Thursday, June 30, 2005
Book Review: A Clash of Kings
I mentioned a War of the Worlds review tonight, but since I'm not really feeling that, and am feeling like working on my novel, here's one I wrote a few days ago.
A Clash of Kings is the second book in George R. R. Martin's ongoing fantasy series,
A Song of Ice and Fire. Much like book one (
A Game of Thrones) and book three (
A Storm of Swords) this novel is not self-contained. The three books together tell one epic story, one that is going to occupy six or possibly seven novels, the fourth of which will be published later this year (November 2005) with the fifth following in 2006. No one has any idea when the sixth and seventh will be published, but since there was a five year gap between book 3 and 4, it's probably best if you don't hold your breath.
Book-writing delays aside, this novel is hard to review since, like books 1 and 3 in the series, it's not self-contained. It's part two of a very long story, but since there is no final conclusion to the numerous interwoven story lines, it doesn't really have a beginning or an end. Book two does come to more of a conclusion than book one did, with most of the story lines leading up to a gigantic battle at King's Landing, but there's no way you can read this one and feel satisfied; it will just whet your appetite to move on to book three and more of the adventure.
Nevertheless, on we go to the scores.
A Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Plot: 9
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/9
Characters: 10
Horror: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 10
Overall: 9
This wasn't the most fun I've ever had reading a novel, even a fantasy novel, but it's definitely the best fantasy novel I've ever reviewed, an honor that will likely be removed once I finish rereading book three in the series.
To be fair, I should admit that I'm writing this review in mid-2005, after reading the novel for the second time.
My review of A Game of Thrones was written after reading it for the first time, and would earn substantially higher scores if I were to re-review it at this point. I enjoyed book one the first time, but it was enormously richer the second time through, simply because I knew what was going to happen, and knew more about the plot and characters. It's amazing how well Martin sets up everything, with subtle hints and clever foreshadowing everywhere, and I appreciated the complex plot and character motivations far more knowing enough to follow all of the threads. I don't think it's possibly to fully appreciate any of the novels in this series the first time through, simply because you can't keep all the dozens of characters, and families, and battles, and allegiances, and wars, and so on straight in your head. You'd need a photographic memory, and even then you wouldn't appreciate how well it all weaves together.
The second book was much the same. I enjoyed it far more than book one on my first read, back in 2003, and while I didn't enjoy it as much more this time though, I definitely got more out of it than I did the first time. And the first 100 pages I've (so far) reread of book three are that much better than they were the first time as well. To generalize, I gave book one a 7 the first time, and while I didn't review books 2 and 3 I'd have given them an 8 and an 8.5 or so. This time through, book one was a solid 9, book two was better, and if book three keeps on being even better than it was before, I might need to Spinal Tap my scoring scale to keep up.
It's also sort of pointless to review individual books in this series at this point, since the three novels thus far have all been very similar in flow and pacing and style; they all keep the plot moving on, all have fascinating characters, all tie the plot threads together brilliant, etc. The only differences between them, from a reviewer's point of view, are the actual plot events in the books, and since these all feel completely organic and required by the story they tell, it's hard to quibble about them.
If I have any complaints about book two, and I must or I'd have given it 10s down the entire board, it's that there aren't any chapters from Robb Stark's POV, or from the POV of anyone with him. We hear a little about his war efforts, but only short reports told from a distance, and the only time he appears in the book, aside from very brief reports of his success in battle, is in a couple of early Caitlin chapters. And in those he does nothing but talk to her as she argues against the inevitable war. I'd gladly have exchanged some of the extremely-detailed chapters about the goings on in King's Landing, or a Bran chapter or two, for some more reports of Robb's war efforts, especially given how small a presence he has in book three.
Overall, I enjoyed the first 400 pages, but didn't feel any real urgency to keep reading. As the plot threads began to twist tighter though, and the major war showdown drew nigh, I started to read for longer at a stretch, and by the time everything came together in the explosive and enormously-satisfying concluding battle, I simply could not quit reading. I don't think I was that engrossed the first time through, and for a novel that
I'd already read to suck me in that deeply is quite an accomplishment.
What more is there to say? The characters are more real and full of personality than any I've ever read in any novel, the world is fascinating and incredible detailed, the action is exciting and painfully-gritty, and the writing is excellent. It's truly a masterpiece, and if Martin keeps the series going at anything near the quality of the first three books, he'll have created the best fantasy series ever written. The only thing I'd compare it to is Tolkien, and while Tolkien's world is more epic and inventive (and endlessly ripped off by now), Martin's got him beat on plot, character, writing quality, and since his world grows deeper with each book (as some final, epic struggle is hinted at and slowly developed) even JRR's one advantage may vanish eventually, though he might get points for pulling his off in a fraction of the pages Martin's using.
Needless to say, this book gets my highest recommendation, though it's impossible to read it on its own and get much from it; you've got to read book one first.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Gorilla Denied!
Just back from
War of the Worlds, and my first comment is... where the hell was my promised
King Kong trailer? We saw several trailers before the film, along with like the 17th
Fantastic Four trailer, and the give-away-absolute-the-entire-plot trailer for
The Island, but no
King Kong!
As for Speilberg's latest... eh. The destruction porn was glorious, and probably worth the price of admission (at least at $6.25 matinee prices) but the rest of the film was pretty blah. Good performances, for the most part, but in service of what? A recycled plot with no real surprises, suspense, or characters we cared about. It's basically
Jurassic Park with robots, with the awkward-around-children, responsibility-shunning male dodging death and learning to be a better man/father while saving his brood from destruction at the hands of inhuman monstrosities.
As for the space invaders and their strategy and technology... unplug your brain, because there are so many plot implausibilities and silly things that you can easily ruin the movie for yourself by getting hung up on them (
Ebert mentions a few of the major ones in his spoilery, two-star review.) I managed not to, but it was a near thing. I'll throw up a more complete review tonight, time permitting, but just for now, here's my top of the head scoring chart:
War of the Worlds, 2005
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 9
Humor: 4
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 3
Overall: 5.5
If you're trying to decide, go see
Batman Begins over this; there's really no contest. I'd even recommend
Mr. & Mrs. Smith over it, unless you're solely motivated by seeing things blow up real good and people overact in every possible disaster situation.
Fun with email
The email load at
the D2 site is nowhere even in the universe of where it once was when the game was new (I used to get literally 500+ emails a day, on busy days.) but the stray tale of woe and triumph still trickles in. I can't say where this one falls in the "best email ever" range, but it's certainly near the top.
kevin-pk, says hes got a duper and dupes alot of mephistos soul stones then he said his friend that works for blizzard made it fir him,i drop my ik behind the bar at act 2 and he took it through thebar table. I should have known better but I thought u should know that your employees are making item duper me and my friends were going 2 buy world of warcraft but u gotta pay 4 it but i could do that but i may be hacked in that now that I know ur employees make duper
The most amazing thing about this mail? He's not on AOL. You should also know that the D2 site is a fansite, not the official site, and that we make that very clear. Also, the chances that any Blizzard employee still give any sort of a damn about D2, or that they would waste their time hacking mid-grade items, is beyond astronomical. It must be true though, since after all, some guy who ripped him off with a very old trick said it was so.
Laughable content aside, the second sentence is my favorite part, as it plows on and on without mercy, traveling a punctuation-less path of the damned, inexorably adding clause after clause without regard for grammatical realities.
Penis Size: It's all in your head?
That appears to be the conclusion
to draw from this article, at least.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Men worried about having a small penis are usually pretty average, but have a false idea of what the normal size is, according to a report in the medical journal Urology.
...Men should know that a normal-sized penis is 1.6 inches or more when flaccid or 2.76 inches when stretched out.
...However, on average, they estimated that the "normal" flaccid length should be to be 5.1 inches.
I clipped the details, and I'm not sure what "should be to be" means, but the gist of the story is that they surveyed nearly 100 hundred men who went to a hospital in Cairo, Egypt, all thinking their penises were way too small. All of them were actually within the average flaccid size range though, and they all felt better about themselves once the doctors showed them that, and then lived happily ever after. Why they were so concerned with their flaccid size is not discussed, and I would have guessed that they spent a lot of time in locker rooms... except that they had absolutely no idea how long the average penis was. It's a mystery, really.
Of course
as I've blogged in the past, the allowed range of lengths for an "average" penis is ridiculously wide. They say that something like 90% of men are between 4-7" when erect, which may be true, but the 4.1" guy and the 6.9" guy are going to have a very different idea of their size. Ninety percent of grown women may be between 4.5" and 6" feet, but that doesn't mean the extremes in both directions don't know they're shorter or taller than everyone else.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
King Kong Trailer Debuts
I should have posted about this last night when I watched it, but the first trailer for Peter Jackson's upcoming King Kong remake is now online. It's also playing on every print of War of the Worlds, which we'll apparently be seeing Thursday, so bully for us. The trailer is hosted by Volkswagon.com, for no discernable tie-in reason, but you'll probably have better luck using
the mirror links on the infinite bandwidth KongisKing.net official fan site. The
King Kong official site is also now online, but it's nearly content free and has annoying pop up windows for the tiny bit of content there, so it's really not worth your click.
As for the trailer itself, it's interesting. I wondered how they'd do it, since King Kong is somewhat similar to LotR in that most people watching the trailer and waiting for the film already know the plot. I often hate movie trailers that give away the entire plot in order to make the movie seem interesting, but in the case of KK and LotR, PJ's sort of doing the trailer backwards; trying to make movies interesting to people who already know their plots.
He succeeds with me and KK, though it's a good trailer, not a great one. Lots of time is spent pre-skull island, setting up Jack Black's movie-maker character and the desperation of people during The Great Depression, and then when they sail off to Skull Island all we get are scattered shots of awesome Aztec-esque architecture, ominous shots of strange natives, and quick flashes of dinosaurs, swamp monsters, giant insects, and finally Kong himself, as he battles a T-Rex for his little blonde hottie. There's no hint of the whole "capture Kong and take him to New York" conclusion, so if you didn't already know the movie's plot, you'd really have no idea what was going on at all. Which might be the whole idea, come to think of it.
It's a good trailer though, if not quite as epic and majestic as the LotR ones were. The special effects look okay, but not spectacular, but it's often hard to judge those on a tiny trailer. Sometimes they look cheesy when blown up on a huge screen, and other times they're much more convincing on the big screen. The effects in both SW3 and Batman looked lame in their online trailers, but were great in the movie.
Update: Regarding the CGI and image quality,
check out this post on AICN with two photos in full quality of the charging T-Rex and Kong's face. (Scroll down and click them for the full size.) They are truly awesome, and as Harry the Knowles babbles on about in his post, it makes you wonder why movie companies with fantastic images in their films post trailers in such tiny size and shitty quality that everyone who watches them thinks the CGI is cheesy.
Malaya and me are likely going to see War of the Worlds Wednesday afternoon, and I'll post something about how good or bad the Kong trailer looks on the bigscreen. Not to mention something about War of the Worlds, which is
doing very well in
early critical returns.
DVD Review: Castle in the Sky
Castle in the Sky, is an animated film by much-acclaimed Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki. The film is a fantasy work, like all of Miyazaki's cartoons. This one is set in a never-time, somewhere near the turn of the 20th century, when the world was largely agrarian, but industry was beginning to take over. There are fantastic propeller-driven flying machines of every kind, trains running on crazy roller coaster-style elevated tracks, steam powered factories that hardly hold together, and a magical floating castle in the sky that may or may not be just a legend. The land is as inventive as the technology and the sky, with steep gorges and ravines everywhere, and clusters of houses built along the sides of them, clinging to the rocks like bird's nests while the vast majority of the land is open and green and unsettled.
The main plot concerns a young girl and her magical pendant, and the dangerous air pirates and destructive army forces chasing after her. She is befriended and aided by a young boy (his and her ages seem to vary, with them looking 8 at times and 15 at others) with great courage and spirit, and as they run from their pursuers they explore their fascinating world, meet numerous interesting people, discover that neither the pirates nor the army are what they seem, and finally investigate the truth about the castle in the sky.
To the scores.
Castle in the Sky, 1986
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 8
Humor: 7
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
I enjoyed this film a lot. Not as much as
Spirited Away, but
Castle is a bit more childish and silly, and I was initially put off by the slapstick humor and over the top characterizations of lots of the supporting characters. Lots of them, the various pirates especially, are screwball caricatures, doing goofy things every chance they get, overreacting, brawling and eating like children, and so on. If not for the fact that most of their jokes are actually pretty funny, and that they're consistently that way throughout the entire film, that element could have ruined it for me. It's largely about expectations; if you come into this expecting a serious, contemplative, adult film, you'll be dismayed. If you expect an exploration-filled adventure comedy, you'll love it.
Also, after a bang bang opening, the first hour is a bit slow, as the two child leads get to know each other and run from their pursuers. Lots of characters are introduced, and the story grinds along, but we started checking the time around 45 minutes in, and kept doing so until around the 70 minute mark, when the cool stuff really starts to happen. We were engrossed by the last hour though, and in retrospect there's nothing really wrong with the opening hour+; we just found it sort of predictable and wanted them to get to the
good better stuff. I've only seen the film once, a couple of days ago, so I can't say if it would improve on a second viewing. I found lots of
Spirited Away pretty slow the first time I saw it, but absolutely loved it on the 2nd and 3rd viewing. (See
my review here.)
While Miyazaki is not yet that well known in the US, he's a superstar worldwide. His films include
Princess Mononoke,
My Neighbor Toroto,
Kiki's Delivery Service, and
Spirited Away, winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Miyazaki is widely-regarded as the greatest living director of animated films, and his work has dominated the Japanese box office for many years. It's only recently that he's come to any notice in the US, and he's still far from a household name in America. His brilliant
Spirited Away earned $265m world wide, but just $10m in the US, despite its Academy Award win. One hopes his work is gaining in popularity on DVD, but it's a sad state of affairs when his masterpieces, films that appear childish but that can be enjoyed by the entire family, are outgrossed by the latest forgettable CG crap from Dreamworks or Disney, or shoddily-inked vomit like Pokemon, DragonBallZ, and Yu-Gi-Oh. His biggest promoters in the US are John Lassiter and some of the other guys at Pixar, and there's definitely a connection there, in quality of work and appeal to all generations.
Disney, Pixar's overlords (for one more film, at least) have signed a deal with Miyazaki to bring his films to the US, and whatever you think of Disney and the way they've destroyed their traditional 2d animation studio in recent years, they have to be given credit for trying to bring Miyazaki's work to a wider US audience. They've done a good job releasing
Spirited Away and the new
Howl's Magic Castle here without long delays (hello Miramax and every Hong Kong film they've delayed and butchered in the process), and they've done good work dubbing English voices into the films. You can watch them in Japanese with subtitles if you like, but as far as dubbing goes it's been done very well on Miyazaki's films. Disney has hired quality actors, they've paid for good translations and script revisions to make the words in English more or less match up with the Japanese lip synch, and unlike most anime and foreign films, it's not at all painful to watch these movies with dialogue you can understand.
I'd talk more about the plot, but you'll enjoy it more if you go in knowing less, and discover the wonders of the film as you watch it. I will mention a few plot points though, below the following spoiler warning.
Minor spoilers below:I can't imagine that anyone over the age of 5 will be surprised that there really is a castle in the sky, or that the main characters all end up there for a final confrontation. The castle, which is more like a city crowned by the largest tree in all creation, is by far the coolest thing in the film, and its there that Miyazaki's trademark melancholy and solitude comes creeping in. Watching the two young leads wander around the castle, which is vast, completely uninhabited, and totally overgrown by plant and animal life, is engrossing, and a bit sad. What fun is paradise if you're there alone? Even the sight of so many robots, all rusted into disuse and overgrown, is depressing.
The final confrontation as well, with paradise shattered by human violence and then abandoned since it can only hope to survive without human interference, is a pretty depressing observation on the human condition. Entirely accurate, I fear, but depressing nevertheless. I don't think it would really register on that level to children, who would just enjoy the action and such, but it's another way that Miyazaki's films work on multiple levels.
I'm curious to see how this one will appeal to me on a second viewing. The slow spots and boring bits in
Spirited Away somehow became brilliant changes of pace and subtle meditations the second time I saw that film, and while I can't imagine that the wacky slapstick in Castle would become anything but that, maybe it wouldn't seem so out of place and redundant on a second viewing?
Bewitching?
Bewitched, a film remake of the cheesy old sitcom, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, opened over the weekend to
mediocre box office and critical lambasting (
28% positive on RT,
34% average on Metacritic. I haven't seen it and have no opinion of it, other than thinking that the trailer made it look dumb and completely unnecessary. That's how I think 90% of comedies look from their trailers though, so maybe you shouldn't put too much weight on my judgment.
No one seemed to think it was very funny though, so I can virtually guarantee that you'll get more laughs from some of the reviews. This
outright hostile one from the Village Voice, for instance:
I have no idea why Hollywood makes movies derived from TV series that the all-important 15- to 25-year-old ticket-buying demographic has absolutely no firsthand knowledge of, or why those same designated audiences do in fact pay to see them with formidable reliability. But I can tell you this about the new Bewitched: It is an affliction. As if the work of an angry god, the movie collects the perspectives of Nora Ephron (director, co-writer), Delia Ephron (co-writer), and Penny Marshall (producer), coalescing into a showbiz self-suck unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension.
It's symptomatic of the recycling-regurgitating Hollywood dynamic that the TV show within the movie doesn't resemble anything a real network would make today -- for all of their navel-gazing insider-ness, Ephron, Ephron, and Marshall are as clueless as farm turkeys.
The film is airy and weightless, not like, say, chiffon, but like the black smoke of burning truck tires. In an ideal world, Marshall and the Ephrons should have to sharecrop, for all the good they've done for the culture.
I've scarcely ever heard the woman's name, but most of the reviews seem to take special glee in sacking the director, Nora Ephron. Exhibit A is above, Exhibit B is found in this identically 0-star review
from the Dallas Observer:
...But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will Ferrell being hung out to dry by Nora Ephron, who shouldn't be allowed to direct an elementary school Christmas pageant, much less a $100 million feature film. (How Ephron is allowed to keep collecting paychecks, after the unholy trinity of Mixed Nuts and You've Got Mail and Lucky Numbers, remains a mystery worthy of John Le Carre or at least Encyclopedia Brown.) She strands him in the middle of the sitcom frame and begs him to find the laughs in her barren, lazy screenplay, written with sister Delia, making him look not like a clown but a fool.
My favorite though
is this one, from the afore-unknown Flick Filosopher, written from the POV of a righteously outraged/disgusted feminist.
Sisters Nora (who directed) and Delia (who cowrote with Nora) have concocted an evil brew of misogynist tripe, faux-ironic nostalgia, and painfully false romantic comedy that purports to be an "edgy," modern updating of a 1960s sitcom. But the Ephrons seem not to have grasped that TV's Bewitched was a desperate last stand of the 1950s, one final attempt to stifle the power women wield that men find frightening, the power that was finally busting out of its girdle when the sitcom debuted in 1964.
Despite Kidman's best attempts to be charming and lovable, Isabel is one of the most abysmal and discouraging female characters to appear in a Hollywood flick in ages.
But wait! There's more that she wants, more to make a female moviegoer with any kind of self-respect moan in anguish. It's not enough that the Ephrons have given us, as a would-be superadorable romantic-comedy heroine, a powerful woman who would willingly smother her own power. Isabel also wants a man to fall in love with, which is fine on its face, but it's not just any man she's looking for. No, she wants someone special: "I want a man who needs me because he's a complete total mess." She wants to be mommy... but not a magic mommy -- she just wants some screwed-up loser she can "fix."
The "irony," the fake "hipness" comes into play as actor Jack is trying to put together a sitcom remake of, you guessed it, the 60s series Bewitched. And he wants Isabel to be his costar, because she twitches her nose in such perfect imitation of Elizabeth Montgomery, and also because Isabel is such a moron -- she's supposed to be "naive," but she comes across as actually mentally retarded
Banging one's head against the wall eventually becomes requisite. If I didn't know this was written and directed by women I'd never have believed a man wasn't the perpetrator, because Isabel is a portrait of modern femi-ninny-ty at its absolute worst: she's idiotic, wishy-washy, and subject to wild swings of "darling" irrationality.
Taken together, these reviews give further proof, as if any were needed, that what we see in films has far more to do with the viewer than the film being viewed. And on that note, I'll get to finishing a pair of reviews I wrote yesterday, to post later today and tomorrow.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Year of the Shark, Again
I don't often post links to Atrios since his blog is pretty politically polarizing,
This post, however, is damn near brilliant. It's apolitical, too. There have been two shark attacks recently in Florida, one of them fatal, and our ever-fickle media appears to be jumping in with both feet. (Not literally, of course... there are sharks out there!) As Atrios reminds us, the summer of 2001 was declared to be the "Summer of the Shark" with several attacks getting big headlines, sharks on the cover of Time magazine, and so on. Seldom mentioned was the fact that there weren't any more shark attacks than usual that summer; it was just a hysteria created by the media saturation.
All of the silly shark coverage of 2001 came to a crashing end in early Septemberj, of course, and afterwards there was much navel-gazing by the media over their role in the dumbing down of public discourse. Here's a bit of the transcript from an interview between Howard Kurtz and Dan Rather, from late September, 2001.
KURTZ: Do you think now that we are headed into an era of more serious and sober news, as opposed to you know, the devoting lots of air time to sharks and Tom and Nicole and stories of that kind, or, three months from now, six months from now, as this story ebbs and flows, will we slip back into covering mini-scandals and celebrities and some of the lighter fair in the news business?
RATHER: Well, it is a key question. I wish I had the answer to it, Howie. I hope, and I honestly do believe that for a long period now there will be rethink among American journalists, in particular those who have some television, about concentrating more on serious news.
But I've thought that any number of times before, for example, in the wake of the Gulf War, I thought there would be a re-emphasis on foreign coverage. There wasn't. I thought there would be a sort of return to our journalistic base camp of trying to report more about things that are important, perhaps at the expense of things that are interesting, like celebrity news.
Not that I needed to point it out, but the US media has gone completely back into frivilous bullshit coverage mode, with Brad/Jen/Angelina, Cruise/Holmes, the non-epidemic of missing white girls, and now shark attacks dominating the headlines. I'd say that perhaps it's a sign and some massive terror attack was coming to shock them back into doing their jobs... but if they can largely ignore the ongoing civil war in Iraq, it would take the Empire State Building in flames to wake them up.
Besides, it's easy to blame the media, but they're just chasing ratings, and they know that no one watches the serious, hard news coverage of international events. For the average 'Merkin, that stuff's depressing and confusing, and anyway, maybe something happened today involving Michael Jackson, or another lady skipped out before her wedding? Better turn on the teevee, just in case.
Things of the Day: Monday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
--Benjamin Franklin
Soul-Devouring Worry:Dying roots.
Answer of the Day:Because bite-sized is usually a lie.
Curse of the Day:May your girlfriend sport better bruises than you do.
Books Lying Open:Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, now playing (Apparently not.)
War of the Worlds, June 29th (Yes, despite Tom Cruise.)
Fantastic Four, July 8th (Definitely.)
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. SmithPhrase of the Moment -- PotM Archive--
Phrase: "Is this movie ever
not on?
--
Usage: When flipping channels and seeing a movie that always seems to be on.
--
Origin: I'm not sure who started it, but Malaya and me have been saying it for months, whenever one of us is channel surfing and hits one of those low brow action films that seems to be on at least five times a day between USA, AMC, TNT, Spike TV, and various other redundant cable networks.
--
Notes: We've developed this into a science over time, but the best application yet came in late June 2005, when I was cutting up salad in the kitchen and Malaya was channel surfing. She issued the usual, "Is this ever not on?" cry, and I guessed,
Commando? first, and when she said no I tried
Gladiator and she burst into laughter. Other popular choices are
Silence of the Lambs,
Pulp Fiction (pointless when bleeped for TV),
The Godfather I & II,
Predator, etc. The odd part is what a grab bag of films they are, ranging from masterpieces to complete junk along the lines of Swayze's immortal
Road House. I figure it's just what the networks could buy the rights to cheapest, since they know we idiots will watch any damn thing they put on the teevee, but maybe that's why I'm not a genius network program director. -- June 26, 2005
Extra: I added the PotM here since, predictably enough, the minute I started writing this neither Malaya or I could think of half the movies that are never not on. If you've got any suggestions or reminders, stick them into the comments. Malaya just remembered that
The Matrix (just 1, never 2 or 3) is never not on, so there's one.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Misc Kali Bruises, Part 02
The public display of kali injuries continues in this, the second installment of our ongoing feature.
Last time I started off with some pretty uninspiring images of the stick-created bruises on my right bicep, and promised better bruises to come, courtesy of a stick and Malaya's forearm. It hurt, or so she assured me, but unfortunately those bruises did not ripen. Fortunately, there are always more.
The knee belongs to Malaya, and the bruise came from being thrown to the floor during a kicking sparring session on Thursday. Purpling nicely after three days, isn't it? The funny part is that she didn't even know she had it, since her shins were kicked so many times during class that any worry about soreness was concentrated on them.
The shin is my left one, and it's unfortunate that we didn't get a photo Thursday night, when it was all red and raw and bleeding slightly in a couple of places. I thought the bruising would swell and darken though, so I waited. A poor choice, since while you can see large, puddle-shaped yellow blotches on it with the naked eye, they don't show up very well in the photo, due to my skin color and leg hair. Malaya's shin bruises are much the same, and on her darker skin the yellow doesn't show up at all, unfortunately. We'll know to snap photos of our injuries when they're fresher, next time.
The Spotlight Burns
Maybe there's something to experience and veteran guile after all. After 15 year old Michelle Wie made all the headlines the first three days of the Womens' US Open, she went out tied for the lead Sunday and completely blew up, shooting +11 and plummeting from first to last place.
Scoreboard! In fairness to youth and inexperience though, fellow amateur 17 y/o Morgan Pressel played a decent round and finished second, and would probably have won if another woman no one had noticed at all hadn't chipped in a very long birdie from a sandtrap on 18.
Golf might be the hardest sport to win in, given that there are 64 or more players going on the same course every weekend, and any of them can win. Also, there's no way to play defense and win by keeping your opponent from scoring, and you can never coast or take it easy; you've got to make one great shot after another, and you still might lose if someone else plays the best round of their year. It's also such a huge mental strain, with intense concentration required on every shot; you can't just run and keep up with the pack, or let your teammates make a few shots while you rest.
It's definitely not a bad thing to fly below the radar in golf, and Birdie Wie, the winner, no doubt benefited by not being interviewed, not being pestered by media or photographers, and not speaking very good English. All the easier to tune out the chatter of the gallery, that way. As for Wie, given the way she folded up like a cheap deck chair, maybe she should go train with Tiger's dad for a few years. He could yell at her and shake the keys in his pocket when she's trying to put, and she'd either break or gain the mental toughness to go with her talent.
Age Before Beauty?
Like most people, I pay next to no attention to women's golf. Hell, I pay no attention to men's golf either, except when Tiger's winning a tournament. That said, I did actually watch half an hour of women's golf on Saturday, and might watch a bit more on Sunday. Why? Because of Michelle Wie, the female Tiger, of course. She's tied for the lead in the US Women's Open with one day to go, and it's interesting because she's all of 15 years old. Adding to the fun, the top female US amateur, Morgan Pressel, is just one stroke back, and she's 17, blonde, and played Saturday in a pink mini-skirt. (This necessitated some careful camera work by the network, since every time she squatted down to eye a putt they had to cut to a camera that was not in front of her, or else focus it high so they wouldn't broadcast a worldwide upskirt.)
We're all used to championship tennis players and gymnasts and track and field and swimming stars, women especially, being in their teens. Even their mid-teens. But golf? That sport is supposed to be all about precision, control, and experience. It's not a young man's or young woman's sport, since it's not a sport where you need to be especially strong, or tall, or fast. In fact, most of the top men's golfers are pudgy white guys in their 30s or 40s, which is part of the reason Tiger made such a splash when he won several tournaments at a very young age.
Michelle Wie is similar to him in that she's big and strong and tall, and hits it farther than anyone else. In fact, during the last few holes of Saturday's TV coverage, the announcers were slobbering over her potential and basicaly saying that she might end up competing on the men's tour, even winning there due to her inredible physical gifts and golf skill. The fact that she's moving from cute kid to beautiful woman certainly doesn't hurt her media attention, though there's no point in getting too excited since the fact that she'll almost certainly be earning about $10m a year by the time she turns 18 substantially cuts into the chances of her ever needing the money and career boost an appearance in Playboy, or the publication of a sexy calendar would bring. And no, you can't think about that yet, not while she's still complete jail bait.
Speaking of interesting photos, while looking at Devilfinder's offerings on Wie, I saw this huge one (5meg!) that contains roughly infintely more information than this entire post. It's from the Daily Press, which appears to be a local paper in Virginia, and it's got info about Wie, a short bio, a list of other young sports phenomens and how they're doing, her upcoming schedule, a detailed comparison of Wie vs. Tiger, and more. All on a poster-sized image. And for good measure, here's a scan of an article on her from a 2003 issue of Business Week.
Kali and Flexibility
Two thoughts about Kali and a rhetorical question about something else. The something else first.
Flexibility. I'm often sore in the morning, when I first get out of bed. My low back usually, but quite often my arms, neck, legs, hips, shoulders, and other parts are sore instead/as well. It's not arthritis, fortunately, and it's seldom in my joints; it's muscular. It eases when I get up and get moving or stretch out some, which makes me wonder -- if I were more flexible to begin with, would I still get sore like this? I'm not very flexible now, and I never have been, even though I work at it all the time. Not enough, obviously, and I always mean to go to some of the yoga classes at the gym to improve my stretchiness, but it never seems to happen. I might actually be going backwards now, since while I try to stretch, I do work out and lift weights regularly, and that's building muscle and probably making me tighter in the process.
So if I really got more flexible, would I not have the morning aches and soreness? Or would I still have them just as I do now, from overwork in Kali or the gym; just in different places? I'd really like to work on my flexibility too, since I kick pretty well in Kali, but low and medium only; I don't have the flexibility to kick quickly while aiming high. I can get my foot up there, but I have to lean back in a weird angle, or stretch sideways a lot, and that makes my move so slow and lacking in power that it's pointless to even try it.
A question that leads me to my next topic...
Kicking in Kali. We don't work on kicking that often, but we've done it once every other month or so during the 8 months I've been at it. It's not a real thrust of the style; we do more with weapons and open hand, and when we do kick it's usually as a support to open hand or knife. It's very sneaky kicking too, almost all aimed at the opponent's feet or knees, meant to trip or cripple or distract them in order to open them up to other killing blows. Higher kicks are allowed, since you can basically do any sort of move in Kali, but our style is designed for anyone to do, not just super athletic young men (who lose all ability to keep doing the leaping kicks once they get older and their knees start to give out) so we don't spend much time learning moves that are real high impact on our bodies. (Most of what we do is very high impact on the opponent's body, but that's different.)
I enjoy kicking in Kali though, and it feels very natural and easy to me, now that I've learned the basic forms and techniques. I've got the reflexes to do it well, hitting and countering other kicks (which is what opens them up for my shots to land), and I have very quick feet, at least as compared to the others in class. The odd part is that I'm either very good, or everyone else is very slow, since I can best far more advanced students in kicking, students who easily beat me in open hand, or stick, or knife, or just about anything else we do.
It was actually surprising this week, since we hadn't done any kicking in a couple of months, and we hadn't really sparred any last time; just worked on form and drills and such. This time it was all kicking, toe to toe, so to speak, and while I was much faster than the first guy I went against, we were basically just warming up and working on some forms, so I figured he wasn't trying very hard yet. I found out differently when we rotated partners after ten minutes, and I was paired with the most senior student there. He's very good and very quick with his hands, and I expected him to be better than me kicking. It was therefore a great surprise when I pretty much ate him alive for the first five minutes. I could land just about any kick I wanted, I could easily dodge or parry or counter his kicks, and he seemed to be wearing cement boots, compared to the snap and speed my kicks had.
He improved greatly as we went though, and he soon started getting in some hits, and I was dancing around and working much harder so I started to tire and slow down. After ten minutes things were more even, but when you consider how much faster and more skilled he is at open hand and stick, it was damn near unsettling to be better than him anything in Kali. It was fun too, though honestly I wished he and the others I went against that night had been better, and that I could have gone some against the Gura.
I hadn't really thought about it in the past, but reflecting on the kicking stuff I realized that I actually prefer going against someone who is better than me (as long as they're not so far ahead that I'm just helpless). I like the challenge, I like being pressed and having to raise my game, and I enjoy getting my shots in more when I have to really try to land them. Most of the time Thursday I was in control and landing hits at will, and soon found myself experimenting, trying odd angles, trying to do double kicks and parries rather than just dodging and taking sure hits, etc. It made it more fun and more of a challenge for me that way, and allowed them to get in some hits as well.
The reason for my skill in this, oddly enough, seems to be the soccer I played all through my youth. I haven't kicked a ball in years, and haven't played any organized soccer since I was about 14 (when I got sick of practices and of always being the one good player on bad teams) but somehow the foot awareness and speed and agility persist. I do different style kicks than most of the others too, ones no one else does, and as Malaya and me analyzed them, we realized that they were all soccer kicks. Passing the ball across my body with my instep, shooting a kick sideways with the side of my foot, being able to kick backwards and hit things with my heel, etc.
More than just specific kicks though, I've got more awareness of where my feet are than other people. I'd never thought of it that way, but that's what the Gura said when I asked her, and she said that most people require a lot more practice to kick accurately and with control, and that most have a lot of trouble doing it left footed and right footed. I'm better right footed, I've realized, but that's mostly because my left leg doesn't have the fine motor skills to kick exactly where and as hard as I want it to. I suppose that's what the others feel like with both of their legs though, so I can hardly complain.
The funny part is that my footwork for other things in Kali is awful. Well, it's improved a great deal and I'm far better than I was at the start, but I've still got a long way to go, and it took me six months to gain any ability at sliding when I walk, keeping level and not bobbing up and down, keeping on my toes and curving around people as I move backwards, etc. My alleged foot location awareness didn't help a bit there, and my bouncy, fast strides (that might have been developed in soccer?) have actually held me back, since I'm constantly having to force myself to take smaller steps in Kali, to lift my feet up less, to keep my weight more on my heels instead of moving forwards so quickly on my toes, etc. I've mentioned it before, but the people with a background in dance are the ones who can move in the Kali-style right away, and they have far better footwork and body posture than the rest of us. It doesn't seem to help them much with kicking though, except that they can keep their balance centered and spin to do heel kicks and sweeps pretty well.
Moving very slowly. One final thing about Kali, that applies to other athletic endeavors. In another class last week we worked on basic stick fighting techniques. We stressed the fundamentals, since most of us have been getting very lazy about those and instead of doing the full blocks and counters, we're doing sliding hits, backhand strikes, and other shortcuts. Gura wanted us to get back to the basics though, so back we went, and in addition to those she had us move very slowly. It was hard, oddly enough.
You'd think that swinging a stick across your body forehand and backhand wouldn't be hard, but when you do it at about 1/10th full speed, you realize how much you usually use momentum to cheat on form and balance. Try it with a golf swing, or tennis, or baseball, or whatever sport you've got handy; do your normal swing, then try it again at about half that speed, then again even slower, and so on, until you are barely moving. Feel how your balance is off to one side or the other, how you lean, how your posture goes to shit in one direction or the other, etc.
I wouldn't have believed it, but it took me probably an hour of leading and throwing very slow attacks until I managed to completely correct my balance problems completely. And as I fixed those, the Gura told me to work on my posture, to stand up straighter, to keep my head up, to not lean sideways while doing this or that, and so on. So I spent probably 75% of the class swinging at my partner, compared to 25% receiving, and even though we were moving at less than a walking speed, and I was moving my arms and stick as if I was underwater, I was simply dripping sweat the whole time. Going slow and trying to keep good form was far more tiring than taking half speed swings with my usual posture, and I was constantly having to adjust my balance, lean back, stand up taller, think about where my left hand was to balance me better, and on and on.
I've got no idea if that would work the same way doing it with a tennis racket, but it would be interesting to find out. Not that I play tennis, but I think a lot of players would be shocked at how much they found out about their poor form if they moved super slowly and learned how their speed and momentum were keeping them in line, while disguising their structural flaws. We've not done stick stuff at normal speed since then, but I'm curious to see how I'll do, and if the slow motion stuff will carry over and help my form and balance.
Mad Cow Disease in the US
I've already blogged on this topic
at ridiculous length, so just a comment and a link today. They've found another case of Mad Cow Disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in a cow in the US, and
much ado is being made while much incompetence is revealed at the USDA.
New tests have confirmed that a Texas animal federal officials earlier declared to be free of mad cow disease did have the brain-wasting ailment, the U.S. Agriculture Department announced yesterday.
The definitive testing, done in England over the past two weeks, showed that the ailing animal, first flagged as suspicious in November, was infected with mad cow disease. The animal was retested after the USDA's inspector general requested the additional check because of continuing concerns about the sample dismissed by the agency...
[USDA Chief] Johanns sought yesterday to assure consumers that U.S. beef is safe, and that any suspect beef would have been kept off supermarket shelves. But he acknowledged a number of embarrassing mistakes and oversights by the agency. In addition to misdiagnosing the diseased sample, officials apparently mislabeled the sample that tested positive, officials said. According to USDA's chief veterinarian, John Clifford, a tag describing the breed of the infected animal was apparently mislabeled, an error that has slowed the process of determining where the diseased animal came from.
Countries that care about their public food safety, Japan, Taiwan, and others in Europe, have immediately
blocked imports of US beef, but I doubt we'll see any real reaction in the US to this. Not until there are dozens of positive BSE tests a year will people take notice, and I can't see that happening unless the USDA actually starts trying to protect the public health, rather than covering up and boosting beef industry profits. In other words, it's not going to happen until Bush is out of office, at the very soonest.
In any event, Americans like their beef. Consumers here will avoid particular restaurants (I.E. Wendy's, when the finger chili story was active) but there's no way they're giving up their cow, short of certain death, and I'm not sure even that would deter people. America is truly the land of people who don't believe anything bad could ever happen to them, and besides, it's not as if your average hamburger-scarfing guy is all that concerned about his health. If he were he wouldn't be stuffing that sort of saturated fat and calories down his pie hole in the first place, now would he? If the guarantee of near-term obesity and long term heart disease isn't dissuading him, what are the odds that possibly developing some fatal brain-eating disease in twenty years will?
Saturday, June 25, 2005
The Justice of Nudity
New Attourney General Alberto Gonzales might be pro-torture and fanatically right wing about virtually everything, but at least he's not as wacky a prude as his predecessor, John Ashcroft, was. As a result, the
statuesque boobies are back in Washington's halls of justice.
After more than three years of being blocked by large blue drapes, two Art Deco aluminum statues of semi-nude figures in the building's Great Hall can be seen again.
The "Spirit of Justice" and the "Majesty of Justice," which loom over the stage in the Great Hall, were blocked from view by curtains installed by the department in January 2002, when former Attorney General John Ashcroft was in office.
When they were covered up, officials working for Ashcroft -- a devout Christian -- said the move to spend about $8,000 for curtains to cover the figures were made for "TV aesthetics."
The decision to install the curtains sparked a myriad of jokes and Ashcroft became fodder for late-night comedians.
Not to mention snarky bloggers. I'll miss him, if only for that.
Things of the Day, Saturday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
--Henry David Thoreau
Soul-Devouring Worry:Leaking ceilings.
Answer of the Day:Because these feet were not made solely for walking.
Curse of the Day:May your envy and admiration battle for supremacy.
Books Lying Open:Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, June 24th (Possibly.)
War of the Worlds, June 29th (Definitely.)
Fantastic Four, July 8th (Definitely.)
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Book Review: The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
My
unnecessary book review series concludes with another title picked up from a library giveaway.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith, is a modern day novel of tomb raiding and adventure, set in Egypt and the rugged Ethiopian mountains where the Nile river begins. The titular scroll is an ancient manuscript, written by the eunuch slave of a Egyptian pharaoh, that contains coded directions to his four thousand year old tomb, purportedly hidden somewhere in a great stone gorge near the headwaters of the Nile, and unspoiled all these millennia.
Seeking the tomb is a young, beautiful (aren't they always?) female Egyptian archeologist, left alone after unknown attackers murdered her husband and stole all of their work. Desperate, she seeks out the aid of a male, Lara Croft-esque English adventurer, and together they work to travel to the dangerous land and unravel the mystery of the scroll, while evil forces conspire against them and monitor their every move.
It's basically Indiana Jones 4, or discount Clive Cussler, when you get right down to it. To the scores.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Plot: 4
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 4
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 5.5
The Seventh Scroll isn't a bad novel, but at nearly 500 pages it's considerably longer than it needs to be, and it's not anything special. The characters aren't bad but they're not very memorable (one bad guy with some weird fetishes is the only one I remember anything about now, a week after reading it), the plot isn't bad but it's very straight-forward and lacking in twists or complications, and the writing is okay but never sparkling. As the scores indicate, it's a passable action adventure, but not one you'll stay up all night tearing through, nor one you'll remember long after you put it down.
I'd never heard of the author before snagging this novel, but apparently Wilbur Smith is actually pretty successful. I would have thought him a new novelist from this book, an amateur walking in the well-worn footsteps of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton; an amateur who needs to learn how to compress his plots and needs to think up a lot more twists and turns on the way to the ultimate showdown next time. I would have been wrong, since Wilbur Smith is in his 70s, has nearly 30 published novels on his resume, and had more than 65 million novels in print, as of 1995, according to the dust jacket on The Seventh Scroll. None of which makes this book any good, but now you know.
The most interesting thing about The Seventh Scroll is something I did not know until after I read it and ventured to view the
Amazon.com reviews. The surprisingly, overwhelmingly-positive Amazon.com reviews.
Scroll is actually a sequel to one of his earlier novels,
The River God, and an unusual sequel, with the action set 4000 years later.
The River God was written from the POV of a brilliant eunuch who serves an Etyptian Pharoah, and eventually carries his master's body to the headwaters of the Nile and buries it there, in a hidden tomb. The very Pharaoh and the very tomb the heroes of
The Seventh Scroll are trying to find in that novel.
Many of the Amazon.com reviewers recommend reading
The River God first, and while I obviously didn't, I'm not even sure if that would be a good idea. I got some suspense from
Scroll just because I had no idea if the tomb even existed, and if it was where the heroes of the novel thought it was. I'd think that if you'd read
River already you'd lose a lot of the suspense of
Scroll, since you'd already know there was a tomb, where it was hidden, how it had been built, and what was in it. I may check out
The River God if I ever see it though, just out of curiosity.
As for
Scroll, as I've been saying, it's just okay. The characters aren't as cardboard as those in most action adventure novels, and the setting and background plot stuff (crazy jealous safari guide husbands, civil war and guerillas in Ethiopia, crazed private collectors willing to murder for an untouched Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb, fanatical Coptic Christian orders, etc) is interesting. The main thing that held back the novel was the plot, and its lack of complications. The hunt for the tomb and the details of it are fine, it's just that there's nothing else going on in the book, and the tomb hunt and then excavation are so straight forward that I kept expecting some wild twists and seemingly-insurmountable setbacks... I'm still waiting.
As it is this novel has an amazing amount of description about river valleys, dam-building techniques, Egyptian sculpture and statuary, and the geography of mountainous Ethiopia, but it's about three major plot twists short of being a page turner. That's why I say the length is too great; it's not so much the number of pages, it's the content of those pages. Most action adventure novelists are worse writers than Wilbur, and craft less interesting characters… but they're generally far better at cranking out involving, twisty plots, and those are what keep you reading. I suppose that Wilbur wanted to keep the novel somewhat realistic, and didn't want there to be half a dozen false tombs with ancient clues hidden in each one to lead on to the next, but there was plenty more unbelievable stuff in the story, and at least those sorts of plot twists would have made it more interesting to read. With a bit better plot this could have been quite an interesting novel. Pity it wasn't.
I've also got to reluctantly single out Wilber's writing when it comes to action or sex scenes, because he's amazingly bad at them. I'm not quite sure why, but even during the numerous life and death struggles and the occasional kinky and somewhat explicit sexual interlude, his writing seemed so stiff and cold that I never felt any excitement. Of either kind. He's not boring in all of the writing, and he's not academic and dry in his descriptions, but for whatever reason the fight scenes and sex scenes always felt very remote and passionless.
I didn't glance at the author info until after I read the whole book, but my impression from reading it was that Wilbur Smith was an older gentleman, retired from some real career, and that while he knew a great deal about history and geography and everything else, and was technically proficient as a novelist, that he just didn't have the skill to make characters come to life. Especially not when they were doing dangerous or sexy things. And when I looked at the back of the book and saw the picture of the elderly white guy, and learned from his bio that he worked as a tax collector into his 30s before becoming a writer, I was sad to see my stereotype come true. He actually looks pretty spry in
the bio photo on his website, with a definite twinkle in his eye, and I'm judging him by just one book, but at least in the
The Seventh Scroll he seems to be a decent writer, but one without a lot of imagination or ability to incite emotion in his readers.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Congrats to Ebert
Maybe I should do a semi-daily links post, with quick pointers to all of the interesting articles I've seen, rather than not posting anything about most of them, and posting too much about the few I do post about?
Anyway, congrats to the best film critic in America, Roger Ebert,
who just got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I made fun of it recently when they gave one to DJ and variety show host Ryan Seacrest, but having one is still a mark of distinction, and Ebert certainly deserves his. And given that there are 2287 other stars there, it's pretty clear that quite a few people do not.
HOLLYWOOD -- For four decades, Roger Ebert's reviews have turned countless actors and filmmakers into stars. On Thursday, Hollywood returned the favor -- dedicating the 2,288th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to the Chicago Sun-Times' legendary film critic.
The occasion also marked another "first'' for Ebert, the nation's first Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic. According to the event's major-domo, Johnny Grant (known as the honorary "mayor of Hollywood"), Ebert's star is the first ever given to a critic.
"There are plenty of others out here with stars who have been criticized, but Roger's our first official critic," quipped Grant, joking that in the future, movie fans will now have the chance "to walk all over Roger" if they disagree with one of his reviews.
...
"When we are born, we are placed into a specific box, in a certain space and time," Ebert said. In his opinion, film is the one art form that most easily enables people to escape their own reality, "imagining what it is to live somebody else's life -- to be a different gender, live in a different time, to live in a different economic class.
"It is a truly liberalizing experience and makes people broader-minded as film makes it possible for them not to be just stuck being [themselves] day after day."
That being said, what's up with giving, like,
every single movie a 3-star score lately? Okay, not every movie, but it seems like he's getting more generous by the year, and being too understanding by scoring every film as it would be received by its target audience. It's okay, Roger, condemn some stuff for sucking. I loved his 1-star review of The Perfect Man, and didn't even bother to read several of his recent 3-star reviews of films I had no interest in. His The Longest Yard review, 3-star of course, was an interesting read though, just for the way he talked himself out of, and then back into, giving it that score. Even though, with reflection, he realized said rating was wildly too high for the latest piece of shit someone scraped off of Adam Sandler's poseur boot.
Weirdest Katie Holmes Story Yet
Unless you've literally been living in a cave you can't help but have heard about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, especially now that they're engaged. Is she just a "beard" for Tom's dubious heterosexuality? Is the entire thing a contractual sham? Is Scientology pulling their strings from afar? There have been a ton of amusing and scandalous articles published so far, but the
best one yet is here, courtesy of the ever-dubious Fox News.
The newly engaged Katie Holmes still has some explaining to do to her friends and family. There were 16 days in April during which no one seems to know where she was.
Holmes made a public appearance on April 4 at the premiere of "Steel Magnolias" on Broadway. She came with her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnick, and a couple of other friends. They were there to support Rebecca Gayheart, who was making her Broadway debut. I know this because I spoke to Holmes at length during the play's intermission. She said she had just moved into her New York apartment and was looking forward to seeing the city.
Holmes was busy during that first week in April. On April 7, she was photographed at the Fragrance Foundation's FiFi event. Four days later, Holmes was still in New York and was photographed at VH1's "Save the Music" concert. She still had not met Cruise. Sometime that week, her friends say, she flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Cruise about a role in "Mission: Impossible 3." The meeting took place after April 11. The next time anyone heard from Holmes was on April 27, when she appeared in public as Cruise's girlfriend and love of his life.
Where was she during those 16 days?
Somewhere during that time, she decided to fire both her manager and agent, each of whom she had been with for years and who were devoted to her.
The
article gossip piece also covers Katie's Rasputin-like new best friend and advisor, a prominent Scientologist from an allegedly corrupt and nutty family of Scientologists. It even gives a list of the other young, aspiring Hollywood starlets Cruise allegedly approached, and was turned down by, before finally latching onto Katie Holmes; a list that includs Jennifer Garner, Kate Bosworth, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, and Scarlett Johansson. It closes with some other amusing info I hadn't heard before; that Katie's long listed her favorite actor as Tom. Tom Hanks. Not Cruise, as she's often said since their "relationship" began.
I have no idea how much, if any of this is true, or if it's all just what we want to believe, knowing how fishy all of Tom Cruise's relationships have been, and how wacky
The Church of Scientology is. It's fun to poke at other people's lives though, isn't it? Especially when they're much more famous and rich than we'll ever be.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Bella and Fella Photo Page
Yes,
another page with pictures of cats. These are different cats though! My mom's cats, to be specific. She got the brother and sister kittens last Christmas, and I was lucky enough to be there while they were young and impossibly frisky. They're juveniles now, and still pretty frisky, and after getting two new pics of them last week, I spent a couple of hours putting together a photo page for them. Here are the earliest and latest photos of them; click to their photo page to see what came between.
Here they are lounging around, something you hardly ever see a kitten doing. Bella is orange while her brother is gray. He was larger as a kitten too, and he still is, though less noticeably now that they're both nearly full grown.
We now jump forward to June 2005, when the kittens have grown to adolescence. They're about nine months old here, and still sleeping together, though they chase and fight and wrestle now as well. There's absolutely no way they can fit into this little furry bed, it's the same one you see above in their earliest photo, but they don't seem to know that.
This is about how Dusty and Jinx play too; one attacks the toy while the other watches, waiting for his/her turn. We do not have a cool climbing thing like this for our cats, though we keep meaning to get one. It's about six feet tall, with multiple levels. The pipe-length at the bottom of this photo hangs from a rope, but apparently isn't really their favorite place to sleep. The top portion is a box, with about four inch sides; all the better to keep sleeping kitties from rolling out and crashing down on top of fragile decorations, I guess.
Click here to see more.
A Feast For Crows
Courtesy of Malaya's obsessive monitoring of
his site, word comes that George R. R. Martin's long-awaited book four in the Song of Fire and Ice series is finally complete, and has an official publication date. Mark your calendars and start rereading the first three, all in preparation for...
November 1, 2005.
As
I mentioned previously and as
Martin explains here, the fourth book, as written, is like 2000 pages long. So rather than publishing that behemoth, or simply cutting it in half, they've re-edited it and split it into two books that will cover the same time frame in the narrative. In the fourth book the action will continue in the six kingdoms of the south, and in the second book, the fifth in the series,
A Dance with Dragons we'll see what's going on in the north and the east. Given that my favorite characters are in the north (Jon Snow) and the east (Daenerys), I should be annoyed at having to wait an entire additional book to see what they're up to, but I'm just happy that Martin's still plugging away, and that we may yet see the saga conclude before his death leaves us with nothing but partial notes and a hack of a failed-writer son to extrapolate them into some godawful bastardization of the original great work.
I don't think that would happen; hell I don't even know if Martin has a son. But
it's not as if that sort of abomination
has no precedent.
Birthday Festivities: Day Three
The birthday week festivities wrapped up Wednesday afternoon, with one last surprise meal and a short shopping expedition.
Tuesday night Malaya cooked dinner, but she clearly had something else in the works for the next day, since there was a big Trader Joe's bag on the counter and two more in the fridge that I was forbidden to look inside. I resisted the temptation since I knew the surprise would be more fun (I never hunt for my Xmas presents in advance or try to guess what's in the wrapped ones either, for that reason.) and when I got up and showered Wednesday, and it was lunchtime and Malaya said we were going out, I was a bit grumpy. I'd been up very late working, I hadn't slept that long, and I was tired of going out, after doing it two days in a row.
Fortunately for me, my love knows me pretty well, and rather than leading me to a restaurant or some other shopping experience where I would have been annoyed, she'd prepared a ginormous picnic lunch. Meeting her at the door, I was confronted by a heavy cooler and a large picnic basket, neither of which divulged their contents to my curious gaze. Considerably happier to be heading for a picnic than someplace that I would have to tolerate other people, I hefted the tonnage that was cooled liquids, followed Malaya who had the basket in hand, and off we went. She drove, and soon enough we were parking at the local reservoir, and walking up into a grove of pine trees, and sitting down at a nicely-shaded picnic table. Once there we pitched a tablecloth, set the cooler and basket on the table, and Malaya started unpacking. And unpacking. And unpacking. She unearthed a truly impressive spread.
Seriously, look at all of that. We had a sliced baguette, four kinds of spreadable cheese, cut veggies, spicy hummus, watermelon, three types of grapes, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, Ritz crackers, cream cheese, bottled water, a bottle of sparkling Martinelli's apple cider, and a box of yogurt-covered raisins for dessert snacking. She'd even brought along the books we have lying open, for some after meal lounging and reading. It was unquestionably the best picnic breakfast/lunch I've ever had, it was even light and healthy, or at least it would have been if I'd taken it easier on the spreadable cheese.
After eating and lying around talking for a while, we left the reservoir and headed off for some errands. The birthday fun wasn't over yet either, since on the way to CostCo we stopped at Fry's, where she turned me loose in the DVD section with instructions to pick out a couple of movies or a game or whatever I wanted. I'd love some new computer games, but we just never have time to play them; hell, the
Warcraft III Battlechest is still sitting under her desk, never yet installed on either computer more than a year after it was purchased.
So movies it was. I picked
Enter the Dragon,
Kiki's Delivery Service, and
Castle in the Sky. The first one is a classic Bruce Lee movie we've always meant to get on DVD, and the last two are older masterpieces by Miyazaki, best known for his Academy Award winning film,
Spirited Away. My reason for picking them is mentioned in the Things of the Day post, below.
As always at Fry's, with their enormous selection and iffy organization, the titles were virtually impossible to find, and when an employee couldn't find either one on the shelf, they had to check on the computer to see that they existed, and go look again. The first girl I asked couldn't find either, but she was apparently just going on break and enlisted the guy working to look. He found
Kiki's, but neither of us could see
Castle, so we headed back over to the computer to run it again and see if they really had it in stock. While he was typing in the name, a lady who had been doing some serious browsing (she was taking notes) in the Anime section since my arrival walked over, a DVD in hand, and yes, it was Castle. God knows where they had it stocked; we certainly didn't see it despite looking through the entire "C" section.
We even watched Castle in the Sky Wednesday night, forgetting all about our supposed trip over to the dance class for about the 4th Wednesday in a row. No review yet; perhaps tomorrow, but it was interesting. Much more slapstick and wacky than Spirited Away, but similar in the "amazing secret world" aspect of Miyazaki's imagination. It had an odd ending too; despite the good guys making it out happy and successful, it was actually very melancholy, with a strong "The only way to preserve paradise is to keep humans away from it, since they'll just destroy it." message. I'll see how I feel when I write up the full review, and it's definitely a good movie, among the best anime you'll ever see, but it's certainly not anything you're used to seeing from mainstream Hollywood films.
Overall, I hardly know what to say about the three days of birthday fun. Malaya did an amazing job planning and executing them, and just for that she deserves credit. It's not easy to find stuff I want to do three days in a row, being as I'm happiest just sitting home and working on my computer or interacting with her on an one to one basis. If you've read my blog for more than the past couple of years, you'll probably remember that this attitude was precisely why I didn't make any effort to date or find a girlfriend before Malaya. I didn't imagine I'd ever meet a woman I liked (much less loved, being as I didn't entirely believe in that concept back then) who could put up with my hermit tendencies -- and I didn't want a girlfriend enough to put up with doing all the things I didn't want to do just to make her happy.
My best case scenario was a hot, intelligent, self-confident woman who had her own life and interests, enough of which overlapped mine that we could spend 2 or 3 days or nights together, per week. I figured I could put up with doing stuff I didn't really enjoy that often, that those things (going out to clubs, shopping, hanging with her friends, etc) wouldn't be that horrible with a woman I liked, that we'd do some stuff together I enjoyed, and that I'd still have 4 or 5 days a week to do my own hermity thing. And no, I didn't seriously think I'd meet a woman who would be cool with that, which is why I hadn't made any effort to do so.
Miraculously, as detailed extensively on this blog about 2.5 years ago, I met Malaya, we shared a ridiculous amount of overlapping interests, she was also hermity by nature, and was quite willing to spend most of her time at home, working on her computer beside me. I did not anticipate that I'd fall in love, and had no idea how much that would improve everything, and how much more fun doing things would be with someone I loved. Nor did I envision all of the new things I'd come to enjoy once Malaya introduced me to them, or how things I didn't like to do would become tolerable, or even fun, once I had her to do them with.
That all said, she knows me very well, and was able to pick activities she knew I would enjoy, she made food she knew I would like, and she left me enough free time that I could do some blogging and get some work done, without feeling like birthday stuff was consuming every bit of my time. In short, it was just about a perfect birthday, and if I could just switch off my unavoidable thoughts about how "she's spending too much money on me/doing too much for me" there wouldn't have been a worry in my head over the past three days. I'm even doing pretty well at not thinking about what I want to give her on her birthday in November, since that would just put pressure on me and take away from my happy funtime glow.
Thanks for the best birthday ever, Honey. Love you.
The Technology is 99.9% Accurate
Well, I don't know if it's that accurate, but here's some news I've been meaning to blog about. It concerns the mechanical detection of that largely-mythical creature; the female orgasm.
Here's the article, and you should just go read it if you haven't already, it's pretty short and most of the excerpts I'm about to snip are props for cheap attempts at humor.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark Jun 21, 2005 -- New research indicates parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking.
In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated.
"The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain," said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
This article is simply full of potentially hilarious material, but I think my favorite part is found in three little words in the previous paragraph, when the doctor says, "as we know."
Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men's climaxes didn't last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women.
Holstege said his results on women were more clear.
When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during a genuine orgasm. Even the body movements made during a real orgasm were unconscious, Holstege said.
The most striking results were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated. Deactivation was visible in the amygdala, a part of the brain thought to be involved in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.
Runner up for best line? It didn't work well to test on men because, "the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes." Wanna just kick every man on earth right in the balls while you're down there, Doc?
Seriously though, it's an interesting article and appears to demonstrate that for women it really is all about letting go and surrendering to the moment; just like every sex advice book says. I also liked the bit about the man's reward center lighting up, while there was no similar reaction in women.
The article doesn't mention it, but I'd be curious to see a study where each partner was tested while they were the ones giving the pleasure, rather than receiving it. What do women think when their partner reaches orgasm? I mean besides the obligatory, "Already?" On the other hand, I'd think that giving his partner an orgasm would light up the male reward center like a Christmas tree, since women generally require more time and effort to achieve one, and since (seemingly) every woman has a history of past boyfriends who couldn't or didn't give them that. It would be interesting to see if that varied by the technique used, too. It's much easier to get a woman off with cunnilingus than intercourse, for instance -- how an orgasm each way register for both participants?
I'd also like to see comparisons to homosexual partners. I'd assume that there's a vast difference between ease of giving a woman an orgasm and giving one to a man, though I can't say I've actually done any field testing on one side of that equation. But just going by anecdotal evidence and reports from women, none of whom ever seem to have had any problem bringing their male partners to orgasm, I'd think there might be a difference. Try the same bi-sexual man with his girlfriend and boyfriend, perhaps? As always, I have more questions than the research can answer.
Things of the Day, Thursday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it."
--Anatole France
Soul-Devouring Worry:Too few things, too many days.
Answer of the Day:Because they're never available used at Blockbuster.
Curse of the Day:May you be all ready to go, and have two days to wait.
Books Lying Open: Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Movies to-see list:Land of the Dead, June 24th
War of the Worlds, June 29th
Fantastic Four, July 8th
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Birthday Festivities: Day Two, Continued
Malaya's surprise of the day was a trip to
The Bone Room. I first heard of it years and years ago, I was on their mailing list more than a decade ago down south in San Diego, but until yesterday, I'd never been there. As you'll see if you browse around their site a bit, they basically sell dead animal parts. All sorts of parts, including bones, skulls, claws, teeth, horns, and so on. They've also got lots of huge tropical insects mounted in glass cases or just in plastic bags, a few stuffed animal carcasses, weird jewelry and baubles, feathers, animal pelts, and much, much more. We spent a good hour+ browsing and hadn't gone through half the stuff there, and it's not a very large store. Just crammed, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with cool stuff.
Malaya said I could have whatever I wanted, though that's obviously got to be kept within reason in a store filled with $500+ skulls and articulated animal skeletons. We got some jewelry, some cool pewter pendants, a rabbit hide that the cats went crazy over, skull key chains, a 10" brown and white striped African porcupine quill, and lots of other small items. Our one larger purchase was my birthday present, and you saw a glimpse of it in the earlier update. The cats went crazy sniffing it too.
It's some kind of sheep skull, but what type we do not know. The tag in the store said simply "fancy sheep," and it's obviously a male, with those horns, but that's about all I can tell you. I'd like to know more about the provenance, so I'll probably try to identify it by the horns at some point. It's going to be just one of many in my eventual bone/skull collection, after all.
I put it above my monitor, of course, and yes, it's staring down at me even as I write this. I love it, and it seems like a "write more fiction" guardian to me, but then again I've always loved skulls, so I would think that.
Lastly, this has nothing to do with my birthday, but I found the staff of the Bone Room curious. The owner is just what we expected; old white guy, looks sort of professorial, seems slightly-cranky while being absurdly-knowledegable in his field. The store was much busier than I'd have expected though, and his staff, three women in their early twenties were very busy selling things, answering questions, and doing a lot of phone orders. One looked average; brown hair, okay face, slightly pudgy, etc. Just like 90% of the women her age I see in a given year. The other two were amusing though, in that they were super-goth girls. Like above and beyond the
Suicide Girls minimum requirement. All black clothing, huge tattoos on their arms, neck, back, etc, jet black dyed hair; one in dreads and the other straight and perfect like Morticia Addams, much facial jewelry, etc.
They were sort of "lipstick goths," to coin (?) a phrase, in that they were slim and feminine in looks, and very normal in their mannerisms. Entering that store for the first time has to be a strange experience for anyone who has done business with the Bone Room over the phone, since while we were there I heard both the goth girls taking and making orders, and they both had perfect phone voices and manners. They were friendly and helpful, so I'm certainly not complaining about their look or style; I've just got to wonder what they look like when they go out clubbing if that's how they dress for work. Also, I'd be interested to hear how they decided to go that far goth, and how they ended up working in such a strangely-appropriate place of business. Not that I'm ever likely to gain answers to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud.
After exhausting ourselves and our budget in the Bone Room, we picked up some sandwiches at
a tiny Greek sandwich place in the area, and drove down to the Berkeley Marina, where we braved gale-force winds to eat our sandwiches and fruit salads in the open air looking out over the bay, towards the distant Golden Gate bridge. Next stop, Japan. I might be exaggerating a bit when I saw "gale-force" but I've never before had pieces of lettuce actually blow off of my sandwich.
From there we headed home, and while I did some computer work Malaya was off to the gym. She returned around 6, and I left shortly thereafter for Kali class. The Birthday stuff was not over yet though, and when I got back at 9:30 she'd made salad, cooked a big crustless quiche-like thing, baked catfish and veggies, and even scored fat slices of my two favorite types of pie: pecan and cheesecake. It was quite the feast, and made all the more delicious by the fact that I did not have to prepare it, clean up after it, or think about it anyway.
I'm feeling a bit guilty about the all the birthday stuff at this point, since I've never done this much for Malaya on her birthdays past, and I honestly don't know that I ever will, much though I'd like to. She doesn't expect me to though; she's doing all these nice things because she really loves me and wants to do nice things for me, and while that's an odd concept to wrap my brain around, I'm working at it.
Hers is really the best attitude to take towards someone else's fun, though. Don't do it because you expect recompense, or equivalence. Give someone a present or a card or whatever because you care about them and because you want them to have it. Don't tie your own hoped-for card or present or whatever to that, since that turns it from a gift into an obligation, and it will make you unhappy if you don't get as good as you gave. Besides, if you follow that math you probably owe your parents a car, a down payment on a house, and about four new wardrobes, and that's just getting started on what you owe them for raising you.
This is rationalizing, a bit, since I've gone in on the card and gift and such for three of our mutual friends in the past year, and none of them remembered me in any way this week. I could get angry about that and feel ripped off, or castigate them for being thoughtless or ungrateful or whatever, but what would be the point in that? They're all very busy in their real lives, and they're all friends of Malaya's that I just know through her, so really, what did I expect? About what I got, to be honest. They've done lots of small things I've benefited from in the past anyway, and who am I, the one who usually ignores it almost entirely, to complain about other people not paying enough attention to my birthday?
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Birthday Festivities: Day Two
Today's destination was...
the Bone Room! At last, my precious.
More tonight.
Birthday Stuff, Day One
Yes, Day One. I'm as surprised as anyone by this development, but Malaya's got three days of stuff planned this year, and two presents. I'm not sure how that math works, but today was day one, and it began with a wake up backrub that turned into a full body rub, and then became a mall shopping expedition. Todai, our choice for dinner, is at the mall, but rather than heading straight for the food Malaya dragged me off into the depths of the tween-infested pits.
Ordinarily I dread such a journey with all the might my blackened heart can muster (to mangle a metaphor) but I was more curious today, since I didn't know where we were going. I was happy to see that our first stop was Wilson's Leather though, since it's hard to go wrong there. Malaya said I could have anything I wanted, so long as it was leather, or even fur. I don't want anything fur, but while I usually enjoy leather I didn't feel the need for any today. I've got a relatively new leather jacket that's the style I want it to be, at least until they make one in a style I like more, I have an old pair of leather pants that I haven't worn in years, I have a sturdy and nicely-battered leather bag that I've had since about 1988, and I have a leather wallet that doesn't need replacement. I also have a new leather belt that was $9 at TJ Maxx (vs. $30 at Wilsons for the exact same thing) and I'm not going to buy a leather hat or gloves or anything like that, at least not in June. Or not until I get my Lamborghini and can wear racing gloves while driving without becoming the laughingstock of every single other vehicle on the road.
I was given no advance warning about the leather-based present requirement, but thinking on my feet, literally, it occurred to me that my only dress shoes are uncomfortable, clunky things that I spent $22 on at a Payless Shoe Source some years ago. Plus they're only still black and acceptable for public exhibition through the grace of lots of black shoe polish, so with Malaya delighted by my suggestion, off we headed to Macy's. As it turns out they have quite a few leather dress shoes, so long as you like them black, or possibly dark brown, and shiny and traditional in design.
We browsed for a bit, saw none I liked that could still pass for formal, compromised, and eventually settled on ones that looked okay, and felt pretty good on my feet. They've actually got some padding in them, unlike my current cheap ones. Behold!
These are
Rockport Warringtons, and yes, they were expensive. I certainly wouldn't have spent the money on them, and would have settled for some near-look alikes that were $80 (or more likely have gone back to Payless and tried my luck again), but Malaya was buying, she insisted that I not even consider the price, and since I couldn't think of anything else I much wanted/needed for my birthday... this be them. I'll try to wear them a bit more often than I have my current dress shoes to get something approaching her money's worth, but it's not like I move beyond jeans and cargo pants very often, when I can even be bothered to not wear shorts.
I've got a wedding to attend in October, at the very least.
Also, as I said above, this was just day one of the birthday stuff. Malaya's got plans for us to do something tomorrow, and apparently I'll get another present then too, though I've got no idea what it is. Strangest of all, we're doing some more birthday stuff on Wednesday, and that stuff does not include a present; at least not one of a tangible, wrap-able nature.
The most unusual present of the day arrived in the mail Monday morning, and it was from my mom, with some collaboration from Malaya. It's a "shadowbox" they tell me, the craft project-impaired man. The concept is that
women people buy a box that's a few inches deep and covered by a glass front, and then they fill it up with scrapbook type stuff and other decorative elements. In this case mom put one together that could be entitled "Flux, as of June 2005." It's got pictures of me, Malaya, Dusty and Jinx, me doing Kali, and lists of my favorite authors, my favorite things/people, and more. You get the idea.
It's got quite a nice design as well, with silver and black the predominant theme, and there are even some little kali sticks inside, along with books, cool picture frames around tiny images that could represent characters from my ongoing fantasy novel. Take a look, and yes it's small so you can't read it, and yes I pixeled out Malaya's face and a few other bits of personal info that I don't want online.
It's certainly not anything I would have ever asked for or thought of, but I like it now that it's here and it's taken up a position of prominence on the shelf immediately above our TV. Here's to hoping the cats manage not to knock it down in a shattering disaster within the first week.
As for the birthday lunch/dinner... urf. I had one fried egg on toast for breakfast at around 1pm, we ate from like 6 til 7, it's 2am now, and I'm still full. We're eating a couple of small peaches now, but that's mostly just to chew on something sweet before bed, since our mouths are bored from doing nothing for the past half day. Nothing at Todai was great (Malaya might disagree when discussing their
saba), but everything was pretty good and as it's a buffet, there was a lot of it. My meal was free, a $23 dollar value, and that's a decent birthday present right there.
You'd think they would discontinue that birthday free meal thing, as many people use it, (When they seat you they ask if there are any birthdays, and I heard at least half a dozen from the maybe fifteen tables near us while we were eating.) but since most people there go in parties of 4 or more, and there's since never more than one birthday per group, I guess they make up for it in quantity. Free or not, Todai is an amazing value just for the sushi. Most restaurants you're paying $5 or so for two pieces, much more for expensive fish or in an expensive restaurant, and at Todai they've got 20 different types of sushi and it's all included. Just eat eight pieces and a few bites of dessert and you've broken even, and needless to say, but no one there just eats eight bites. Hell, most people eat $22.95 worth of just the giant crab legs, it seems like, much less the sushi.
More on the birthday stuff tomorrow, assuming I survive the festivities, and then the Kali class in the evening. Also, thanks to everyone who posted their birthday wishes. It's almost like you guys care, or something?
Monday, June 20, 2005
Party like... it's yo birfday...
I hadn't given my impending birthday much thought all day, but a few hours ago, when Malaya suddenly leapt up and scurried across the room, then returned with a card, and I noticed that my computer clock read exactly 12:00, I couldn't have hidden my smile even if I'd wanted to. I do love her so.
Happy Slapping Yobs
You've got to love those English headlines, eh? Despite the joviality of the wording,
this is not a happy article. It's about random assault, and a sign of lawlessness amongst the UK's youth.
Watch out for "happy slapping," the latest youth craze to sweep Britain.
It's not a new dance step or even a new designer drug. It's a criminal assault.
Groups of teenagers approach an unsuspecting person and begin punching and kicking him or her while capturing it all on their mobile camera phones. The images are later uploaded and shared on the Internet.
The fact that I half wish I were there to be set upon by just such a pack, so that I could finally try out some of the wrist and arm break techniques we're always learning in Kali class, is probably a wee sign of overconfidence. It's just that beating such idiotic yobs half to death would be such fun, and that since the UK isn't the dangerously gun-flooded US, you can take a chance on an honest fight, since odds are the asshole coming after you doesn't have a piece in their belt.
The whole article is worth a read though, since it's hardly about happy slapping, and is more about yobs, and is more about the perception that UK society is becoming more lawless, even while crime rates are falling. A perception we share in the US, and one I suspect is fed by the same style of "all crime all the time" media coverage. It's also nice to finally see a proper definition of the word "yob," since I knew its usage, but not its proper etymology.
Happy slapping is the latest manifestation of what Britons call "yob culture." The word "yob" dates to the 19th Century--it likely derives from "boy" spelled backward--and it denotes a kind of loutish, anti-social behavior associated with working-class youth in Britain's urban centers. The British soccer hooligan is the quintessential yob.
There's even some quotage from a self-proclaimed happy slapper, posting on one of the popular yob blogs. It's a useful education for anyone (such as myself) who thinks only US teens babble on in AOLese while remaining perfectly-oblivious to how idiotic they sound.
"I happyslap people," explained "Huni bo" from Sleaford on a popular yob blog. "I dnt see nowt wrong wit it tho, ima good person! Its well funni tho!!"
"It's not funny," replied Spartanette from Swansea. "If it's just among mates and you actually know the person, then it's harmless, but when you do it to someone you don't even know, you deserve a beating."
"So I deserve a beatin yeh?" replied Huni bo. "Wes onli do it ppl lyk are age ish, say from 15 -- 19 or 20. summats, wunt do it to an old man, even though they keep avin a go at us, an it dus are heds in!"
Ahh, the English. Even as his syntax and grammar awake an unquenchable desire in me to beat him to a bloody pulp, I can't help but love his slang usage. "Does our heads in" is just so precious!
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Book Review: L is for Lawless, by Sue Grafton
My unnecessary book reviews series continues, with a mystery this time. See
the first entry in this three-part series here; more for the review explanation than the book review itself.
L is for Lawless is the um... lemme see... ABCDEFGHIJK... it's the twelfth! The twelfth novel in Sue Grafton's ongoing private investigator Kinsey Millhone series. Like the other three (
Gumshoe,
Homicide, and
Quarry), I've read in this series, this is not a mystery novel as much as it is an detective story, with Kinsey once again starting off working on a small case that quickly escalates into a large and dangerous endeavour that she is lucky to survive. I'd like to see one of these where she goes in expecting great danger and a huge risk, just for a change. You'd think she'd become sort of skeptical, given that she's narrowly survived 15 or 20 of these so far.
This time Kinsey's looking into the background of a dead man, one who told his children that he was in the military during WWII. All they want is the military to pay for his funereal expenses, but the Army says they've never heard of him, and Kinsey is called in pro bono, through a mutal friend. As always, there are ominous signs right off the bat, when his old apartment is broken into and his seemingly-worthless belongings are ransacked moments after Kinsey gets involved. Who would do such a thing? What were they looking for? Who was the old man really, and where was he during WWII if not in the Army? All questions are answered in the novel, and you'll thrill (or not) along with Kinsey as she travels cross country, gets dragged into a treasure hunt for stolen goods from half a century ago, and finds hidden relationships between characters that you'd never have expected going in.
To the scores.
L is for Lawless, by Sue Grafton.
Plot: 6
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6.5
This book isn't really any better than the other three I've read in this series, and yet I enjoyed it the most of all of them. Like all of Grafton's work, it's a very quick read, and I put away the last 200 pages of this one the night before a recent trip, reading it in the tub in hardly more than an hour. I wouldn't call these books junk food, but they're definitely closer to a snack than a meal, and they read as or more quickly than any novels I've ever cracked open. I don't think Grafton is a very good writer, and her plots are always a few twists short of what they could be, but she does have a J. K. Rowling-esque ability to string together flowing prose, and to keep a story moving along briskly. If you want a novel to get involved in, blow through quickly, and forget in a day, Grafton's an excellent choice.
In addition to being the best overall of the four I've read in this series,
Lawless has by far the single best scene; one that had me laughing out loud while I cheered on the actions of one character. That joy didn't last all that long, but I still remember my surprise and enjoyment as I read that scene, and just for that one I bumped up the overall score a point, and gave this one a better score for humor than I had any intention of awarding it.
I'd say more, but there's really nothing more to say. If you've read any of the Kinsey Millhone novels, you pretty well know what to expect from this one. She eats junk food, she jogs once, she dresses lazily, and she gets in completely over her head and is soon unarmed and scrambling to survive by her wits while surrounded by semi-hostile and very dangerous men who never make her feel threatened as a woman, just as a person. It's far from great, but it's the best one in the series so far, at least in my opinion. The majority of Amazon.com reviewers
don't seem to agree, giving this one a mediocre score, but what the hell do they know? Exactly.
Father's Day and Birthdays
Happy Father's Day to all the fathers and potential fathers out there. "Who am that baby daddy?"
My own dad doesn't read my blog, which is probably for the best, but I mailed him yesterday and I'll likely call him today. He already got his card and present though, since I gave them to him while I was in San Diego earlier this month and he insisted on opening them before I left. It's a good thing I never got into the habit of buying him an ugly tie every year, since he's been retired for years, and probably wears two ties a year, at this point. He got a drill this time, since the one he had was old and all metal and literally threw sparks out over your hand when you used it. I'd have sooner stomped logs down into a wood chipper barefoot than used that drill in the rain.
I also left a card and gift for my stepdad while I was in town. I'm not sure I wanted to set that precedent; I took him out to lunch a couple of times back when I lived there, but despite the fact that he's a really nice guy, and the fact that he's been married to my mom for a decade, I never really got into a yearly habit of doing anything with him on this holiday. After all, I didn't meet him until I was in my 20s, so it's not like I'm turning my back on the man who helped to raise me or something. I figure it's okay to start gifting him now though, since what I give him indirectly benefits my mom, and since I'm trying to be more adult and remember holidays and birthdays and such. In any event, he's already in his 70s, so it's not a cross I'll have to bear for too many years.
Joke! It's a joke, FFS. I hope he outlives you all.
As for Birthdays, yesterday was Malaya's dad's birthday. He doesn't read the site either, thank god, or even know it exists, so I'd wish him a happy one here, but what would be the point? His daughter spent some time with him yesterday and gave him a nice gift and my best wishes as well, so that's that.
And by a strange coincidence, it's my birthday on Monday. Yes, I'm turning 29, again, and I have no idea what I'm doing or if I'm getting any presents. I didn't ask for anything, and as I often quip, "If you ask for nothing, it's quite possible that you'll get it."
As for the proximity of my B-day to Father's Day, that's never mattered thus far, other than some "this dinner is for both of us" times out with my dad. Now that I'm in a relationship where I can imagine one day having kids of my own though, it occurs to me that it must suck sharing the day with yourself. It's not exactly like being born between December 23-27th, where you just get lumped in with Xmas every year and hate everyone so much right then, but kids are ungrateful little shits in the best of circumstances, and giving them an opportunity to act appreciative of you just once a year is probably an open invitation to outright rebellion. As well as receiving two ugly ties I'll never wear.
Luckily for him, Malaya's dad has but one child, and she's obedient and thoughtful and wonderful in every way, so I'm sure she's spent her life making sure he felt special on both of his June days, and extra special on the days when the holidays double up. And with any luck she'll twist the arms of our future spawn enough to make sure they do the same for me.
I suppose I'll post something Monday night about the birthday, but don't expect too much since I have no idea if I'm getting anything or doing anything. I do know that we're eating at
Todai, since Malaya loves sushi and since that Asian buffet restaurant gives a free meal to anyone who goes there on their birthday. They're strict about it too; checking ID and everything, but with a huge buffet that's like $22 I guess that's to be expected. I'm not a big sushi fan, mostly since I prefer both fish and rice hot rather than cold, but I'll eat a little of it, and they've got coconut fried shrimp and fried rice and miso soup and lots of other good stuff.
As for a present, I'm at a loss there too. I've known Malaya for more than two years, and over that time we've both had two birthdays and two Xmases. Our usual thing is to pick one $100ish item we want, and have the other person buy it for us. You'd think with two presents per year they'd be memorable, but last night we were talking about it, and between us we could not think of all eight gifts. We eventually remembered all of mine, but could only think of three of hers, and one of those are the leather pants I promised that she still hasn't collected. As for my l3wt, she got me a cell phone in June 2003, snowboard bindings Xmas 2003, misc DVDs and a few other things last June, and hiking boots for Xmas 2004. This year I had nothing on my list and can't think of anything I really want or need, but since Malaya never asked, I'm assuming she's had something cool in mind all along. I'm pretty curious to see what it is too, at this point.
I have no idea what my mom or dad are getting me either, though since dad's basically giving me his 4 year old car later this year when he buys a new, post-back surgery appropriate one, I certainly don't expect anything more than a card on top of that. Mom got me some cross training shoes while I was in San Diego, and shoe inserts to go with them, but she's usually very good at sending something odd and creative that I never would have thought to ask for, so I won't be surprised if there's more on the way.
As for other people, I have no idea there either. I don't really socialize with anyone else, other than people in Kali class and some other friends of Malaya, and since I never told any of them it was my birthday, I'm not expecting anything. Malaya might have gone behind my back and tipped them off though; she's tricky like that. She does know I'm not much into socializing and going out though, so she wouldn't set me up with a surprise party or big group outing. Then again, if I expected her to do it it wouldn't be much of a surprise, now would it?
Something is only skin deep...
Why it's better to date a model than marry one?
I'm not sure if this "the wonders of makeup" photo is depressing or encouraging. Click it,
or these words, to see several more examples of similar transformations. I saw that page shortly after I saw
this compilation of photos giving a time lapse of Paris Hilton's various facial surgeries. The images are not related, except by theme, but they got me thinking, and I can't decide if it's depressing or encouraging.
On one hand, the "Anyone can be beautiful if they try hard enough." message is sort of encouraging. Plus, it's a painful reminder that no one really is, and that those who appear to be are probably lying.
It's definitely depressing that so many women think they need to undergo plastic surgery, or an hour+ of makeup, just to face the world, or that their entire self esteem is based on their appearance. It's also depressing that men do their part to create a world where female appearance is that important.
Yet at the same time, isn't it nice to think that other people out there are spending so much time on this short of bullshit, thereby leaving more resources for the rest of us to work on things that are actually important? Of course if you just piss away that time watching TV, or eating potato chips, or reading blogs, or worst of all, writing one, what's the difference? Other than saving money on nose jobs and eye liner, I mean.
Mostly it's just fun to look at photos of people and see the secrets behind them. And my god was Paris an ugly duckling in her teens. No wonder she's such a slut now; in her head she's still that ugly, gawky little rich girl, and all the attention in the world isn't enough to fill the void inside.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Automated sloth triumphs over manual labor
Several weeks late, I just finished archiving the last of the
daily updates, going through
April and as far into
May as I got before Malaya helped me set up the blogger software. The archiving was tedious and slow, as always, since as always I got distracted and ended up reading most of the updates I was supposed to be skimming in order to refresh my memory for the quick archive page blurbs. As always, my first reaction was "Christ I write a lot." immediately followed by my second reaction, "Christ there are a lot of typos in these."
I never really realize it at the time, while my fingers are tapping away trying to keep up with my rambling thoughts, but damn do them words pile up. The sheer amount of amateur pseudo-sociology dumped into the endless
May 2nd update rather boggles the mind. The funny part is that while I remembered the events described once I reread them, I have no memory of actually writing them down. Honestly, I could not pass a lie detector to prove that I wrote most of the blogs on this site, since they seem to vanish from my head the minute they're transferred to the computer screen. Every time I look in my own archives I'm like, "Huh. I don't remember that at all."
Anyway, my point in posting about this was to announce that all of the old daily archives are now complete, and to celebrate the fact that I will never, ever have to skim updates and type out archives again, now that blogger is doing that for me. Sure, it's worthless to the surfer since there's no handy and concise summary of what was in the update, but did I mention that it requires absolutely no effort on my part to create it? Above all, you can be sure that I will put the time saved to the best possible use.
Just as soon as I wander around the apartment for a bit and poke at the cats. And maybe get a snack.
Misc Kali Bruises, Part 01
While it's not the most impressive photo ever taken, I wanted to get started on this project at some point, and this'll do. At least for a couple of days, until the forearm bruises Malaya got Friday night have begun to purple nicely.
This is my right bicep (it's flipped since I took the photo in the bathroom mirror) and those yellow blotches are bruises, as if you hadn't guessed that already by the post title. These were created Tuesday night (3.75 days before the photo was taken, and they were much darker yesterday, when I
should have taken the photos), by a kali stick, as part of the exercise we were working on. It's sorta hard to explain, but the maneuver was to block the other person's stick as they swung at you, slide your stick around their wrist and shoot it through their armpit. As you do that you seize their right wrist with your left hand and bend your stick hard against their back, with the end of it (where you're holding it) against their bicep.
The point is to press the stick down into their upper arm, hitting a pressure point below the bicep, while pulling their arm forward with your other hand to make a leverage point. It sounds complicated, but can actually be done against a full speed swing, in maybe .5 seconds, and if you get the spot right, or even near right, the other person will absolutely, without any doubt, no matter how big or strong they are, go down to their knees. It's very easy to work in a disarm with it too, as you bend their wrist back while crushing their pressure point with your stick.
Anyway, as this scattering of bruises attests, finding just the right spot can take some practice; most of these are actually too low, and the good spot is up higher, more in the armpit. I was working with a guy who was attending his first class ever though, so his accuracy and technique were actually pretty good, for his first time. He certainly had no problem being strong enough to dig the stick right in there and lever me down, which is a good sign, actually. Some people are all "I don't want to touch or be touched or hurt or be hurt." when they try Kali, and that's just an impossible attitude to have while practicing the martial art.
All in all, these are fairly unimpressive bruises, but as I said I wanted to start documenting them for posterity, and I had to start somewhere. I guess I could retroactively include a past entry that detailed
my various facial contusions, and perhaps I will, when there are enough entries in this subject to warrant their own articles page.
Cool Optical Illusion
I see links to this sort of thing all the time, but
this is the first one that impressed me enough to motivate a blog post. It's an optical illusion, but one that moves, not just one of
those types of gifs where the wheels appear to be turning if you focus on the one in the middle. I'd describe it but it's more fun to look, and the page has very short instructions on how to make it work. I didn't think it would, but when I stayed focused on the + for a moment, and watched the pink dots vanish one by one, I was truly impressed. Hence the link.
Perhaps I should save up these sorts of interesting quick view links I see, and add a "quick link of the day" entry to my ever-growing Things of the Day posts?
Saturday Things of the Day
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men."
--John Stuart Mill, English philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
Soul-Devouring Worry:Not being richer than other men.
Answer of the Day:Because the clutch is your speedy little friend.
Curse of the Day:May you plan too far ahead.
Books Lying Open: Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
L is for Lawless, by Sue Grafton
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Movies to-see list:Land of the Dead, June 24th
War of the Worlds, June 29th
Fantastic Four, July 8th
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. SmithProps to Lanth for the movies list addition idea.
Friday, June 17, 2005
And One Million New Punchlines are Born...
...most of them involving comparisons to Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. And remember, it's
gay marriage that's a danger to society. This sort of farce is just fine.
Late Night Thoughts: Writing and Kali
As good as I feel on the days that I get a lot of writing done, it's amazing how seldom I do so. I enjoy doing it, I need to do it for my career dreams, and I feel good after I do it. So why is it so hard to find the time? Even tonight, with the happy glow from some good writing time this afternoon still discernible over the horizon, I've spent an unacceptable amount of time toying with the cats, screwing around surfing, playing
.BMX Ghost, and so on. All enjoyable, and all a waste of time with no long term benefits of any kind. (Well, setting a new personal best on BMX Ghost and knowing it would drive
Donnie crazy was kind of worth it.)
I've got an hour or two left of consciousness though, and I'm now going to get some editing done. Just as soon as I finish blogging about how much happier I'd be if I were writing, that is.
...
In other news, Kali is going well. I don't think I've mentioned it since I returned from San Diego, which just goes to show the benefit of blogging whenever I want, rather thrice a week, with two of the writing times situated immediately after Kali class.
I returned from my week and a half away last Thursday afternoon, and after spending some reunion time with Malaya we went off to Kali together. I didn't feel very good that night; slow, non-flexible, unadaptive, lacking in touch, and so on. I don't even remember what we worked on now, but it was something requiring finesse and touch, two things I had virtually none of that night. After that, I felt a bit down, and over the weekend I was sort of iffy on the whole thing. I don't mind that other students are better than me, but I mind a lot when I'm worse than I used to be.
Tuesday's class was more fun though, with two brand new students who didn't know much of anything, and some stick work that was mostly about finesse and technique and submission moves and disarms and such. The kali wasn't real demanding and it helped ease me back into the swing of things, and I worked all night with the new guy (the new girl worked with someone else) and complete noob though he was, I got a bit of an ego boost from being infinitely better than my opponent/fellow student.
Feeling more into Kali after that, I did some stick work in the house Wednesday and Thursday, and though I wasn't feeling very hyped up, I really enjoyed Thursday night's class.
We worked on open hand parry/check stuff, which is my favorite thing to work on other than stick combat. There were six of us there, including Malaya, and the other four guys all had at least a year more Kali experience than me. Time served doesn't mean everything, but it's not meaningless either, (I'm certainly far far better at everything than I was just 3 or 4 months ago.) and when I go in knowing that my partner in every exercise *should* be better than me, I enjoy it a lot. There's no pressure to teach them, I can soak up their technique and learn while we spar, and any shots I get in are a bonus. It's also fun since I've been working with/against all of these guys the whole time I've been doing Kali, and I know how much better than me they used to be. They're still better, but the gap has narrowed a great deal, and knowing that I can defend most of their shots, while landing some of my own, when before I was pretty much helpless in any sort of free sparring exercise, is definitely satisfying.
What we do in Kali is often hard to describe with words, but in this case it's pretty simple. We were trying to punch each other in the ribs, throat, solar plexus, or head, and we were using both arms, and throwing every sort of hook and jab and uppercut we could think of. Pretty simple, eh? We're doing this all without any gloves or pads, so control is needed since no one is trying to put anyone else into the hospital, but we're still hitting and being hit quite often, though most of the blows land on the arms and wrists and shoulders, as we block and weave and dodge. Oh, and we're kicking too, all the time, though mostly as a distraction since no one is going to land any hard enough to break anyone else's ankles; at least not during friendly sparring sessions in class. I'm better at kicking than most, so I got in a lot of kicks. Lucky for them I was also wearing soft rubber shoes and my control is good enough that I can kick fast, and hit, but pull the speed just before impact so they feel it, but aren't (usually) bruised.
Going into every variation and permutation of the sparring is way beyond the scope of this post, at least without videos to link to, but trust me when I say that it's a complete blast to punch effectively with either hand, to block with both hands, and to move your head and body well enough to avoid most of the shots that get past your hands. It's almost like a dance, and I'd think an uninitiated observer would find it hard to believe that two people can stand at arm's length from each other and punch at every height and angle, as fast as possible, without landing a solid hit for 20 or 30 seconds at a time. When both people are blocking well, that is.
I enjoyed getting in my hits, but found that I enjoyed successful defense even more. No one can turtle and take flurries indefinitely, at least not unless they've got four arms and a tower shield to defend with. You've got to punch to keep your opponent honest, and the best time to land a hit is with a counterpunch, since they've got at least one arm extended if you parry it and slide into your own attack before they can pull back. But that said, it is possible to fend off three or four fast shots, and it's very possible to end their flurry with a successful counterpunch of your own, after which you slide back with a smile on your face, knowing that you took the best they had, and beat it. Especially when they were nailing you with at least half the punches in that combo not five minutes earlier, and looking damn smug about it at the time.
It's also interesting switching partners, which we did every 15 minutes or so during the two hour class. People fight so differently, even when they've all fought together regularly, and are all, in theory, learning the same martial art.
I started off going against the most senior student there. He's very good at punching but not so great at the Kali aspects of it, I.E. moving, flowing, taking the energy of a punch and returning it with a flourish, etc. He's also very good high, but tends to be vulnerable down low. So in the time we spent sparring he hit me at least 3x as often as I hit him, and I never once got a good throat or head shot in, but I could nail him in the ribs or solar plexus just about any time I wanted to, especially if I sent one high to distract him, before aiming low with my next punch. He's also very hard with his arms, strong, and he uses his weight to lean a lot, so going from him to the next guy, a 2 year student a little shorter and heavier than me, was an odd experience. Especially since that guy is much more Kali in his movements, but not as good at channeling it yet.
So he looks good, much like the Gura when she demonstrates, but he's not able to use his newly-learned form to land very many hits yet. He also keeps his hands much lower, and doesn't commit to attacks very often. He likes to parry and parry and parry, sliding his hands around and waiting for you to strike, so he can slide it off and nail you with his counterpunch. He's not fast enough at that yet to be deadly though, so I got a lot of head and throat shots in on him, though he usually got me low in the exchange. I hardly ever touched his ribs though, and he got me all over, usually with a counter punch but several times by taking the initiative himself. It's such a fun dance of the arms and bodies, as you spar with your hands, both of you looking for an opening and thinking how to get it without getting nailed in the process.
After him I went up against the biggest guy there, and the best puncher. He's odd to spar with empty hand, since he's so big and strong that he's very soft and gentle in Kali, likely because he's had to be careful his whole adult life to avoid simply killing someone with a light shove. He's a guy I really enjoy doing empty hand against though, since he's a good partner, and since he's so good at it that he can go half speed and still dominate. He's strong, he's fast, and he's got great reach, so half the time he just leaves one or both hands out in front of him, bent a bit at the elbow, and touches your head or throat any time he wants to, while just eating up every punch you throw at him. It gets frustrating, so you try to hit faster or harder, and once you're leaning he effortlessly lands flurries and sends you reeling. The worst part is that he can get hits without seeming to really try, and he just leans his big bear paws out and smacks you in the head casually, while still remaining able to block your counters.
We sparred for a good half hour, and I don't think he threw more than four or five punches at speed in that time, and he still got me far more than I got him. And virtually all of my hits were shots I threw as fast as I could, shots that just barely slipped past his defense, and mostly shots that hit him in the ribs, at best. Meanwhile he could have knocked out all of my teeth ten times over, all without really trying. I actually wanted him to throw faster some of the time, since I'd adjust to his speed, get half a dozen hits (and lots of kicks) in a row, and start to think I was good. I was hitting faster and more accurately than he could defend, true, but only because he was not counterpunching much and not very quickly when he did.
Of course I can get in hits when I'm going full speed and he's going half speed, but what would it have been like if he'd been going fast too? Probably pretty ugly, and when we next get around to doing parry/check, I'll have to ask him to go full out a bit, just so I can see how far I still have to go. He's got enough control to hit me without killing me. I hope.
There was other sparring too, and Malaya and I ended up going for a while at the end. I landed more hits since I had reach and speed, and I'm better at punching, since it's more naturally a male motion and she hasn't practiced it much. She's got far better Kali form in her movements than I do though, and so the question of who was "better" is very open to debate. I landed more hits, but given my strength and reach advantage, how could I not? The question is how many hits did I land vs. how many should I have landed? If my technique were better the percent would go up, so I can certainly learn and improve going against her, and she can learn against me since she's giving up so much size. Hopefully we can work on that some more at home, and keep it friendly. We often do stick work and I let her practice knife on me, but we don't really spar very much, since tempers and frustration tend to boil over when the opponent is the one you love.
(Did I mention that I totally popped her in the forehead when she got way too devoted to trying to land a kick on me and lowered her eyes, after I'd been turning her shins red for several minutes? *cough*)
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Oil-Based Science?
Speaking of people who lack common decency, the news about the latest guy in the Bush Administration to slink out of office in disgrace
just about defies parody.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Opposition Democrats criticized the administration of US President George W. Bush after it emerged a former top White House advisor on environmental issues, Philip Cooney, has taken a job with oil giant ExxonMobil Corp.
The news that Cooney had secured a job with the oil giant came days after he resigned as the chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality on Friday.
Prior to resigning his White House post, Cooney was involved in a controversy over the deletion of dire climate change warnings in US government reports.
"This is just one more example of how the Bush White House is bought and sold by the very industries it is supposed to regulate," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said in a statement.
Cooney has no scientific background and prior to taking up the environmental post at the White House he served as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, an association of oil and energy firms.
Really, what more can you say that Howard Dean didn't? The guy was not a scientist; he was purely an oil industry shill who was was editing environmental reports to take out hard facts about global warming and links to the burning of fossil fuels. When news of this finally broke he resigned, and immediately went back to working for Exxon. Seriously, imagine you're Bush's spokesperson... what do you say? What lie can you possible concoct that will be even remotely-believable? I'd be stumped, though I might try to link it in some way to "terrorism" or "9/11" or "national security," knowing that the easily-frightened portion of the US population (about 51%, apparently) would hear those words and completely shut off the logic centers of their brain.
Sadly, White House Spokesman Scott McClellan didn't even try.
Asked about Cooney's case, McClellan told reporters: "That's a pretty absurd question that you just raised."
The White House has said Cooney's resignation was "completely unrelated" to the release of documents last week that showed Cooney had edited US government documents on global warming in what appeared to be an effort to water down climate change warnings.
Remember when lying was a bad thing, and that public figures who did it blatantly and repeatedly were castigated and shunned? Me either.
Schiavo's Parents Unrepenant
Following yesterday's news that their daughter was indeed a thoughtless, blind, shrunken-brained vegetable, one would think that Terri Schiavo's parents would make the apologies and crawl back into the hole that the right wing media machine so vociferiously propelled them out of.
Think again.
LARGO, Fla. - An autopsy that found Terri Schiavo suffered from severe and irreversible brain-damage has done nothing to sway her parents' position that she deserved to live and may have gotten better with therapy.
The long-awaited report Wednesday found that the 41-year-old woman's brain had shrunk to about half the normal size for a woman her age when she died March 31 after her feeding tube was disconnected. The autopsy also determined she was blind.
Bob and Mary Schindler disputed the results, maintaining that their daughter interacted with them and tried to speak. Their attorney said the family plans to discuss the autopsy with other medical experts and may take some unspecified legal action.
"We knew all along that Terri was profoundly brain damaged," said Schiavo's brother, Bobby Schindler. "We simply wanted to bring her home and care for her. It all goes back to this quality of life."
Remember when people had the decency to admit when they were wrong and to try and make amends? Me neither.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon who had questioned Schiavo's diagnosis during the intense national debate on whether to remove her feeding tube, said the autopsy brought "a very sad chapter to a close."
"She had devastating brain damage, and with that the chapter is closed," Frist said Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
...
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the autopsy did nothing to change President Bush's position that Schiavo's feeding tube should not have been disconnected. He had signed a bill, rushed through by Congress in March, that was a last-ditch effort to restore her feeding tube.
As Malaya said while I was nuking my breakfast this morning, "I just want her parents to admit that they expected a miracle." Exactly. It was faith-based medicine for them, and it doesn't matter what the facts were, they saw what they wanted to see and never let reality slow their rush to judgment. I've also got to chuckle every time I see a quote from Terri's brother. Hope you're not riding a motorcycle or taking any heavy drugs, dude, 'cause you know mommy and daddy will keep you twitching on the slab with the help of every medical machine yet invented.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Movie Review: Batman Begins
Batman Begins is the latest batman movie, and the first in nearly a decade, since the
debacle that was Batman and Robin. This film, as the title indicates, is not a sequel to the previous series, but a fresh start to the character and the mythology. In this one we see Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, and learn about his childhood, how he developed a fear of bats, how his parents were killed, how he found himself as a man, where he got his combat training, and see the idea of Batman germinate in his mind and watch as he figures out how to fight, assembles his utility belt from useful items (nothing cheesy like a bat-arang), finds an image and becomes known to the people of the city, and learns to fly and climb around the city while avoiding criminals and corrupt police.
He fights enemies also, those of Gotham and elsewhere, and struggles to save the city that killed his parents and made him the hard man that he is. To the scores:
Batman Begins
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 7
Humor: 4
Horror: 5
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7.5
This film is definitely the best Batman movie thus far. That's not saying very much from me, since I wasn't a fan of the previous four, and I only saw the first two that Burton did; I was smart enough to bail out before they turned cheese-meister Joel Schumacher loose. It's a good movie though, by any standard, and may be the best comic book film yet made.
It's not a fun movie, and it's not a comic romp; it's very dark and serious, with convincing performances and genuine human tragedy. There's even some scary stuff, and not just for people who are afraid of swarms of CGI bats. I think it would have been greatly improved by an R rating, since that would have allowed the bad guys to be much nastier, the action to be more violent and bloody, and the perversion and hinted at sexual elements to be convincing. It's an effective PG-13 though, with very hard-hitting action and many deaths hinted at, if not actually shown. And there are marketing and box office considerations behind the teen-friendly PG-13 rating, of course.
Saying it's dark doesn't mean it's grim and joyless though. I enjoyed it a great deal, and the dark elements just made the heroism and triumph that much more enjoyable. The villains are evil and despicable, but have a bit of a wacky edge to make them comic book, and the main plot to destroy Gotham City is realistic enough to believe, while being too crazy to belong anywhere outside of a comic book world.
More on the scores:
Script/Story: 8This is the strongest element of the film, and while it's not perfect, it's pretty good. The flashbacks to Bruce Wayne's childhood and young adult years are very well done, both in of themselves and in terms of how they are integrate into the film. You could see this movie having never heard of Batman in your life, and it would all make sense, in a comic book sort of way.
The film opens with Bruce Wayne incarcerated in some sort of Tibetian prison, fighting for his life against a gang of prisoners, and as the plot unfolds we see why he was there, what sent him off on his world-traveling, soul-searching path, why he decides to return to Gotham City, and how he tries to live up to his father's memory. From there we see him picking his weapons, training in their use, and deciding what sort of public and private life he's going to lead. In short, this one has all of the "how" and "why" stuff that superhero movies usually skip, and that's exactly what bothers me about most of them.
For example, I couldn't sit through
Batman 2, the one with Danny DeVito as the Penguin, since it was just too much disbelief to suspend. Baby Penguin washed into the sewers as a deformed baby, and the next thing you know it's decades later and he's this hideous beak-nosed thing with jagged teeth, a vast fortune, and hundreds of costumed henchmen. How did he survive? Where did he find the henchmen? Who makes their clothing? Where did he get hundreds of penguin backpacks to outfit his animal assassins? And so on. I also always wonder how Batman got his vehicles and costumes, how he built his huge Batcave beneath his mansion without any workers talking, and so on.
This all goes for other movies too; I can't watch X-men without wondering who built all of those massive underground rooms, how Xavier has the most advanced aircraft on earth, etc. Just the fact that almost none of this stuff marred the quality of Batman Begins would have earned it a high score in this category. That it's got a good plot otherwise, good dialogue, and so on, is gravy.
Acting/Casting: 7No one is exceptional in the film, but everyone gets the job done. Michael "30 years ago I'd have carried this film and now I’m the fucking butler!" Caine as the Alfred was perfect in his role, and I liked Policeman (not yet Commissioner) Gordon too. Christian Bale as Batman is acceptable, and the young guy who plays the psycho Scarecrow is suitably creepy, while Morgan Freeman plays Morgan Freeman, in a role that's well-written for him. Liam Neeson is also good in his mentor role, and the only one who really stuck out in sore thumb fashion was love interest Katie Holmes. She's not horrible, but she just takes up space and is surprisingly not-attractive throughout. Honestly, the only memorable thing she does comes at the end of the film, when she wears a thin white silk blouse in a chilly outdoor scene with a stiff breeze, apparently wanting to make up for the lack of nipples thus far seen on the new batsuit. If not for her ongoing Tom Cruise-related circus I'd have had no idea who she was and not have given a thought to finding out afterwards, except to wonder why they didn't get a beautiful woman for the role.
Action: 7It's not really an action film, not with all of the story and acting, but what action there is rocks. It's hard-hitting and realistic and intense, and while the fight scene editing is all of the fast and tight and frantically-edited type, it works pretty well. True, there's no way to tell what's happening, especially with almost every fight featuring a guy in a black bat suit against other guys in black uniforms, but it's fast-paced and intense. Most of the scenes of Batman in action are shot from the POV of the bad guys, as they look around in terror and shoot up at shadows, and these work since we just see Batman as he appears and knocks someone out and vanishes. Go watch a Jet Li movie if you want to see long shots of fight scenes featuring people who can really do it. This film is much more stylized and brutal, and you've got to like Batman's bone-crushing attacks. He swoops in, hits some thug hard enough to knock him through a wall, and vanishes. The technical nature of the fighting is remedial at best, but it's not a martial arts film, so don't expect
Crouching Tiger style fight scenes and you won't be disappointed.
Other than physical combat, there's other quality action. The Batmobile chases are fun, due entirely to Batman's Hummer-on-steroids vehicle, "The Tumbler." It rampages through Gotham, cornering with hydraulics, running right over police cars, crashing through walls, firing missiles, and going into stealth mode, and it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch. It's probably even more fun to drive, but that privilege is not given to us, the viewer. Coming soon to a Six Flags near you, perhaps. There's also a truly-glorious train crash that goes on and on in a series of explosions and collapsing buildings that I greatly enjoyed.
Best of all, the action is there for a reason, and it's more or less realistic. It's not video game silliness, like
Mr. & Mrs. Smith, or
Charlie's Angels, or
the last few James Bond films. The action in Batman Begins is not only part of the story, it actually advances the story, and when it happens it seems necessary, rather than pointlessly inserted for its own sake.
Humor: 4Don't read too much into this score, since it's not a comedy. The scenes that try to be funny are, but there aren't many of them. It's not an action/comedy by any stretch of the imagination.
Horror: 5Much like the humor score, this film isn't trying to be scary. That it was in any way was a surprise to me, and I liked that surprise a lot. I'd talk more about it, but I don't want to be spoilery about something I didn't know about going in, and enjoyed all the more for my ignorance.
Eye Candy: 6The movie looks exactly how it wants to look. That most of the scenes are in the dark, dirty slums of crumbling Gotham City is intentional, and while these are not pretty things to look at, they look perfect for the story. Some of the early scenes of the wilds of Tibet or Nepal (or wherever) were gorgeous in their harsh and frozen grandeur, and I loved a few of the long shots of Gotham City too; with the steaming ugliness transformed by aeriel photography. Gotham is basically New York, but bigger and far more stratified between the gleaming high rises and the festering, third world slums that surround them. Ugly though it was, I wanted to see more of the city, and that's not something I felt about any of the perfectly manicured and computer-generated fantasy lands in the three Star Wars prequels.
Fun Factor: 6It's not a very fun movie, but it's not exactly meant to be fun. It's meant to be gritty and dark and tough, and it is all of those things. It's not quite noir, not with a PG-13 rating and a heroic superhero good guy, but you feel for the characters, rather than laughing along and knowing everything will turn out alright.
Replayability: 6I'm torn on this score, since while I'd like to see it again tomorrow, that's more out of admiration for the quality of the film than because I had such a fun time watching it. I didn't enjoy it as much as appreciate it, but I can imagine it growing on me once I've seen it a couple of times on DVD.
Overall: 7.5I've no hesitation in naming this the best of the Batman films, and it's probably the best superhero/comic book film yet made as well. I'm only including modern ones in this, since the genre has progressed so much, and since I can't fairly-evaluate films I saw when I was a kid. I always thought Superman was pretty boring and far too goody-goody to be of much interest, but I remember thinking
Superman 2 was pretty good, with his fights against Zod.
Spiderman was a well-made film, but Tobey Maguire is a splash of water compared to the solid presence of Christian Bale, and that movie was all too jokey and consumed with an un-involving love affair to do much for me. The
X-men movies have both been passionless and fallen far short of their potential, and various other films like
The Punisher and
Underworld and
Blade (reviews of all those in my
reviews section) have had their moments, but haven't really worked on the whole.
In retrospect, the only comic book movie I'd put up against this one is
Hellboy.
My initial review only gave it a 6, but it's really grown on me after seeing it several times on DVD, and right now I'd say it's a better and more enjoyable film than
Batman Begins. Admittedly, I also love the Lovecraftian mythology of
Hellboy while I'm pretty neutral towards the world of Batman, so factor that into my score if you must. Whether
Batman Begins will grow on me once I've seen it again on DVD, especially if there's an unrated version with more intensity, remains to be seen.
All in all, it was done about as well as it could have been. I'd have liked a bit more light on and technique in the fights, but that's just my martial arts eye talking. I think most people will like them just as they are, and better frantic editing and close ups and style than unconvincing long shots of some guy in a bat suit. The female love interest could have been a better role and definitely a better actress, but all of the male characters were well written and acted, and when you get down to it, this is very much a man's movie. Or a boy's movie, at least. I'm looking forward to part 2.
Minor Site Updates
Prompted by the new blog format, I spent some time today going over various old site pages and making updates, and in one case making a deletion. Updated (modestly, in most cases) are the
Feedback page,
Cast of Characters page,
Design Notes page, and
Contact page. Updated (at the bottom) and then purged from the navbar for redundancy is the
Mission Statement page. This is the last time you'll ever see a link to it from anywhere on this site, so click and see why, or ignore it and miss nothing.
Things of the Day
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights."
--Kahlil Gibran
Soul-Devouring Worry:Deceptive matinee pricing.
Answer of the Day:Because I just had to get back into the swing of things.
Curse of the Day:May the yin/yang of your sleeping pets shatter with consciousness.
Books Lying Open:Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
L is for Lawless, by Sue Grafton
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Unnecessary Reviews
So here's my quandry. Before and during my recent Chicago trip and San Diego "
vacation" I read three books, none of which were very good and one of which was actually quite awful. Sunday night, while in a mood to write but not a mood to fiction, I typed out reviews of all three. I kept the reviews relatively short, and tried to talk about why the books worked or didn't work, but all the same, all three books are old, two of them are hardly even in print anymore, and the oldest and least-known was by far the worst of the three.
The quandry is, why should I post those reviews when they're about mediocre titles no one is likely to ever read again anyway? It's ironic too, since as I was reading two of the books half the reason I kept going was so I'd be able to write a review about them. And now I feel like I've got to post the review since after all, I sat through the whole stupid book before I could write it.
Anyway, here's the first and the worst of the three, a cheesy attempt at a horror romance by the previously-unknown Barbara Michaels. Her stunningly-original title?
Prince of Darkness. To the review, which you can
also read here, in my
reviews section, though I can't really imagine why you'd want to.
Prince of Darkness, by Barbara Michaels. I picked this one up for free at a library giveaway and read it on vacation when all of my other books were exhausted; time that would have been better spent in virtually any other pursuit. I have not read anything else by this author, so perhaps this is her style, but I thought this was one of the most poorly-written novels I've ever read. The prose is weak, the descriptions are cursory, and the dialogue is barely serviceable. The worst thing though, is the deception practiced by the author, in order to attempt to create some suspense, purely by withholding information from the reader.
To the scores:
Prince of Darkness, by Barbara Michaels
Plot: 3
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 3/5
Characters: 3
Horror: 2
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 2
Page Turner: 3
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 2
Deception, you say? Yes. I shall try to explain.
The book opens with a man being hired to do a job, and the events are presented in such as way that we think he's going to kill an innocent woman, or at least drive her insane in some sort of plot to get her money. The book is from his POV for the first 2/5 or so, and then just as his plan is going well he makes a huge discovery that we don't share with him, one that changes his entire outlook on things -- at which point the book's POV changes to that of the woman who he was trying to drive crazy with cheap ghostly parlor tricks. The novel then proceeds from her POV, while the initial male character starts behaving completely differently, with no explanation given. We get the thoughts of the female lead from then on, but never enough to answer the basic mysteries of the tale. The author simply had to switch to her POV since if we'd stayed with the man's we would have learned what was going on, instead of having it drawn out for another 100 pages.
This book is not a mystery, since there aren't any clues given that would let you figure things out in advance. Rather, it's cheaply-deceptive because the suspense is generated entirely by the author withholding information from the reader and switching the POV around to keep us on the outside. On top of that, the final reveal is melodramatic and cheesy to the extreme; think of every bad twist you'd see in a soap opera, and you'll see it in this novel. Dead characters coming back to life, secret identities, hidden relationships between characters, and so on.
Great writing and characters might have redeemed this, at least partly, but there is none to be found. The main male lead is just some English guy with no particular distinguishing traits, the woman is skittish and uninteresting, and when basically every other character in the novel suddenly turns out to be a murderous demon, it's not believable and is just silly. We didn't care about the other people, nor the main characters, so why should we care when the ridiculous events of the climax begin to take place? The book also cheats on every bit of potential gore, sex, confrontation, etc. Just as something passionate is about to happen, the narrative skips to another POV, or forward in time until after the events have already taken place.
I was hoping for a good suspenseful tale with some horror, occult, or even romance, and I was disappointed to find nothing but cheap thrills and obfuscation by a mediocre novelist. Really, the author should have realized she didn't have enough plot to support a novel, and rather than going forward with the cheap tricks required to eek out 220 pages and barely qualify as a novel, she should have put this on the back burner and given it more thought. Some more plot twists and another few scenes with the townsfolk would have fleshed out this tale and might have given it enough meat to pass.
As it is, I can't recommend this book at all, and no, it's not good enough to bother going into further detail about the individual rating categories. I am willing to quickly summarize the plot, if anyone cares enough to ask. Just so you'll gain even greater insight into why it sucked.
The best news about this? We're going to see Batman Begins this afternoon, so with any luck I'll get to wipe away the taste this one left in your mouth with a review of something fun and enjoyable.
Schiavo Autopsy Shows Massive Brain Damage
In
news that's not news to anyone who didn't have a huge cross to grind on the issue, Terri Schiavo's autopsy results have been released, and it turns out that she was just as much of a vegetable as everyone but her parents and their religiously-motivated supporters contended.
LARGO, Fla. - An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband's contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner's office said Wednesday. It also found no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused.
...
Her parents cling to their belief that her condition could have improved, in spite of the autopsy report, their lawyer said.
She died from dehydration, Thogmartin said. He said she did not appear to have suffered a heart attack and there was no evidence that she was given harmful drugs or other substances prior to her death. He said that after her feeding tube was removed, she would not have been able to eat or drink if she had been given food by mouth, as her parents requested.
"Removal of her feeding tube would have resulted in her death whether she was fed or hydrated by mouth or not," Thogmartin told reporters. He also said she was blind, because the "vision centers of her brain were dead," and that her brain was about half of its expected size when she died 13 days following the feeding tube's removal.
It's times like this when I almost wish I read some of the nuttier right wing blogs, just to see what they say when they're proven completely wrong on one thing after another. Perhaps they could begin combining conspiracy theories, and prove that Osama met with Saddam and they hid the WMDs in Terri Schiavo's brain, just as Dear Leader Dubya foretold?
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Maybe there are some good rides at DisneyWorld after all?
Disneyland/world's reputation is that they are family places with wimpy rides, and that adults who want real rollercoaster-style thrills should head to Six Flags. The reputation is true as far as I know, but it looks like Disney is working to change that.
To the news:
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. - A 4-year-old boy died after a spin on a Walt Disney World spaceship ride so intense that some riders have been taken to the hospital with chest pain.
Daudi Bamuwamye lost consciousness Monday aboard "Mission: Space," which spins riders in a giant centrifuge that subjects them to twice the normal force of gravity. The boy's mother carried him off the ride, and paramedics and a theme park worker tried to revive him, but he died at a hospital.
The sheriff's office said the boy met the minimum 44-inch height requirement for the ride.
That sounds impressive, until you notice it's a whole 2g. You get more than that stomping on it at a green light! Besides, 4 year olds aren't exactly reknowned for their hardiness and difficulty killing, what with all those drownings in buckets of water and from taking a bite of a peanut butter sandwich and such.
A more interesting aspect of the article comes in later, when the state of safety regulations at DisneyWorld is briefly discussed.
Florida's major theme parks not directly regulated by the state, and instead have their own inspectors.
It's a good topic for a much longer blog post at some point, but if you hunt around and find some info about how Disney has basically bought off the entire state of Florida, it's a fascinating topic. My dad's favorite author
wrote a book about it, and if you can find
fascinating stuff about Disney online, for free. For instance, did you know Disneyland and Disneyworld are two of the very few locations in the US that were
permanently designated "no fly zones" by the Homeland Security Act?
Never Neverland
So, Michael Jackson was somehow found
not guilty on all charges in his latest child molestation ordeal. I'd say something clever about it, but since I hadn't worked this hard to ignore a celebrity trial since the OJ farce, I don't know enough about it to comment. I'd assumed he would go up the river, but apparently the DA did a shitty job, and the mother of the allegedly-abused kid was a complete money-grubbing bitch who alienated the jury with her rambling and accusatory testimony.
I'd especially assumed he was screwed when Johnny Cochran dropped dead earlier this year (and fell straight through the earth's crust on his non-stop journey to hell). But Cochran wasn't working for MJ anyway, and apparently there's more than one lawyer out there with a knack for getting nutty celebrities out of trouble of their own making. If the sequined glove don't fit, you must acquit?
In fact, there's
a glowing article today about Jackson's lawyer, Tom Mesereau.
"He is probably the best cross-examiner I've ever seen in a courtroom," said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, who sat in on the trial. "He is tenacious and he knows the evidence regarding the witness he is questioning better than anyone else in the courtroom."
Yes, it's all quite fascinating. If only the media could spend a little more time reporting on celebrities? After all, there's not any more important news out there. It's not like we're not losing a war in Iraq right now or anything.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Movie Review: Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (John and Jane, respectively) is a relationship film masquerading as an action movie. It starts Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and the bleeding, dying ghost of Jennifer Aniston's love, and is a fun little romp propelled almost entirely by snappy editing, bright colors, and the tremendous chemistry between the two leads.
The plot, if you're somehow unaware of it at this point, is that Pitt and Jolie are a married couple who have grown very bored of their safe, plain lives. Each believes that the other has a normal job, when in actuality they are both super assassins, jetting around the world to pull off hired murders before returning home just in time for their next banal dinner party. Eventually and inevitably, they discover each other's secret identity and turn their guns on each other. Will they rediscover their love through near death? Will they join forces against the anonymous forces who are now after both of them? Will there be lots of gunplay? What do you think?
To the scores.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 9
Action: 7
Humor: 6
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6
This one was tricky for me to score, since so many of the totals were very mixed. For example, the action was very good, for what it was. By that I mean what you saw on the screen of the gun play, driving, fighting, infiltration, etc was pleasing to the eye. At the same time, 90% of the action was completely ludicrous, in terms of whether or not it could actually happen like that in any dimension even remotely like our own. I'll go into more detail in a moment, but the action, like so many other aspects of this film, will work better the less thought you give to the logic behind it. Since quite often, there is none.
I don't have a "chemistry" score on my ratings, but if I did this film would earn a 9 or 10, and it would be the only thing that kept this one afloat. Malaya made the point after we saw it, and I think it's fair to repeat, that this movie would have been a complete train wreck had it starred virtually any other pair of actors.
I'm sure some other male and female leads could have pulled it off, but none leap to mind, and since almost the entire plot requires you to suspend your disbelief with a crane, it's essential that you believe that Pitt and Jolie really are in love and really are half crazy as they consider killing each other. The whole movie does not work, but what does work would not work at all if it were not for the two leads meshing so well. Pitt and Jolie are great together, and even the scenes where they're just suffering through a miserable suburban dinner together have a sort of crackle to them. This film is probably the best evidence yet that all romantic leads should have an affair during filming, for the good of the project.
Further comments:
Script/Story: 6The first of my very conflicted scores. The script for the dialogue and actions of Pitt and Jolie was great. Lots of nice comedy bits, lots of nice relationship touches, realistic in their actions and reactions to most things, etc. The rest of the script, in terms of the overall plot, the actions of other characters, the way the fight scenes worked, etc, was completely absurd. Plot holes everywhere, physical impossibilities in every action scene, completely stupidity in almost every scenario, and so on. I can't discuss it further without going into major spoilers, but there's just no way not to spend the last hour of the film thinking, "Why didn't they just do _______." and "No one would ever do ______." and so on.
Acting/Casting: 9As I've been saying, this is what makes the film. Pitt and Jolie are both nearly perfect in their roles, and while either of them would have been good on their own, they are just electric together. As good a romantic pairing as I've ever seen on screen.
Action: 7Another mixed one. As I briefly alluded to above, the action is fun and lively and visually-pleasing, on that level. If you want it to make sense and be logical and realistic, you're out of luck, since it's nearly as full of physical impossibilities as cartoonish films like
Charlie's Angels.
I read a bit in Entertainment Weekly that there were initially two head bad guys, directing the plotting against the Smiths. They tested poorly though, and were completely axed from the final film. I can't say whether or not that improved the movie, but test audiences seemed to think it did, and we might as well trust their judgment. I can speculate that their removal is a large source of why so little of this film makes sense, though. As it is the bad guys are about as real and grounded as the enemies you blow away in a computer game. There are hundreds of them, all anonymously clad in black, all wearing masks, all driving black cars or flying in black helicopters, and they pop up as needed, die bloodlessly, and are instantly replaced by dozens more, just in time to be mowed down by the Smiths as they trade innuendo-laced banter and look cool reloading their guns.
Did you ever see
Commando, the Arnie film? Think about the last half hour of that, during which he blows away maybe 150 soldiers, most of them at point blank range, while simply ignoring the thousands of machine gun bullets and dozens of grenades that blow up all around him. Arnie is basically playing Command on "god mode" and that's pretty well what the Smiths do in their film as well, though at least Arnie made some effort to duck and hide from time to time, as he took cover behind such bulletproof objects as rose bushes and chain link fences. You get the idea.
Humor: 6This all comes from the clever dialogue and character treatments in the script, and it's all predicated on the Smith's chemistry. Several people were laughing aloud during the entire film, I mean like non-stop, and while I didn't find it that funny, I was amused and appreciative of the dialogue. It was somewhat reminiscent of the best of
Moonlighting, where Bruce Willis and Kathleen Turner had some cracklingly-sparring dialogue and chemistry going.
Eye Candy: 7Another mixed score. The two leads are undeniably gorgeous, regularly being voted the #1 most beautiful man and woman on earth in those completely-scientific tabloid mag polls. There is some lovely architecture too, as each of the leads inhabits their James Bond-styled secret offices and plays with their hardware. Other than that though, there movie isn't much to look at. Most of the action takes place in the suburbia of upstate New York, or else in a distant and dry desert, and neither of those locations, or the various interior sets, are anything special to look at. So give this one a 9 for the people, and a 4 for most of the sets, and average it out with weighting applies to the human aspect.
Fun Factor: 6If the plot had made a bit more sense and hadn't forced me to overlook so many totally illogical things, I'd have had more fun. As it was I enjoyed the film, but was always aware of the disbelief I was working to keep suspended, and that's never much fun.
Replayability: 5Another mixed score. Right now I've got no desire to see it again, since I mostly remember the dumb stuff and figure I'd fixate on that during a second viewing. Malaya's eager to see the unrated director's cut version though, with the PG-13 edits removed and some much hotter sex included, and I can envision this one really growing on me once it's on DVD, and I have come to terms with the plot holes and can begin ignoring them and just enjoying the other aspects of the film.
Overall: 6While I admire the acting and some of the action, there are simply too many gaping plot and logic holes for me to give this one a higher score. The romance and relationship stuff is very solid and extremely well-acted, and the action scenes themselves are fun. If the plot had even made a hint of sense and hadn't been constructed in intentionally-illogical form to keep the scenes flowing, I'd have been happy to give this one a higher score. As it is I can't really recommend it, unless you're confident that you'll be able to overlook all the silly stuff and just enjoy the acting and romantic chemistry.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Trying way too hard
Batman Begins is opening this weekend, and shockingly, after the
unwatchable fourth installment of the series, it's getting
very good reviews. One of them is from Walter Chaw, one of my favorite film reviewers (
more on him here), who is in fine form in this review, as he does everything possible to tell you nothing useful about the film while convincing you that the money his parents spent sending him to grad school
was well spent. A quote:
More than appreciably darker, Batman Begins tackles the story's essential Freudian/Jungian mooring, returning over and over to the dank, vaginal tunnel that a young Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has tied inextricably to the death of his parents until the moment that a grown Bruce, after a self-imposed exile of seven years, penetrates the black pit of his divorce from his parents to find himself reborn, as it were, underground.
Uh huh. He gives it four stars by the way, though you'll need patience and a thesarus to figure out why. We'll be seeing it opening weekend, I suspect. Malaya's in quite the lather for this one, and I'm willing to go too, even though I wasn't impressed with any of the previous batman films; not even the two Tim Burton ones that most people seemed to find enjoyable.
The Family Dog
Here's
another heartwarming pet pit bull story, with a bonus quote from the stupidest mother on earth. Well, ex-mother.
SAN FRANCISCO - The mother of a 12-year-old boy killed in his own home by one of the family's two pit bulls says she had been so concerned about one of the dogs that she shut her son in the basement to protect him.
Maureen Faibish said she ordered Nicholas to stay in the basement while she did errands on June 3, the day he was attacked by one or both of the dogs. She said she was worried about the male dog, Rex, who was acting possessive because the female, Ella, was in heat.
"I put him down there, with a shovel on the door," Faibish said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "And I told him: `Stay down there until I come back.' Typical Nicky, he wouldn't listen to me."
...
"It's Nicky's time to go," she said in the interview. "When you're born you're destined to go and this was his time."
Well, mom's real broken up, but hey, you can't fight fate. Man, her god must be a cocksucker, huh? So that kid was born 12 years ago, a perfect beautiful baby boy, but nevertheless had "Die by June 10th, 2005." stamped on his head in celestial ink. Do you suppose the method of death was preordained? I mean did it also say, "Mauled by dog." or was that left open, and if Rex (nice original name there, lady) hadn't torn him to pieces would a stray bullet have gotten him, or a car crash, or a blood clot?
Unbelievably, the article also includes the requisite quote about how she never could have expected this from her loving pets.
Despite her concerns about Rex that day, Faibish told the newspaper: "My kids got along great with (the dogs). We were never seeing any kind of violent tendencies."
Of course you weren't. This quote appears in every article you ever read about someone's murderous pit bull or akita or doberman or whatever, and while I usually just laugh at their oblivious ignorance, in this case I'm almost left open-mouthed. Honestly, she's either a scheming liar trying to avoid prison on child endangerment charges, or a complete idiot. Given that she actually locked her kid in the basement (a dangerous act in of itself) to keep him away from the dogs before they murdered him, how on earth can she seriously say they weren't dangerous? This reminds me of all of the asshole children you see; bullies, druggies, disruptive brats, or whatever, and then their frequently-clueless parents. "Oh no, my son/daughter is a perfect angel and never acts up at home." People have an amazing ability to see only that which they want to see in other people, especially when they've given birth to said other people.
Lastly, the scariest thing in the whole article is mom's plural use of the word "kids." She's got more! Survivors? Can I at least hope that they'll take them away from her before they lock mom into a basement with several vicious animals? After all, it's probably about her time to go too.
Things of the Day
Quotes and other things of the day will be posted in this fashion from now on, for reasons elicudated in the previous post. Quantities will vary, but you should definitely take my use of the word "day" with a non-literal grain of salt.
Quote of the Day:"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change."
--Jim Rohn
Soul-Devouring Worry:A playful cat whose claws are in desperate need of a trim.
Answer of the Day:Because an answering machine would just complicate things.
Curse of the Day:May your iGimp remain cordless.
Books Lying Open: Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
L is for Lawless, by Sue Grafton
Prince of Darkness, by Barbara Michaels
(Books with a strike through them await their just review.)
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Technical Difficulties
Thanks almost entirely to Malaya's
eagerness willingness to leap into the quagmire of blogger template editing, we've got BlackChampagne.com working now, in the proper look, through the blogger script. It's still a work in progress (I'll get to the problems in a moment.) but things are smooth enough as of Saturday night that I can now remove the link to the blogger.html page. Please revert your bookmarks to the main page:
http://www.blackchampagne.com.
ChangesBlog entries will continue to be posted every day, roughly as they have been over the past couple of weeks. The schedule will vary, of course, since my main priority is working on the novel. But you'll almost certainly see new stuff more often than the Mon/Wed/Fri schedule I've been running with for the past year or so. As for content, now that I'm back home in my comfort writing zone I will likely start throwing in more long essay-style blog posts, posting photos, posting several related news items in the same entry, and so on. Those are what most of you have grown used to from me, and I enjoy writing them, however I also enjoy the ability to post a quickie little thing whenever I want to, which is why I'm keeping the blog script and not going back to only posting full HTML pages.
You'll notice some other minor appearance changes. I'm still playing around with the top of the page; whether or not I'll have some sort of "recent features" box up there, where the black champagne title image is going to go, etc. I sorta like the new look up there, even though I had to hunt up that van gogh painting and clip out a larger version of it to allow for wider page stretching in some resolutions.
The following nav bar and format changes apply
only to blogger-powered pages --
not to the 3.5 years of daily archives posted before my recent San Diego trip, nor to all of the other site content pages including reviews, articles, mailbags, band names, etc.
That being said... due to the way blogger works, I can no longer post items in the nav bar and have them remain there forever, tied to a given day's or week's worth of blogs. For example, if you go back to any random archive day, say
February 4, 2005, you see the entry for that day, and you also see the Curse of the Day, Quote of the Day, Books Lying Open, Phrase of the Day, etc entries just for that day. Most of those have been changing with every blog entry for the 3.5 years that I've been doing this blog, and I will continue to post new ones all the time, but as blog posts themselves.
Unfortunately, I have to put everything into the nav bar and have it all overwrite every day, so while I could post new curses and quotes and such, you'd only see the newest one, and it would appear on every page fed by the blogger script. I liked sticking them over there in the navbar, but there's just no way to keep doing that now, unfortunately.(The PotD and QotD actual archive pages not withstanding. And by the way, if anyone is ever really bored and wants to click back through hundreds of blogs and paste out every curse of the day, question of the day, soul devouring worry, etc, and stick them on one page, sorted by category, and send them to me, I'll be happy to make up an archive page for those with all of them in one place for easy reading. I'm just not motivated enough to do it myself.)
Reader comments/emails with praise and/or complaints about all of these changes, as well as suggestions for other improvements are entirely welcome, of course. This blog is always a work in progress, especially now with the ongoing format changes.
How do they stay open?
I'm speaking about
Comp USA, of course, better known as "Com-pusa!" Saturday afternoon after sitting through
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Malaya and I headed down the road to
Fry's, and then after a late lunch/early dinner at Claim Jumper we visited a nearby Comp USA.
At Fry's we had to park a quarter mile from the store entrance, walk past hundreds of cars, and then wade through hundreds (literally) of people inside, and we were actually surprised at how uncrowded Fry's was, for a Saturday afternoon. At Comp USA, perhaps two hours later, we saw maybe eight customers in the entire store, and about four employees. They were so dispirited that they didn't even have a security guard at the door to check receipts, since honestly, no one there was buying anything.
This isn't any real surprise; we visited that Compusa months ago, before Fry's opened two miles away, and wondered how long it would remain in business with that sort of competition moving in. It's lasted nearly a year, but I don't think it can go on too much longer with the total lack of customers we witnessed on an otherwise busy shopping day. I won't miss it either, since it's like all Compusas; crappy selection, high prices, and completely indifferent sales people who spend most of their time hiding from public view. Bye bye.
Most Heartwarming Story Ever?
I wasn't going to post any more entries this weekend, with the potetial blogging time instead dedicated to working out some way to insert this blog into the BC main page. That being said, it's morning, I just got up, and we're going to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith in an hour, so I might as well throw up something quick. Given that it's currently the #1 read story on Yahoo News you may not have needed me to tip you to it, but
check out this story about the autistic (or something) kid who loved sports and finally got to play with the basketball team in the last game of the year.
CLOVIS, Calif. - The chant began late in the fourth quarter in the basketball gym at Clovis East High. The students started it first, clapping their hands in unison and pounding the bleachers with their feet. It didn't take long for the parents to pick it up, too. The noise grew until the whole gym seemed to shake. "We want Ryno. We want Ryno."
Pacing the sideline, coach Tim Amundsen felt himself getting goose bumps. Less than 4 minutes remained in the game, and Clovis East was winning comfortably over rival Buchanan High. Now Amundsen had a decision to make.
...
The final seconds were ticking off the clock and Clovis East got the ball one last time. This time, Ryan found a spot just beyond the 3-point line to the left of the key. He got a pass, and turned to shoot.
The noisy gym quieted for a split second as the ball seemed to hang in the air forever.
It swished through, the way it did so many times in the driveway in front of his house.
"Nothing but net," he exclaimed.
The buzzer sounded as Ryan ran joyously toward his bench, attempting to chest butt a teammate in celebration.
In the stands, Justin tried to scream, but nothing came out. He wasn't alone. Grown men and women hugged each other and cried.
The kid who wouldn't take no for an answer could now say he was a player, too.
"All the parents were bawling, and the students were too," Amundsen said. "My coaching staff all had tears in their eyes. It was an unbelievable moment."
It wasn't over yet. As the teams shook hands, two football players grabbed Ryan and hoisted him on their shoulders. He held his arms high in celebration, a big grin on his face, as they carried him on a victory lap around the gymnasium.
"I've never seen anything like it before and I probably never will," Amundsen said. "He'll be my example the rest of my life as a coach."
If you didn't tear up at least a little bit while reading that one, you're truly a hardened individual. Come on, it's retarded Rudy! Cry, damnit.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Movie and Game Stuff
As I've been catching up on my surfing and reading today, I've hit a lot of stuff I could have blogged about. I didn't want to post 20 frivilous things though, so I'm just going to mention a couple of them.
Kong is King moviesI enjoyed watching the last three Production Diaries on the glorious
Kong is King website, and had a comment on the most recent one. It's nice to see that the post production is proceeding smoothly, but I almost felt sad when one of the miniature technical guys remarked (paraphrasing), "Sometimes the best model and special effect work is wasted when a director doesn't make a film well enough to showcase it."
I'd never really thought about that before, but when you consider it, it's a good point. Imagine that you're one of the peons in the special effects department, and youv'e spent a year or two of your life working on a film, and then you can hardly see your work in the final picture, or it looks like shit because the director did a crappy job presenting it? You might have done great work, but no one will ever know due to circumstances completely beyond your control.
I suppose that's how most employees feel on a daily basis, as their large corporation churns along and grinds them into no more than a tiny gear in the vast machine, but for a creative artistic type it's got to be torture. I know how angry I'd be if I wrote something I liked and it was ruined in the final presentation by an asshole editor, or errors in type setting. The guy talking in the production diary sounded almost grateful to be working under an auteur like Peter Jackson, and his confidence that King Kong would be done well enough to look good, and to show off his miniature work, was heartwarming.
Pop Cap's poor choiceElsewhere, in gaming news, there is a new helpful addition to the
Pop Cap games, and it's driving me insane. My game of choice there is
Heavy Weapon, one I've meant to post mention of on the blog for months. I'll talk about it another day, but it's basically an old style arcade shooter, in which you control a tank and shoot down hundreds of planes and choppers, dodge their missiles, gather powerups, and so on.
I post about it now because, like all of the Pop Cap games, you play in a pop up window. This works nicely since you can position it wherever you like to be in your eye line, concentrate on it fully without extra background space around it, etc. The problem, one that didn't exist when I last played it two weeks ago, is that all of their games now pop up into a new window, which has a "Start My Game" button you have to click to load the actual game. I have no idea why they added this, since the games load whether you click it or not, after about 10 seconds. The problem is that the actual game is then the second thing you load in that window, and if, while playing, you accidentally click the side button on your mouse, the one that makes your browser go back one in the history... there goes your game.
This hardly matters on puzzle games like Bejeweled or Zuma or Alchemy or whatever, but in action games, such as Heavy Weapon or Insaneaquarium, where you've moving the mouse and clicking the mouse buttons furiously for minutes on end, the odds that your thumb will stray up the side of the mouse at some point are pretty good. So far I've played 4 games of Heavy Weapon since I returned, and ended two of them at around the 8 minute mark, just when they were getting good, by clicking "back" accidentally. (The other two weren't any good either, with me dying before I even had all 9 of my special powerups -- I'm clearly rusty from disuse.)
Yes, I could simply disable the mouse button, but since I use it constantly while surfing, I'm not going to. I am going to continue cursing when I instantly cancel a game by clicking back while playing, though.
Catching Up
I'm not sure what sort of schedule this blog is on anymore, but I can't see returning to the old Mon/Wed/Fri updating schedule. I've grown too accustomed to throwing up quick posts whenever I wish and it's just a matter of doing the technical work to transform the current format to a blog format. Here's where I'd like to just give some instruction to my technical guru and conclude by saying, "Make it so." Since I tragically lack a technical (or any other kind of) guru, you'll have to wait for me to get around to it, and with any luck it will occur before Monday.
Friday has been a busy day, full of catching up to the homelife activities. I didn't sleep that well, despite having a nice dark bedroom in which to do it. Perhaps I grew accustomed to waking up half a dozen times while sleeping in a light room in San Diego, but I woke up at least that often last night, and not just because Dusty and Jinx seemed to be taking turns occupying as much of my legroom as they possibly could.
I got up eventually, and scratched together some breakfast while surveying the entirely empty refrigerator. Malaya ate something while I was in San Diego, but not very much of it, since she lost weight and there was virtually nothing left in the house to eat. She'll follow recipes and cook excellent food when motivated, but only for both of us. When she's eating on her own, if there's not something left over she just makes due with whatever quick crap we've got lying around. Formerly that was ramen noodles or other junk, but with the healthier eating and diet kick she's been on lately she's doing a lot of low calorie frozen dinners and 100 calorie snacks of chips and such.
So apparently she survived on that stuff while I was out of town, since anything she bought and prepared was certainly gone when I got home. For breakfast today I fried the last egg in the house, one left over from two weeks previous, and had two slices of toast, those also left from before my trip. There was no margarine to put on the toast, and only a bit of "jumbleberry" preserves one of her colleagues made and gifted us with, and with some water and a few slices of the orange bell pepper I'd brought along as an airplane snack, it made for quite a mediocre breakfast.
I didn't get to dwell on it for long though, since we were soon off to the gym for a hearty workout. I enjoyed it, and it felt good to sweat and strain, after doing some of the former and lots of the later while out of town. I did 400 calories in 25 minutes on the elliptical machine, then did mostly upper body weight machines for 10 minutes before joining Malaya on her last lap through the circuit training express workout machines. We then stumbled home and into the shower just in time to head out shopping. Stops on that trip included CostCo, the produce market, Smart & Final, Trader Joe's, and finally the regular grocery store, and yes, we're pretty well stocked on food now.
She had a frozen dinner and I had a can of chicken chili with corn chips while we watched some trash TV, and then Malaya had to dash off to Kali class. I'd hoped to get a bunch of writing done tonight, but I was feeling very tired and somewhat out of sorts being back here after 10 days of being elsewhere, so I just caught up on my surfing and puttered around on the back patio with my dying houseplants and such for a couple of hours, before I got to cooking.
I did some cooking in San Diego, but not that much. I seem to be making up for it here though, since on the stove right now is a huge refried bean cassarole, a dish of baked chicken, and a pan of baked vegetables. I also cut up enough raw ingredients (everything but lettuce and tomatoes) for several days worth of salad, hardboiled a bunch of eggs, and so on. Nothing gourmet, and nothing I've even taken a bite of yet, but it's all stuff we'll eat this weekend and into next week. It's actually quite a bit more than we'll eat, I suspect, but it gave me something to do when my mind was far too adrift to get any work done, and it beat wasting hours on video games or something like that.
It also gave me motivation to get some damn work done on my novel, since as I always tell myself, "Everything I want in life is predicated on making some money from my writing." I need to have some income before I can (in good faith) ask Malaya to marry me, and we'll need an income to buy a house, upgrade our automobiles, buy a larger TV and other fun toys, and so on. I'd settle for just a larger kitchen now, since after spending the past week+ in my dad's big house, I'm really missing room to do more than just turn around in the kitchen. And his kitchen is old and nothing like those huge ones they put into houses now, with the central island for food preparation and so on. I'd be so happy cooking in one of those, where I didn't have to clean up after every dish in order to have room to prepare the next one.
I was up until 3am last night, and got about 7 hours of sleep, so hopefully I'll be up late enough to do at least a couple of hours of work before I sleep. It's odd to be moving back towards my night owl schedule already, and it feels sort of like jet lag, even though I'm still in the same time zone. After all, what other explanation could there be for the fact that I'm just about to have dinner and am planning on being up and working for hours yet, when I spent the last week+ going to sleep at about this time?
Home Again
I'll spare you the whole, "why I'm glad to be home" post, being as I elucidated most of it in anticipatory fashion yesterday. That and I was up early this morning, I sat for hours in an airport and on an aeroplane, and I went to Kali class tonight, so I'm tired. No, it's not a very original excuse, is it?
Home is good though, even if the food selection took a turn for a worse when I left dad's well-stocked fridge and pantry and came home to the bare larder and empty fridge Malaya has been suffering for the past week. Food shopping is definitely on the list for tomorrow, and I'm sort of glad that I was (due to dad's "sitting or lying down most of the time" post back surgery needs) doing most of the food preparation in San Diego, since it won't be a shock to get back into that here. I can remember past years when I'd spend a week or two visiting my grandparents, were we ate out or granny made 90% of the food, and back then I always had a few days of culture shock when I came home to my own apartment and had to relearn the art of providing for myself.
I suppose I could be Cro-Magnon and insist that Malaya make food, but given that she's the one with a real income, and that it's her condo I'm living in, that might not be very wise.
Glad though I am to be home, I miss my parents already, and I didn't dislike my trip. I wouldn't quite call it a vacation, not with as much work and house keeping as I did while there, but it wasn't bad. Malaya even remarked upon it, after we'd talked the second night I was there, and she said, "You know, you don't sound all that miserable." Not the most ringing endorsement for a vacation you've ever heard, but not the worst either. Having so much to do to help out dad was a blessing of a sort, just since it kept me busy and I didn't end up sitting around for hours feeling bored or out of place. Not when there was always something else that needed doing.
Home is good though; I enjoyed Kali, I'm enjoying petting my own kitties, and I'm overjoyed to be back with Malaya. I actually enjoyed kali a bit less than I would have, since my flight was late, I didn't get home until late afternoon, and with spending some quality time with Malaya at the top of my to-do list, the next two hours vanished in a blink and by the time I thought about eating something to get some energy for martial arts class (those two bags of peanuts on the flight up here didn't exactly fill me up) I didn't have time for more than an orange bell pepper and some nuts on the drive over.
I'm merging subjects grossly here, a habit I should try to curtail while I'm doing actual blog posts, but Kali was fun as well. We kept it pretty low impact since several people were very sore from their Wednesday night Kali, but we worked on nothing but flowing movements in a sort of sparring form. I did a fair amount of Kali while in San Diego, but almost all of it was just stick stuff, gliding around and hitting a wooden post in my dad's backyard and such. That's useful to keep sharp in some ways, and you can even improve your stick work doing it solo like that, but it's not at all like real sparring or martial arts, since there's no interaction with another person. The stuff we did Thursday night simply can not be worked on solo, since it's all about pushing at them, letting them push at you, trying to catch them off balance, flowing away from their force and then returning it to them, and so on. Hard to describe, impossible to simulate alone, though I suppose you could sort of work on some aspects of it if you had something heavy and hanging on a chain to push and be pushed by.
Lastly, I'm pretty sure I liked the blog style technology I've been using for the past week and a half, so I'm going to look into some blog script that will let me keep doing it, while integrating the style into my current BC main page format. I imagine you guys like it more too, with updates appearing much more often than thrice a week? The content hasn't been that great for the past week since I've had very little time to write and didn't have the ability/time to stick in photos, but now that I'm home I will get back to more of my usual style and content – you'll just see it updated more frequently.
That's the theory anyway. More to come on Friday, when I have time to get organized and settled in and such.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Home Sweet Home
Yes that's a lame post title. No I couldn't help it.
As the title suggests, I'm going home tomorrow. My suitcase(s) are on the bed, my clothing is in the dryer, and my airport ride (mom) is lined up. Malaya's even set to pick me up from the airport when I arrive, so pretty much all I've got to do is sit back and enjoy the ride(s). Getting some sleep tonight would be a nice start on that too.
Coming down here a week+ ago, I had just one suitcase, a big one Malaya lent me, and I loaded it up with everything I thought I'd need. Unfortunately, all I thought I'd need weighed 11 pounds too much, and I got dinged for a $25 "it's our job to lift heavy things but that doesn't mean we like it" fee, since there was no way I could bleed off 5 kilograms of weight from my suitcase into my already over-loaded carry on bag. The saddest part was that I couldn't even try to bribe the baggage handler guy with $10 or $15 to overlook the weight since I had literally $2 in cash after spending so much on the Chicago trip, and having no time to hit the ATM on the day between flights. I had to pay the $25 with my credit card at the main check in terminal, FFS.
Apparently you're now only allowed to carry 50 pounds of goodness to and fro anymore, at least 50 pounds per bag, and I basically ended up paying $25 to bring 3 pairs of shoes I never put on and a jacket and a sweatshirt and a long-sleeved shirt I never wore to San Diego with me. Meanwhile I washed clothing three times in 9 days since I was getting sweaty every day working in the yard and I only brought 5 t-shirts and wore 2-3 of them a day. This is why mommy used to pack my luggage for me, I think.
Sadly, for the return trip I've been further laden with additional clothing, new shoes, new kali sticks, a huge bag of peanut butter-filled pretzel bites, and so on, items that add at least 8-10 pounds of weight. Since I'm not eager to get gouged for another $25 on the return flight, I've claimed an old duffle bag from dad and crammed all of my shoes and other weight-intensive items into it. I even weighed it, and was disappointed to find that it only tipped the scales at 17 pounds. My big suitcase is up to 41 pounds already, and with a full load of clothing in the dryer, it's going to be close.
As for homecoming plans, I'm eager to see Malaya. We're going to do a date night and see a movie and have dinner or something like that, just to catch up on what we've each been doing. We've talked on the phone almost every day since I've been here, but 20 or 30 minutes not face to face is a far cry from actual one on one communcation, though I'm sure plenty of phone sex operators would dispute that.
I'm also missing the cats, my computer with the glorious 21" monitor, a good office chair, a dark room in which to sleep, and computer time. I had hoped to get a lot of writing done here, but with all the time I spent in dad's hospital room, and then all the work I've done around the house in the days since then, I've hardly been on the computer at all. To get any significant work done on my novel I need hours a day, most of them continuous and uninterrupted, and grabbing 15 minutes here to surf and 20 minutes there to write a blog post in San Diego is not getting the job done. Plus I'm tired all the time here from the physical work, and the sunburn, but also from a lack of sleep. I've been going to bed early, midnight or sooner most of the time, but my room here gets very light by 6am, which means I wake up then, toss and turn and doze for 20 minutes, wake up again, doze some more, etc, until I finally give up around 8am and get up for the day. Yes, this is all how real people live their entire lives. That's why I've never had any desire to be a real person.
I'll update something from home on Thursday, but I'll be busy spending time with Malaya, petting the cats, unpacking, obtaining provisions, and hopefully going to Kali class Thursday night, so if you're expecting some huge discourse, you'll likely be disappointed. I've got a ton of stuff to catch up on though, blog and otherwise. Hell, I never even talked about any of the stuff we did in Chicago, other than lamenting the damn toll roads and praising the dessert spread at my friend's wedding. I've also got numerous amusing hospital stories from dad's stay, cute (lonely) girls in bikinis stories from the San Diego beach, tales about driving dad's sports car which may soon be my sports car thanks to his back surgery pain and the deep bucket seats, and so on. I'd get into it now, but my clothing just finished and the suitcase and the scale await. I've enjoyed my time here a great deal more than I thought I would, but it's good to be going home.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Movie Critic Fun
I did not see Million Dollar Baby and I will not see Cinderella Man, but that didn't stop me from appreciating the analysis in
this blog post by James Walcott. He is writing not so much about the films themselves, but more about the critical reaction from the self-professed family values crowd to those films. Apparently two of the conservative National Review Online writers have been relentlessly plugging Russell Crowe’s new boxing film, and of course it’s nothing about boxing itself that they like, since they hated Eastwood's Oscar winning Million Dollar Baby. What's the difference?
It's amusingly obvious why NRO has thrown its nonexistent critical weight behind Cinderella Man. It's everything Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby quietly, subversively wasn't. Eastwood's allegorical chamber drama violated the pious strictures of family-value entertainment as chiseled on stone tablets and brought down from the mountain top by Michael Medved. The fighter's family in MDB is a gimme-gimme pack of trailer-trash Snopeses; Braddock's family in Cinderella man is a warm, movable hearth. Million Dollar Baby enters a dark tunnel and travels the length of it to accept death as a personal choice and deliberate destination. For all its somber coloration, Cinderella Man is as life-affirming as a Frank Capra movie without all the corny humor of contrived eccentricity. Million Dollar Baby took a girl-power story and existentialized it. Cinderella Man enshrines masculinity in a humble wooden frame.
"Cinderella Man is not really a movie about boxing, it's a movie about what it means to be a man. In the character of Jim Braddock, we can read what today's audiences are wistful for: a man who works hard to support his wife and kids, who teaches his kids to be honest, who communicates his delight in his wife with every glance." It isn't audiences that are wistful, but politically motivated critics who want to turn back the clock to that character-building time before the New Deal wove a safety net so that men didn't have to bash each other senseless to keep their families decently clothed and fed.
This quote comes from the end of a long blog entry about critics in general and the private jihad one of the NRO writers has been carrying on against fans of Star Wars 3. Which is my way of saying that you should follow the link and read the whole thing.
Speaking of movies and box office, since I've been out of town and out of touch the last couple of weekends, I've paid far less than my usual attention to box office figures. Looking now, I see that Cinderella Man flopped over
its opening weekend, coming in a weak 4th, and Star Wars 3 is continuing to make very good money, completely confounding my opening weekend prediction that it would fade quickly after that huge opening. (By the way, I don't recommend following that link if you're using Safari, since it instantly crashed my browser, making me glad that last night's fiasco at least taught me to stop writing blog posts right in the browser window.)
I also haven't seen a film since SW3 on its opening weekend, but with
Mr. and Mrs. Smith opening this weekend, and Malaya as eager to see it as she is for us to swap with the titular couple, I suspect we'll be there, if my Thursday return goes as planned.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Rotten Apple
I was just about to post a long blog entry covering what I did Monday, with shopping, new shoes, new Kali staff, yard work, lunch out with mom, and all sorts of other crap, with links and all that fun stuff. Unfortunately just as I went to search out some links to kali sticks to illustrate the topic of my new staff, the Safari browser I'm using on Malaya's Mac laptop did one of its rather frequent instant crashes, and I lost the entire post, since I was an idiot and was typing it directly into the browser window instead of writing it in a text document which I would have then pasted into the blogger window.
It's late and I'm not about to retype all that, so suffice to say that Monday was very busy and this is the first time I've had online all day, aside from some brief email to Malaya just before dinner. I got some cool new sneakers as an early b-day present (I hadn't given a thought to that occasion, despite it being less than two weeks away, and had no idea why she was buying me shoes until she mentioned it) from my mom, I got a cool six foot staff that I'm going to slice into two new 31" Kali sticks, and so on.
Also, my return has been delayed from Tuesday until Thursday, since dad wanted me here longer and Malaya is holding up admirably without me. Yes, this is the most boring post ever. Good night.
Thank Martin for Sansa Chapters
That's all I have to say as I move closer to the end of
Game of Thrones. If not for those, I might never get any sleep, since all the rest of the characters are so interesting, and the action is getting so good that it's just about impossible to stop reading, even though I'm now maybe two hours past my bedtime.
If you haven't read the novel it gets my highest possible recommendation, but just for the sake of this blog post you need to know that the fantasy tale is told a chapter at a time, with each chapter presented from the POV of a different character. I've not counted them, but the fifty+ chapters in the first book are probably told from a dozen different POVs. Thus the overall story is related in piecemeal fashion, as seen by these different narrators and since they do not proceed in any order, and you never know whose chapter will be up next, there's always a small surprise waiting as you finish a chapter and turn the page.
I always find myself hoping for more from Daenerys, or Arya, or Jon, but I'll happily read a chapter about anyone... anyone save Sansa, whose name just appeared atop page 618 and set me free.
I'll read it eventualy, of course, and it's a measure of Martin's skill that he can move readers to so loathe a major character in his series when she never does anything really bad. She's just this innocent girl who wants everyone to get along and her prince to love her and so on and so forth, and it's not really her fault that she's such an idiot... but I feel no guilt at all about hating her anyway.
Also,
Game of Thrones is the only novel in the series that
I have thus far reviewed, and my review was written after I first read it, when I hadn't gotten that involved in the series. I'm not going to re-review it after this second read is finished, but I might at least throw in new (higher) scores for it, since I'm enjoying it enormously; far more than I did the first time, and the change is almost entirely due to me having read books 2 and 3, and now knowing enough to keep all of the characters and vast plot intrigues straight.
My initial review scores were as follows:
Game of Thrones, by George R R Martin
Plot: 6
Concept: 4
Writing Quality: 8
Characters: 7
Humor: 7
Page Turner: 5
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 7
I'm tempted to throw up a bunch of 9s and 10s, (especially for plot and characters and rereadability) since it's really that good, but I'm going to wait and get through books 2 and 3 before I write a review for either of them or adjust this first one.
Game of Thrones certainly deserves 9s and above compared to every other fantasy novel out there, but I suppose I've got to review it with some implied comparison to the other novels in the series, and since I haven't read them in two years, and haven't reviewed them ever, I need to refresh my memory. Plus, with books 4 and 5 coming out later this year, I wanted to reread them anyway, just for my own enjoyment.
I also brought book 2 along with me, and if dad had lain unconscious in the hospital a few days longer, I might be halfway through it by now, rather than still 300 pages from the end of book 1. Curse his speedy recovery!
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Cracker of the Month
Not that I have a "Cracker of the Month" (CotM?) award or anything, but I couldn't resist posting something
from this news item about racism in Lindey, an "asshole of nowhere" Texas town.
As the story goes, some mentally retarded black man, 43 years of age, was picked up by a bunch of redneck white teens and taken off to amuse them as they got drunk. They had him dancing in a field, racial slurs were flying, and eventually they beat him unconscious and then threw his body out onto a fireant hill by the town dump. By the time one of the rednecks called paramedics a few hours later the guy was covered in poisonous bites, and as a result he had a brain hemmorage, was in a coma for a week, and suffered permanent disability that's going to keep him confined to a shitty little nursing home for the rest of his life.
You'd like to think that the people who did that, drunken idiots or not, would get some serious jail time. And you'd be wrong. There would have been no justice at all if some of the crackers hadn't talked. They did though, and two of the guys at the party rolled over and testified against their friends. Their friends were smart though, and rather than pleading guilty they asked for a jury trial. Unsurprisingly, the mostly white jury found them innocent of all serious charges and recommended no jail time at all. The judge gave them some anyway, 30 and 60 days, but that would obviously need a huge upgrade to even qualify for "slap on the wrist."
What's the mood of the town? Here's the former mayor, who can wear his CotM badge proudly:
"It was a very unfortunate and senseless thing," said Wilford Penny, 73, who last month completed a 6-year term as Linden's mayor. "But I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there."
How about that logic? At least Wilford there knew enough not to say "nigger" to the big city reporters, though he couldn't resist a "boy" in reference to a 43 year old man, and he couldn't resist blaming the guy for the assault perpetrated upon him. Is this ex-mayor representative of the mood of the town? That would be a yes:
There was the case in 1994 when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found dead from a gunshot to the groin. And another in 2001, when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found hanging from a tree. Local officials ruled the first case a hunting accident and the second a suicide, despite the persistent doubts of family members and civil rights officials.
So, it's a horrible place to visit and you wouldn't want to live there.
Plant Planting
"It hasn't killed one yet."
Dad's explanation when I questioned one of his recommended techniques (pounding a long nail right through the center of the plant) for repotting a huge staghorn fern yesterday.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Baseball thought
I never write about baseball, and I may never write about it again after this entry, and you might already be skipping this one just in case. So I'll try to be brief, and this isn't actually about any specific baseball team or player. My thought is actually about the hitting with "Runners in Scoring Position" issue, henceforth to be abbreviated to RiSP.
RiSP simply means you are batting with a baserunner on second and/or third base, where they are, in theory, in scoring position; I.E. they'll get to home plate ahead of a throw if the batter gets a hit. Hits in that situation are very useful, since obviously enough, the object of baseball is to score more runs than the other team scores. There may also be a runner on first, but that's not considered "scoring position" since they can't score from there unless the batter hits a double or triple or homerun. The logic seems to be that a batter can be expected to stroke a single with a RiSP, but that more than that is luck.
Anyway, the situation stuck in my mind since the batter, Dave Roberts, was doing very well with RiSP this season, and he was 12 for 25 or something like that. In the bit of game I saw, he came up with men on first and third and no one out, and got a hit. Unfortunately, it was a little bouncing bunt type thing that just crawled past the pitcher. Roberts reached first on it, the man on first went to second, but the man on third did not head for home, since he couldn't be sure the pitcher wouldn't get to the hit and throw him out at home plate.
My question was, does that count as a hit and a success with RiSP? I mean yeah, technically it's a hit, and there was a runner on third, IE in scoring position... but he didn't score! He wasn't out, and Roberts kept the inning going, but should a batter be credited with a hit and success in that situation when the runner didn't actually score? After all, the whole reason they keep track (unofficially or otherwise) of hitting with RiSP is because it's assumed said runners will score if there's a hit.
The whole record keeping is suspect anyway, since in theory you could bat ten times with a man on third and less than two outs, hit a sacrifice fly nine times, strike out the other time, and on the year you'd be 0-1 with 9 RBIs when batting with RiSP. And it's clearly a pretty janky stat, when you take it to that extreme. Of course most of them are.
Customer Service, or not...
I've mentioned this in past blogs, but one large difference between myself and my dad is our expectations for customer service. Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it stems from my relatively recent immersion in a service sector job at the stadium here in San Diego, but I have absolutely no expectations of decent service at all. I know how disaffected and dumb and bored service workers are, and if my order comes up remotely like what I wanted and it's still sort of hot and there aren't any obvious traces of spittle in it, I'm satisfied. Dad, on the other hand, actually expects people to do a good job, and even worse, to care.
So on his second day in the hospital, when he was at last able to take solid food and wanted to discontinue the liquid diet he'd been stuck on, he talked to the nurse around 11am, and said he'd like a solid lunch and some sort of soup. She said she'd get on it and wandered back to the nurses' station. Five minutes later dad wanted some more ice chips to suck/crunch on, and sent me down to get them. When I arrived the nurse we'd talked to earlier was just leaving in a coat, and when I asked what kind of soup they'd had available (dad wanted something light; vegetable or chicken, rather than cream or beef) she had completely forgotten about ordering his lunch and was on her way to get her own. To her credit she stopped and called down to the kitchen and put in his order before going to get her own food, and I was there for another hour or so before heading off to get my own lunch and to do some yard work at dad's house.
When I returned in the evening, around 6, dad was eating and looking exasperated. His food had just arrived, he said, 6+ hours after it had been ordered, and of course they sent him some sort of beef stock soup. It had been a huge ordeal too, with the kitchen calling up to his room saying he was still in the computer on a liquid diet, not a solid one, and the nurse insisting he wanted solid with soup, and dad even got on the phone at some point and told them what he wanted. That happened around 1pm, and then there were more calls around 2:30pm, and then he finally got "lunch" at nearly 5:30. My mom (dad's ex) was even there some during the afternoon, and during the interminable wait for soup she said she'd just go down to the cafeteria and buy some... and of course the cafeteria had closed 20 minutes before she got there.) On top of that, moments after he finished eating his late soup, it another nurse came in with a dinner platter, with chicken and some sort of creamy pasta. Food he had no room for and didn't want anyway.
I mention this all because of our reactions to it. That's exactly the sort of thing I expect from hospital food, or really from any place where you don't actually see them make the food right in front of you. You'll wait, they'll screw up your order, and the person who brings it to you will have had nothing to do with the actual preparation of the food, and will be no one you can productively complain to. Dad complains anyway, while trying to be nice about it, out of some misguided impressing that anyone actually gives a damn.
They don't. They really couldn't care less. Trust me; I worked at the stadium for ten years and I never once saw a single employee there actually give a fuck about anything any customer complained about. Complaints were dealt with purely on a "Will I get fired for this?" basis, or a "how much of my time will dealing with this take. basis. I fell into the later category,
most of the time, since I was selling poison, on commission, with a very limited time frame to sell it in. Baseball and football games only last so long, after all, and people mostly stop buying grossly-overpriced sweets towards the last quarter of the event. So while I didn't really care if their $3.50 spoonful of ice cream was the right flavor or temperature, any time I spent standing there talking to them about it was costing me sales and money. It was quicker for me to simply give them a new one and then browbeat my stand manager into refunding me for the bad one than it was to argue with the customer in the first place.
I should also mention how frivilous most of the customer complaints were. I was understanding when people got a bug in their cotton candy (a not uncommon experience, given how sticky the stuff is and how many bugs flew around the stadium and the cotton candy spinning area) or when their ice cream was completely melted or something like that. But when they bought a water from a guy walking around in the hot sun, and it wasn't quite ice cold, or when they wanted a blue cotton candy and we only had pink left, I was much more of the "Whatever." reaction.
And those were people with
real complaints; I couldn't even tell you how many dozens of times someone came up to me with about one bite/sip left of their pizza/cotton candy/ice cream/beer/etc and said that it wasn't any good and that they wanted their money back. The obvious, "Well, you seem to have been able to force 95% of it down your pie hole." comment was always a temptation. Particularly rude/drunk guys usually tried the pizza one, and if I were really in a hurry I'd just say, "No. You ate it already." and run off. By the time their beer-slowed brain processed my comment I'd be long gone, and walking down to the pizza stand was way too much work for them to bother with. I was occasionally tempted to require them to return the pizza, ideally into the nearest trash can, but that probably wouldn't have gone over very well either.
Background check aside, the typical customer service continued the next day, when dad was being discharged. He needed a medical chair thingie, one that he could sit down on in a half-crouch with sturdy arm rests, and in the morning the hospital said they'd get him one before he left that afternoon. Lunchtime came and no chair, and then when he was being discharged and ferried home around 3pm they said they'd have it delivered and promised it would be there by 7pm. I wasn't actually there to hear this proclamation, but if I had been I would have laughed out loud. "Of course it will be delivered at 7pm on a Friday night." I thought when I heard it, and figured dad would be lucky to get it by Monday, by which time he probably wouldn't even need it anymore.
Mom and the stepdad came over for dinner Friday, and we all had pizza and salad out on the back patio and enjoyed ourselves. When they were leaving, after watching most of
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on dad's glorious HD TV, dad asked me to turn on the font light and see if there was a card or failed delivery notice or something like that, from the medical supply. I managed not to laugh aloud, and even went and looked to humor him.
It arrived Saturday around noon, and seems to be fine. But of course dad's got to mention how they promised him it would be here Friday evening, and this gets the delivery guy defensive and he starts digging out invoices showing that he only picked it up this morning, etc. Meanwhile I'm standing there praying to my non-existent god that it would end soon so I could carry the thing into his bedroom and take off the plastic wrap and get it operational. The delivery guy doesn't care, he had nothing to do with the time frame, the hospital delayed, etc. And even if he did, what good will it do to complain? He'll just be annoyed and go even slower the rest of the day to get even, and he hates his shitty job anyway. You might as well complain about the smell to a manure salesman.
The customer service idiocy was capped off Friday evening, when dad rode home from the hospital with a friend while I was dispatched to the CostCo pharmacy to get his pain killer prescription filled. The hospital didn't call it over; they just gave us a piece of paper with the doctor's writing on it, which was the first mistake. I handed in the card when I got there and they told me it would be a 45-60 minute wait. If it had been called in it would have been ready when I got there.
The real fun began 45-60 minutes later, when I returned and waited in line to pick up the pills, only to be told that they couldn't fill the prescription since the "date" slot on the prescription card hadn't been filled in. So they'd faxed the document over ot the hospital and were waiting for it to come back completed. Now realize that the prescription had been written maybe 2 hours earlier, and that anyone at all could have just written in 6/3/05 in one second, and all would have been well. I said, "Give it here and I'll put in the date." but of course that's not allowed. Procedures must be followed. I suppose they have rules about that sort of thing, but think of the logic there; say I'm some junkie faking my way to a prescription for this non-narcotic, non-additive pain killer that's costing me a whole $1.69 with my dad's medical plan... how likely am I to screw up the form and leave the date blank, when I know that's required? It's obviously a mistake that's only going to be made by an honest customer who never even looked at the form, and given that the pills didn't even cost two bucks... why bother with faxing and the hospital and all of that?
They did though, since thinking is hard, and dad had to wait until Saturday morning for me to drive over and get his pills.
The gist of all this is that I think it's quaint that dad actually expects better, and it's interesting that I get annoyed by it when it's obviously stupid, but not when it's just incompetent. I guess I expect people behind the scenes to be slow and stupid, but hope that when given a very simple choice or task, like writing in the date on a prescription to enable it to be filled promptly, I feel they should pass the idiot test. I'm as naive and wishful in that way as dad is about other things, I guess.
Overall, is it worse that he still expects decent service, or that I no longer do? Do you prefer cynicism or optimism?
Friday, June 03, 2005
Interneting for Fun and Not-Fun
My dad worked for a major computer company for years and years, so it shouldn't be surprising that he has integrated the Internet into his daily life. What is surprising, to me at least, is how he’s gone about doing so. He doesn't blog, or email that much, or read blogs, or surf very much, or game at all, or anything like that. No, what Dad does is work.
He pays his bills online, he buys things, he tracks his investments, he uses eBay, he makes airline reservations, and so on. All practical things, all useful things, and none of them exactly fun things. This isn't bad, and in fact it's commendable, especially as compared to my ability to sit online for twelve hours without ever once doing anything even remotely productive. It's just interesting that he's so task-oriented and efficient online, when he's online about 1% as often as I am. I was a relatively early adapter too; spending many hours a day online back in the late 80s and then through the 90s; I've had broadband for nearly a decade, leaping on as soon as cable modems became available/affordable, and I've seen the Internet grow by leaps and bounds. If I'd started my own site way back then, rather than working on a gaming site owned by someone else for more than six years before doing this site, I'd have an impressively-aged copyright date. Hell, I've been doing this site for more than three years now, and that makes BlackChampagne.com relatively ancient, in Internet time.
My point though, is that it's ironic that I have been online so much more than my dad, and for so much longer, and yet he does far more real life things on it. I buy airline tickets online, and occasionally order something from amazon.com , but that's about it. Most of my online activities are purely mental, as I read things, learn things, play games, write blog posts, and so on. I suppose you could say that those things have made me grow as a person and have shaped my intellectual state (such as it is) but why can't I do fun stuff and informative stuff while also being productive? More specifically, why don't I want to use the Internet to replace real life activities I find tedious? I hate writing checks and opening bills, so why haven't I migrated those activities to online bill paying? I hate going out and shopping and browsing and talking to idiot sales people, so why don't I order more stuff online? It is a mystery.
(One cool thing about online bill paying, which dad showed me how to do in case I had to do it for him if his hospital stay had dragged on, is that his bank guarantees payment once he’s made it through their bill paying service. So when their computer somehow screwed up one of his credit card payments some months ago, and he had electronic proof that he'd paid the bill on time, the bank took care of issuing another check, canceling the first one, and they even covered the late fees and interest. Good luck trying to get that sort of service from the postal service, eh?)
The other side of this odd coin is that Dad hardly uses the Internet for anything I use it for. He reads some news and sports info online, but he’s basically old school about that sort of thing. He prefers newspapers and magazines and TV for his entertainment and information, and just uses the Internet for a few things, and then turns off the computer. He has researched a few hobbies online, but he's very practical about it and mostly just looks for cheap places to buy stuff he likes, or reads a bit about it and feels happy with that. I've never seen him using Google just to follow links and gain info for fun, or wind up reading web pages for hours as he follows one interest after another. (You know, the sort of bullshit surfing that led quite a few of you to this page in the first place.) It's weird, since Dad is a huge expert on numerous things. Wine, golf, some types of art and food, and more. He just got that information from real people, or from books. He reads a ton too, but mostly novels, and that's understandable, given the generally-execrable quality of literature online. *
cough*
If there's any logic to this, it's that we both still do what we started off doing online. I was online all the time back when there wasn't anything productive online. There weren't any financial services online, and while you could get sports info or follow the stock ticker, the online versions of those things were far from high quality. You could read weird things written by weird people, or play games, or email your ass off, or waste many hours with random surfing, though. In fact it was pretty much mandatory.
When dad started using the Internet regularly, it was much more organized and there were lots of useful things. Banks, online stores, bill paying options, and so forth. He’d long since grown set in his ways of reading the news and gaining info about sports and such, so he didn't really change that with the Internet. He got on to be productive and efficient and adult, and that’s what he did, and when he’s done that he gets offline.
These are not the only two ways to be online, of course. Malaya is somewhat like me, in that she's perfectly capable of spending many hours online just surfing and having fun and playing games and such. However she also uses the Internet quite a bit for maps and directions and all the sorts of things you used to have to actually talk to people to learn. She'd probably do a lot more of the stuff dad does, except that she doesn't trust the security of it, and would sooner throw out her old checks and bank statements without shredding them into confetti than she would give her credit card or bank account to any business or service online. She also uses the Internet as a data mine far more than anyone else I've ever known, and that's because she loves learning new stuff, and while books are fine, there are infinite sources online, and most of them are free.
I don't know enough about Malaya’s pre-Internet information-gathering and other behaviors to compare how she's changed or substituted with the aid of the Internet, but I never said this was a comprehensive survey or anything, now did I? With any luck she'll hop in on the comments and enlighten us all.
Home dark home
So here I sit, squirreled away in my old bedroom, typing and half asleep and strongly considering an early bedtime. Dad's home from the hospital, which is good, but he also wanted to go to bed at 9pm after not sleeping much last night, and he wanted to keep his door open and a fan blowing out the window in the spare bedroom to keep the air circulating. That's also good, except that it forced me in here and forced the door closed and forced me to be quiet, which immediately caused me to become restless.
Dad improved in record time, going from nauseated and weak and miserable and over-medicated to bored and healthy and hungry and ready to leave in less than a day. Fortunately, the doctor agreed and they released him Friday afternoon befire his restless pacing and constant nurse conversation caused problems. I drove over to the hospital for my second visit of the day, and helped pack up all of his stuff while we waited for a sedan-driving friend of his to arrive. Dad's car is sporty, and fun to drive, as I can well-attest after the past few days, but it's got deep bucket seats, and is not at all the thing for a person fresh off of lower back surgery.
Dad's been talking about getting a new car lately, and hinting about giving or selling me his old one (though it's still newer and much nicer than mine), but he doesn't seem real inclined to go forth and do that immediately, just on account of his back. I had vague thoughts of going with him to get something reasonably fun to drive but without cockpit seats, and then driving his car back up to SF in a few days, but there's no way that's going to happen, with him hoping to be back to driving his own car in a couple of weeks, and planning to rent something until then.
Car bullshit aside, Dad's walking better now than he was before the surgery, and once he's healed up he should be back to playing golf and riding his bike and all sorts of stuff; he's far from being old and decrepit. In the meantime, I'm doing just about everything around here, since the doctor told him not to lift anything heavier than five pounds for several weeks. It's worse than that too, if you can imagine, since it's not just lifting, it's straining in any way. I was going around the house, spraying silicone lubricant on window frames and such today, since leaning over a windowsill and tugging sideways on a heavy sheet of glass actually requires quite a bit of effort, when you think about it. Much more than picking up a stack of plates, for instance.
He's a reasonable man, thankfully, and not one of those old timers who think that everyone should go to bed and get up whenever they do. I can't sleep late here since my room gets bright at dawn and I wake up at 6, doze for 20 minutes, roll over, sleep for half an hour, cover my head and nod off for another fifteen minutes, etc. But at least I've got the option, rather than having some maniacal host who comes storming in to unplug my computer at 10pm and demands I get up and join him as he digs for nightcrawlers at dawn.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The smell of sickness
Another day and another day spent in the hospital. Dad's improving, thankfully, and after a morning spent spacing out on whatever the latest medication he's proven allergic to, he came down a bit in the afternoon and early evening and was able to keep his jello down. I was there from 10 - 2:30 or so, before leaving to get a late lunch and chop back here to water the plants and get the mail and other such minor household tasks. I've been surfing a bit for the past hour, and now I must gather things and head back to the hospital again. I'll likely be there until nearly 8, when visiting hours end, at which point I'll head over to mom's house and have dinner and play with her cats and get back here just in time to go to bed to get up semi early to head back over to the hospital Friday.
Yes, it's almost as much fun as it sounds.
The good news is that dad might be discharged Friday evening, if he keeps improving, and once he's home I'll be on call here, but not as regularly. Plus I'll have my laptop running and should be able to get some work done in between bringing him liquids and helping him get out of bed and such. Whee!
It's not really all that bad, and I don't mind taking care of him after all he's done for me over the years... but I can safely say I would not be a good nurse; money isn't enough to make me want to do this sort of thing.
And the hospital doesn't really smell that bad, though the tottering and infirm figures in their billowing gowns sort of give me the creeps. Fortunately I will remain forever 29 and toned of muscle, so there's no need to worry about anything like that.
AOhelL
One last thing before I get to an early bed so I can get up and go to the hospital again... I'm not real happy with the look of this temp blog either, but it was the least loathesome of the various templates available on short notice, and since I set this up in just an hour or so late Monday night, knowing I'd be off to the airport again Tuesday morning, I didn't worry about appearance that much. I did edit the template a bit to add the temp blog notice on the right, but thought that I'd be doing more tweaking with the look once I had time in San Diego.
Unfortunately, as the last post spelled out in rather tedious detail, I've had virtually zero computer time thus far here, and I don't know when that will be changing. I'm supposed to be spending my computer time here editing my last chapter anyway, so you'll probably have to put up with this look for the duration of my week here. I should have some more content posts tomorrow, at least. I wrote some on the laptop last night, but tonight I'm pecking away on my dad's old standard keyboard, and entering these words directly into the blogger posting script and not bothering with much/any links or HTML stuff since his computer set up and especially the AOL browser is such a complete piece of shit that I just can't stand surfing with it.
Huge top and bottom tabs and bars and control panels, 800x600 resolution on a 17" monitor forcing me to side to side scroll, crappy old mouse without side click buttons for surfing, none of my bookmarks, and weird anti-virus and pop up blocking software that has kept me from accessing about 1/4 of the sites I've tried to hit. I can see why some people don't surf much; it's just not worth the trouble with such technical obstacles, and that's not even mentioning the viruses and spyware dad's computer gets nailed by on a regular basis.
Then again, perhaps I should inflict just this sort of technology upon myself at home; it couldn't help but force me to spend more time writing. Or perhaps learning to use the abacus.
Busy sucks
It's bedtime Wednesday night, my 2nd day here, and counting the last 30 minutes I've been online about 40 minutes since I arrived in San Diego. Hence the lack of blogging, despite this shiny new blog anywhere/anytime thingie.
I haven't been that miserable, oddly enough. Tuesday I arrived in the early afternoon and spent much of the rest of the day talking with dad about his medical issues, legal stuff, financial stuff, and so on. I also got to do lots of chores around the house; basically all the stuff that needed doing yet hadn't been done lately due to his hurting back and impending back surgery. Cutting overgrown plants, watering the yard, moving heavy objects around the house, and so on. We then went out for a quick dinner and stopped by mom's house for a while after that before going to bed as early as possible, due to his absurd 4am wake up time Wednesday morning.
We actually got up then, and were at the hospital by 5 and he was off to anasthesia by 6:15 and under the knife an hour after that. I didn't stay around then, returning to dad's place to go back to bed. I woke up at 10, went back to the hospital, waited 2 hours until his surgery ended, talked to the surgeon (who said everything was fine), drove over to mom's for lunch and talk and play with her now 9-month old kittens, and then back to the hospital around 3... and didn't leave there until nearly 8.
Dad was in a room, but was still super groggy and sleepy, plus he was sick from the drugs and couldn't eat or even drink anything yet. And he kept dozing off, waking up and horking up icky yellow ooze, and so on... for like 4 hours. On the bright side, I got through about 300 more pages of Martin's Game of Thrones, and I'm really enjoying it. Even in 15 minute bursts, with constant interruptions by a dozing father and intruding nurses.
When dad finally started to feel better visiting hours were almost over and I was well past hungry, so I bid him good night and took off. After a couple of quick errands I dined with mom and the stepdad, enjoyed the food and company, went for a several mile after dinner walk with mom, played with the cats some more and showed her some kali stuff, and got back here at 11, just in time for a quick shower and a quick phone conversation with Malaya, during which she asked why I had set up this new blog if I wasn't going to make any damn updates on it.
Which takes me right back to where I began.
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