer, 8-13-08]
So um... yeah. Aside from the issue of the guy being on death row for 25 years, what's up with the girl's parents? She wasn't 14. She was a grown woman, well out of high school and into the real world. Do parents really believe their 19 y/o daughters are a virgins? Furthermore, why would you want someone to die a virgin? Of course you don't want your daughter to be raped and murdered (as opposed to just murdered?), but why would you want her to have died a virgin? No, sex isn't the greatest thing ever, but it's usually pretty good, and it's at least interesting and different than anything else. There's a reason for the old joke cliche about people having frantic sex when they think the end is near; because everyone enjoys sex on some level, and you'd had to go out without one last go 'round. Odd that parents would be so eager to deny their own daughter that experience, in her all-too-brief life.
Since that was kind of a downer, here are a couple of others just for laughs.
The Panda Chinese Restaurant in York, Pa., was already in trouble in an early June city sanitation inspection, with demerits piling up because of accumulated grease, insects in the seating area and rotting lettuce, according to a York Daily Record report. Then, in the middle of an inspector's visit, he came upon a live snapping turtle in the restaurant's main sink. Said the inspector, "I had to sit down and gather myself before I could speak." The manager said he had seen the turtle outside and had brought it in for safety: "It was wrong that we put it in the sink." [York Daily Record, 6-11-08]
Unrealistic Expectations: Victor Rodriguez, 21, about to be arrested on a domestic assault charge in Bridgeport, Conn., in June, turned to his 9-foot-long pet python and, as police approached, shouted to the snake, "Get them!" (It remained motionless.) [Connecticut Post, 6-17-08]
The Slacktavist, a blog I enjoy only a passing familiarity with, has spent the past four years intermittently discussing the first book in the Christian Revelations-porn series, Left Behind. Each entry has covered just a few pages of the book, and it's taken four years to finish the discussion of a single book. I'd call the project a labor of love, except that the blogger clearly hates the book he's been so painstakingly deconstructing. Just about any entry from the series is worth reading, but the last post does some nice work summing up the entire pony show.
This brief chorus line stroll here on the final page of the book is only a trivial example, but larger examples of larger impossibilities can be found on every other page. This is, in fact, a major theme -- perhaps the major theme -- of Left Behind. The book is an unending series of events that it is impossible to imagine really occurring in the way they are described.
This brings us back to the failure of world-building we discussed last week. LaHaye and Jenkins almost never bother to tell us much of anything about the strange post-Event world in which their story takes place, and when they do provide details they turn out to be irreconcilable with details provided earlier. This lack of world-building in Left Behind is not an oversight, it's a necessity. The authors are presenting an impossible story set in an impossible world. The more they tell us about that world, the less convincing their story becomes. But they couldn't do more to describe such a world even if they wanted to because such an impossible place is indescribable, unimaginable.
I'm not merely suggesting that this story is outlandish or that it's premise is audacious. I like outlandish and audacious stories.
...But such outlandish settings must be consistent. Storytellers can make up their own rules all they like but, having done so, they have to abide by them. Otherwise, it's just nonsense.
And Left Behind, ultimately, is just nonsense. It makes up its own rules and then breaks them. And then it makes up more rules that require its other rules to be broken. Left Behind refutes itself.
The premise of the book is clear and clearly stated. The Rapture and all the other events foretold by premillennial dispensationalist "bible prophecy scholars" are all real and are all really going to happen. Soon. The book wants to show us the events of this cosmic drama acted out before our very eyes in a story that takes its plot from the authors' End Times check list.
Yet the more we watch, the more we read, the less convinced we become that such a series of events could ever occur. Not because they're too outlandish, but because they contradict and preclude one another. We cannot accept the authors' assertion that A will be followed by B and then by C, because A renders B impossible and C could never take place in a world in which B had already happened.
This is the great and insurmountable failure of Left Behind. It set out to be a work of propaganda, a teaching tool meant to demonstrate -- the authors would say to prove -- that the events it describes could and indeed will really happen. Yet their attempt to present a narrative of such events instead demonstrates -- I would say proves -- that these events could not and indeed will not ever happen. It proves that the weird and contradictory events of their check list could never happen in a world anything like the world we live in, or in any other imaginable world. It proves that their supposed prophecies will never, and can never, be fulfilled.
It's an interesting criticism. After all, anyone can glance at one of the Left Behind novels and see that they're horribly written, with leaden prose and terrible dialogue and boring characters, but none of those faults have ever stopped a book from being successful. It's far more revealing to consider that the entire world fiction of the Left Behind book(s) is undone... by itself. The books were written by godly hacks; we knew that, but I assumed the mythology of the books worked and developed cleanly. Apparently they fail even at that?
On a related issue, it's always amazed and amused me that people will eagerly lap up substandard entertainment offerings, whether books, movies, TV, or music, so long as they purport to come from a religious perspective. I don't mean actual televised sermons or televangelists, but works of fiction, in whatever medium, that are modern updates of Christian lore. If the Left Behind books had invented a new mythology they'd have sold about 500 copies, since they're written poorly, and there's no logic or consistency to their story. The same goes for most Christian music, movies, etc. And, I assume, for Muslim, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, etc, entertainment, in various locations where those faiths are ascendant.
It's an interesting issue; that humans are willing, even eager, to consume sub-par entertainment so long as they feel it will not contradict, or will actually reinforce, their operational dogmas. I guess it's logical; if you buy into the metaphysical claims of religion X or Y, then it's more important that you stay true to those than that you consume entertainment that's actually entertaining.
While surfing idly this evening, I somehow wound on up the BoxOfficeMojo list of worst grossing, wide opening films ever. That is, movies that opened on more than 2500 screens (in the US) and made the least money. It's a fascinating collection, full of "tip of the memory" type names. Films I almost remember hearing about, or maybe seeing a trailer for; but not quite. Others don't even generate that much mental near-friction. I look at the name, I paste it into the search box on MetaCritic and look at a synopsis and some reviews, and I'm still left with a scowling, WTF expression. (As seen below.)
Who made these movies? How did they get on 2500+ screens, which means they had major ad campaigns, without me having any memory of them? I'm not that big a movie fan, and I pretty much ignore family movies and chick flicks, but I watch a lot of trailers online, I see a lot of ads on websites, I used to read Entertainment Weakly regularly...
It's understandable when the movie came out 6 or 8 years ago, since I know I've just forgotten. But when the movie was released a few years ago, or last year, or even last month? The worst performance ever goes to The Rocker, which opened on nearly 2800 screens, and earned $2.6m for the weekend. If you're too stoned/drunk/lazy to do the math, that's about $930 per screen, for the weekend. You figure that's $7 a ticket (It's around $10 most theaters in the Bay Area, but we'll include matinee discounts and kid's prices.) So let's be generous and say 150 tickets sold, per theater, per weekend. The movie probably had 4 show times per day per screen, over 3 days. So 150 / 12 = 12 people per show. Nothing like seeing a "comedy" with a full house to boost the laughs!
Backtracking slightly, I only know The Rocker was a comedy since I researched. When I first saw the list, I noted it, then returned, then clicked the link to the movie's page. My thoughts ran as follows, "What was that date? 08/20/08. Wait... that's August 20th. This year. That's one month ago. What? The biggest flop in the history of widely released movies was just last month? Why don't I have any idea what this movie is? Oh... I guess that's only logical, really."
I still had no idea what it was from the Box Office Mojo page, which had a poster for ease of recognition. I had to search the name on MetaCritic to be sure it was real. It was, and I read the synopsis, and I still had no idea what it was. It wasn't until I read one of the reviews (which aren't that horrible, surprisingly) that I got a grain of recollection. I actually seen a trailer for that film, at some point this summer. It looked horrible; some kind of School of Rock/Spinal Tap rip off with one of those pudgy, white, late-30s manchildren losers Hollywood "comedies" have lately grown so found of vomiting onto the screen. He was almost a rock star 20 years ago, and now his nephew, or something, has a band and they need a drummer, and he joins up and wacky, acid-tinged hijinks ensue.
Clearly I wasn't alone in thinking it looked stupid and immediately forgetting it, given the record breaking opening weekend, and total gross of $6.2m, or less than 1/3 of the production/marketing costs.
At least some memory of that movie came back to me, eventually. Others on the list rang no bells, even after I researched them. Even when they flopped within the past few years. Lucky You? Rumor Has It? Firehouse Dog? Raise Your Voice? Zoom? The funny thing about each of those, once I attempted to refresh my memory by reading the synopsis on MetaCritic, is that they all reminded me of some other movie. None of them seemed in any way original; they were all rip offs of some other successful film, or at least looked like it, and I think that might have been the secret of their failure. Potential viewers saw a trailer or an ad, saw nothing new or exciting, and mentally filed it as a lame derivative of some other, similar, more successful, not necessarily any good, movie. Most of them have really bad titles, too. Generic, non-evocative, or instantly forgettable.
Perhaps the king (queen?) of that is this film, which didn't make the list since it only opened on 1121 theaters. It was mentioned in an article about the weekend with the highest number of wide releases, which was last Oct 19-21. Unsurprisingly, most of them fell through the cracks, led by the bet-losing title, Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour, which starred no one you've ever heard of, and which features a perfect image on the MetaCritic page. I inserted it earlier in this update. That's the film's "star," I assume, and she's (helpfully) making exactly the face most of the rest of us made when we read the title of the movie. It earned $858,415 total in the US, had no international release, and made $586,283 its opening weekend, on 1121 theaters. That's a whopping $522 per screen! Enough to make The Rocker seem like a hit, in comparison.
One of my neighbors in my apartment complex has a new tiny little doggie. It's relatively cute, as such things go, but it's very skittish and scaredy and (naturally) yappy. It's a hybrid dog, one of those labradoodle-like combinations, but one with a far less cutely combinable name. It's a Shi-tzu, Pomeranian mix. Yep. Just try to blend that one. Pomer-tzu? Shiteranian? Tragic.
This morning, whilest out tending to my fading patio garden, I saw an old lady walking along the sidewalk, with a couple of little dogs of her own. I don't know what kind. I don't care what kind. They were under 10 pounds, and therefore entirely lacking in function or dignity. She paused on the sidewalk, and looking up at my neighbor's back patio (which was around the corner from where I could see), said, apparently to her dogs, "Oh look at him. What a cutie!"
Her dogs naturally looked nowhere and at nothing, since they had each other's asses to sniff. But apparently the Shiteranian was out on the back patio, and it must have looked down at her, since it started yarping, and that drew the attention of her dogs, which looked up and started bapping, and for about 30 seconds there it was a veritable rat dog symphony.
I'm not much of a dog fan, under any circumstances, but what I would have given right then for a 4th dog to appear, one that weighed more than a new born human, and one equipped with a real bark. One powerful "woof!" would have reduced those those three noisy, pet-like objects to trembling puff balls, and restored a proper equilibrium to the universe.
Alas, no such rescuing Lassie appeared, and I had to do my best to ignore the ongoing dogerwauling until the old lady dragged her hyperactive, bewigged rodents out of visual range. Worst of all, the whole incident reminded me of the utterly surreal teaser for that abomination of a talking dog movie. I saw Wall-e with Malaya a few weeks ago, and as is always the case when viewing a Pixar movie in theaters, the trailers were a uniquely-horrifying ordeal. Those literally function as birth control; I can't imagine any couple sitting through 15 minutes of previews for things like Chimps in Space, Bolt, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Madagasgar 2, and not thinking, "Maybe we could wait another year or two before bringing something into our home that would keep the DVD player constantly humming with such fare." Sadly, no such disinclination seems to give potential rat dog owners pause, and they (the owners and their odious livestock) are therefore spreading like a particularly unpleasant, noisy, furry plague.
Like most other ills in modern America, this can probably be blamed on celebrity culture. The masses see semi-fictional characters like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears toting around their overbred, mutated canine-like accessories, and thus a viral meme takes root. The official site for the chihuahua movie (click this at your own risk; it's psychedelically-horrifying) has an appropriate disclaimer along the bottom of the page.
Owning a pet is a major responsibility. Dogs require daily care and constant attention. Before bringing a dog into your family, research the specific breed to make sure it is suitable for your particular situation. Learn about and be willing to undertake the serious responsibilities of dog care. Always consider adoption from a reputable shelter or rescue program.
What would you give to see that tattooed across Paris Hilton's forehead?
Two videos that made me laugh today. Basically unrelated.
Opening sketch from Saturday Night Live, with two of the performers doing Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton. Not a bad sketch, but seems like it could have been truly awesome, with some more clever writing.
I've been online long enough to know that nothing, no matter how obviously sarcastic, satirical, or unbelievable, will be taken seriously and literally by some people. That said, I still can't believe how many posters on the You Tube thread about this one seem to think it's making a serious, pro-belief argument. Even if they are You Tube commenters...
