Sunday, July 31, 2005
Movie Review: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I've got a bunch of reviews written, reviews for films and books, and I'm going to be running one a day for a while. I'll start off with this one, finally written up from the brief reaction
I posted the day I saw the film. Go go Charlie!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a new film version of the classic children's story by Ronald Dahl. There was a previous film version, released in 1971 and starring Gene Wilder, but this film is based on the book, not that other film, and since I've never read the book or seen more than bits and pieces of the first film, my review is entirely based on this new film. I liked parts of it, I was sort of bored by the emotionless spectacle of other parts, and for me the performances and look of the film was what it was all about. The actual plot and events in it are absurd to the point that I felt no emotional connection to them at all.
To the scores:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4/8 (Adults/Children)
Overall: 6.5
I'll talk about what I liked first. Johnny Depp's performance has been
discussed a great deal, with some critics loving it, some hating it, and others saying they liked the film despite him. I thought his performance and the character were consistent and interesting, without being at all likeable or being anyone you could really identify with. He's weird, prickly, eccentric, childlike, and wacky, and he's consistent about it. It's not an act or an affectation; that's what Willy Wonka is like, in this film. I didn't particularly like him, and I certainly wouldn't want to get to know him, but he didn't make or ruin the film for me.
Charlie, the namesake young boy, was not at all realistic either; no child (or adult, I suspect) has ever been so selfless and kind and friendly and pure. He was consistently that way though, through the entire film, so you can't really criticize him for it either. I liked him and wanted good things for him and his interesting family, but I never believed in the reality of any of them for a minute. It's a fantasy though, and I don't think you're really supposed to believe in it. It was a bizarre Tim Burton world with anachronisms everywhere, impossible city and factory designs, and people who could never really exist, with the fantastic fun house madness of Willy Wonka's candy factory to cap it all off. I could nit pick about how Event X could never really happen or how Person Y wouldn't be that way, but what's the point? It did happen and they are that way, and that's just how things are in the film. You either go with it and get into the story or you sit there sniffing at everything and don't enjoy yourself at all.
And in the world of the film, I liked a lot of stuff. All of the Oompa Loompa songs were catchy and cute, the special effects and impossible theme rooms of Wonka's factory were creative and fun to look at, the child actors were good in their stereotype roles, their parents were likewise, and even the flashback scenes to Willy Wonka's childhood were useful, if no more believable in the real world than anything else in the film.
While I tried to suspend my disbelief, I wasn't entirely successful. I can go with a pure fantasy film, or one totally based in reality, but when the two combine oddly, as they did in this movie, it's a bit off putting. The movie was set in the modern day in the real world, and all of the children (other than Charlie) were very real people, if very cliche and stereotyped as well. Charlie, on the other hand, lived in some faux-medieval one-room home, on a rubble-strewn plot at the edge of a completely modern village.
Willy Wonka's factory was a complete fairy tale with no laws of physics or space or time, and that's okay, but the rest of the world was very modern and real, with modern electronics, media, television, video games, etc. Yet despite the fact that everyone on earth was dying to get inside and see what it was like, when the five winners and their parents went in none of them took along any sort of camera or recording device? And no billionaires offered millions of dollars to buy one of the golden tickets, and no one used modern technology (metal detectors, scales, etc) to try and find the golden tickets before actually opening up the bars of chocolate?
Charlie's dad worked in a toothpaste factory screwing the caps onto the bottles, at a very slow pace, until they modernized and bought a robot to screw caps onto the bottles. But it still did them just one at a time, with much excessive movement and wasted motion. So they bought a very expensive robot to do exactly what the human had done before, when they could have gotten one that screwed the lids onto 50 bottles at the same time?
The behavior of the winning kids was odd too. The basic theme of the story seems to be bad parenting, in the form of parents who either exercise no control over their kids by spoiling them rotten, or by not setting them any limits. That's fine, but with Willy Wonka announcing in advance that one of the five kids was set to win a super special prize beyond anything they could dream, and at least three of the other kid/parent teams being super competitive and scheming to win it, it was strange that they didn't actually make any effort to do so. All of the kids instead ran wild and did whatever stupid thing their character drove them to do, and thereby got themselves eliminated almost immediately.
True, it fits in with the basic theme of parental neglect that serves as the cautionary moral of the story, but it was strange that the parents watched their kids get (nearly) killed, and worse yet, get eliminated from the super grand prize competition, almost without objection. I'm okay with the parents not showing actual honest love, but they should have at least displayed some sort of twisted "How could you let me down like that!?" disappointment.
My last complaint isn't about the film, and I tried not to let it influence my score. All the same, we've got to remember to never again attend a children's movie during the day on opening weekend. The
Charlie audience had more young kids than a Snickers has nuts, and they did what children usually do in movies -- talked all through it. Not intentionally trying to be annoying; they were 8, not 13, but they were noisy all the same. I suppose it's a nice parallel to the film, seeing spoiled kids got ironic punishment for their bad behavior while the film was being spoiled for us by the noisy children of over-indulgent parents, but I wasn't there for the irony. And the constant loud voices asking, "What did he say then, Mommy?" and "I bet he's the bad guy!" and "Oooh, he's going to get in trouble now!" and so on were troubling. It was like being trapped in a crowd of really bad play-by-play announcers, with several kids pronouncing on every obvious plot twist several few seconds after it occurred.
Overall, I suppose my middling score is based on the lack of any sort of narrative pull or sense of building action or conflict, and the fact that none of the good stuff was so great that it overcame the overall "watching events occur and waiting for them to end" feeling I had during the film. The movie doesn't suck and it's not boring, but it's never emotionally-involving (other than in the opening when Charlie's parents are trying so hard to make him happy in their miserable lives), nor is the conclusion ever in any real doubt, and this was despite the fact that I'd never read the book or seen the end of the 1971 film version.
I suspect I'll see it again on DVD someday, and when that happens I'll add a comment on my reaction to it then. I doubt I'll like it anymore then, but maybe watching it without constant childish interruptions would improve the viewing experience? Or maybe I'll just appreciate it more for what it is rather than disliking it for what it isn't, on a second viewing?
What Do Bicycle Teams Do?
This is a week or two late, with the Tour de Lance already over, but if you're like me and you've always sort of wondered what the strategy of a bicycle team is over a long race,
here you go. The article doesn't go into very much depth, and about 90% of it seems to involve the conservation of energy you get by "drafting" closely behind another rider, but at least it didn't take very long to read.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Google Pedometer Hack
Lanth mailed me this clever and very useful URL the other day, and I've been meaning to share it.
The site is here, and what they've done is write an application that loads maps and satellite images from the glorious
maps.google.com site, and then allows you to plot distances on it. You just get a map you like, at any magnification, start recording, and double click your way around it, putting in a little marker at every click and drawing a blue line that traces your path. The program calculates the distance travelled as you click.
The
example URL Lanth sent me is a trek around the Lafayette Reservoir, where I used to go jogging regularly before I joined the gym to save my knees. (
See photos of it here.) I like that one since it tells me the program is largely accurate; it says 2.6506221430230603 miles (It might be
just a teensy bit more precise than humans require to plan their walks.) for the route, and the painted lines on the ground around that paved path say 2.7 miles. That's well within the margin for error, considering how many tiny curves and twists the path makes.
While I was there I ha to try mapping the upper reservoir trail, a path that's as steep as any you'll ever walk without a sherpa. It worked nicely and you can
see it here, and learn that it's about 5 miles around, though that doesn't give you any hint of the incredible hills you'll have to travel.
The greatest weakness of the program is that it does not measure elevation, but until Google does some magical thing to transform their 2D maps into 3D charts, we'll have to live without it. The program also seems to break when you try to chart very long distances, since the blue lines and markers stop showing up, though it does keep plotting the distance. I measured down the freeways from here to San Diego and got very accurate mileage, even though the lines I'd drawn wouldn't show up in the window. It's still a lot of fun to play with though, and you can map distances "as the crow flies" as well, to surprise yourself with just how close you live to X, once you don't have to follow the roads to get there.
Be Prepared.
I wasn't going to comment on the Boy Scout deaths and disasters, except that there's such a good quote in
today's recap article that I couldn't resist.
On Monday, four Scout leaders were electrocuted in front of several Scouts after they lost control of the towering metal pole at the center of a large, white dining tent, sending it toppling into nearby power lines. The day before, a volunteer was taken to a hospital where he died of an apparent heart attack.
On Wednesday, 40,000 Scouting enthusiasts waited hours in the stifling heat for an appearance by President Bush, who ended up postponing his visit due to the threat of severe thunderstorms. Sun-sick Scouts began collapsing and more than 300 people were treated for heat-related illnesses.
"I don't think it's wise to make judgment on things that could've, should've, would've been done," Jamboree spokeswoman Renee Fairrer said.
Well Renee, that would pretty well rule out making any judgments, on anything, ever again, now wouldn't it? No wonder Bush was going to visit them -- hell, he might have to hire this woman to do his PR; she already has the, "What, me take responsibility?" administration line down pat.
And while I don't exactly agree with it, I also like Malaya's theory about this. She says God is punishing the scouts for their determinedly anti-gay policies and general attitude of homophobia. So if locusts descend upon the Jamboree later this week, don't say you weren't warned.
Because nobody wants to be a pig lover?
I keep seeing a commercial for some Denny's breakfast they're calling the "Meat lover's" breakfast. It's eggs and toast, along with bacon, sausage, and ham. So um... how does three kinds of pork = meat lover? I mean sure, it's meat, (mostly, given US slaughterhouse technology), but it's all the same kind of meat. You don't expect bison burgers at Denny's, but this is lazy, even for them.
Friday, July 29, 2005
The Week in (simulated) Violence.
I'm never sure about the purpose of my Kali posts. Some are to entertain and inform the readers, but some are more like diary entries for myself to look back on one day and see just what I was doing and thinking at a given time. I don't really go all out on making them entertaining and funny though (I'd lie more) and I don't make them personal and detailed enough to really be useful memory aids for me in the future. So are these the best of both worlds, or are they failing doubly?
Encouraging introduction aside, I went to two Kali classes and a workshop this week.
Tuesday Night Class: I have no memory of this one. We did something, possibly with sticks, while spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we'd do in the double stick and broadsword seminar the next night. Oh, and everyone was showing off their new broadswords to each other; a largely pointless exercise, since most of us had identical training ones bought from the same local stores.
Wednesday Night Seminar: This was a lot of fun. We did broadsword stuff for the first hour and a half, mostly solo. Tuhan (the master) would show us a strike, usually one making a circular motion so we could swing it up behind ourselves and bring it down again, and we'd do our best to emulate him while standing in two rows with enough space to avoid killing anyone with our backswing. Broadsword isn't that different than heavy stick, which we practice all the time; you just have to do larger swinging motions, and you want to strike with the middle of the weapon and then slice along to the tip, making long cuts on the opponent. With a stick we constantly strive to hit with the very tip, for maximum force, so some adjustment is needed. You also don't need to keep your grip as straight with a stick, since there's no blade on it and it doesn't matter what face hits the target. That's obviously a bit different with a broadsword.
After going through a few strikes that way, we did some stuff in pairs, practicing basic counters and parries against an attacker, and then killing him in various ways. My favorite was the behind the back stab, where you tuck the sword behind your back, stab it over to the left of your body as you step past your opponent, and then whip it around while turning and chop off their head from behind. Best of all, you not only can do it with a twirling flourish, you have to, since that's the fastest way to move it both behind and out from behind your back. It's like showing off that serves a purpose.
After the broadsword stuff we moved on to double stick for maybe an hour, and that was both enjoyable and frustrating. I love double stick, and practice it all the time on my own. This is useful since I'm very comfortable with two weapons, and I can keep the constant spinning motion (siniwali) going very smoothly, and I'm good at attacking with them. It's bad since I never practice against another person, and when you've got to keep circling them, time your spinning to get your weapons ready on the correct side of your body, and then swing them to hit the opponent's hands as he swings his own weapons, it's damn hard to coordinate all of that. I've done it a few times, and been better than I was for my 30 seconds in front of everyone on Wednesday night, but for whatever reason I was just terrible at it then. I just couldn't get in a rhythm, and kept banging into the sticks of my sparring partner, rather than blending to his speed and hitting his strikes as they passed me by. It was sad too, since others said I had the best siniwali of anyone there but Tuhan, and then my actual fighting abiility was inversely proportional. Sort of like a really hot model who keeps falling off the catwalk.
Watching Tuhan, and also my Gura, go with double stick was inspiring though. Tuhan was truly awesome with them, hitting like a machine, always on target, always taking out both sticks of the attacker, always driving two or three shots into their head or other vulnerable area before they could recover from being blocked on their attack. I honestly didn't think it was possible to be that good with two weapons at once, and while I was very disappointed in my own showing, I was inspired by seeing just how well it could be done. I've just gotta get Malaya to spar with me a bit more, so I can work on my timing and positioning and get used to fending off attacks while moving into my own counter attacks. She just needs to stand there and swing (slowly, for now, given my skill level) so I can practice. The tricky part is that you've got to keep your sticks moving in the siniwali, but speed it up and slow it down so your sticks are in the right position to counter their attacks, no matter how they move and how they strike. It takes a sort of four dimensional timing, since you've got to control your own position, estimate their speed and direction, and anticipate their next attack before they make it. Strong wrists and arms are essential as well, since you've got to snap your strikes right to their hands with good aim, precision, and speed, and you've got to keep track of your own sticks, knowing if you should hit and pull it back low, high, wrap it around your body, turn more sideways, and so on. Etc.
Thursday Night Kali: There were six of us in class, and the four guys had all been to the workshop the night before and everyone had a sore forearm from all the broadsword swinging, and most of us had sore legs from some of the lunge-like double stick footwork we'd been doing. The other two people in class were newer female students, and while Gura said we'd do something light without weapons, I ended up partnered with the biggest guy there, who is also the best open handed fighter. We did a few drills at first, practicing basic parries and counters, but my partner quickly wanted to do more and began free styling around me while I threw lefts and rights and let him practice parrying those and hitting me.
From there we began doing more freestyle, and were soon into out and out open sparring, mostly in long arm style, which is slower and a bit more graceful than your typical jab-heavy boxing match. We use both hands though, swinging backhand a lot, include all sorts of kicks, go in close for neck breaks and arm twisting submission holds, and so on. He destroyed me, of course, but we had a great (and very sweaty) time and both learned from it.
I even got him to go at more than the 50% speed he usually uses for sparring in class, and it was interesting to see just how quickly I had to move and react to stay alive at that point. He's so good at open hand that he basically does it all in slow motion, just practicing his form and aim and such, while the person he's going against is usually getting in their hits only by sheer speed. I was guilty of that, to some extent, but I tried to use form and technique and style more than just giving myself the "I'll go really fast while you're going half speed." illusion of success.
I got in my fair share of hits, for once, marvelled once again at how good he is at blocking any hit from any angle, and got some great practice at blocking his attacks and counter attacking. The more I spar, with stick or kicking or empty hand, the more I appreciate that a fight between two competent opponents is really all about counter attacks and defense. Anyone who knows what they're doing (which sadly does
not rule out quite a few professional boxers/K1 guys/ultimate fighters) can defend themselves well enough that they're almost impossible to hit cleanly. The way you get hits then, is to nail them when they're open, and that's when they've got something extended to hit you. Of course you've got to avoid their hit while moving to get in your own, which requires super reflexes or a lot of luck and timing, and there's nothing to say you won't just be opening yourself up when you swing at them.
Check out this compilation of
old Mike Tyson knockouts, for instance. He makes a few happen with sheer bludgeonery, but most of them come after an opponent's punch; quite often a hook Tyson ducks, before exploding with his own overhead left hook. His style wouldn't work for Kali; you could just kick or knee him in the face as much as he ducks, but it's amazing how well it works in those videos, and how terrible most of his opponents are at defending themselves. You never swing and then stand there with your hands down; always keep at least one up beside your head, and ideally both. I can't see how these guys got through years of amateur boxing without knowing that much, but then again, at least half the boxing matches we see on TV feature constant terrible form and execution. That's why the occasional brilliant boxer like Tyson, or Ali, or Leonard, is able to dominate at so many levels or for such a long time. Simply knowing how to defend, how to keep your head moving, and how to counterpunch is invaluable.
And now there's no more Kali for me this weekend, while Malaya's going to her women's class tonight and then again on Sunday morning before I'm even awake. Hopefully I can get her to do some practice Saturday and/or Monday, since even if she just stands there and throws slow 1s and 2s with a stick, I can work on my double stick technique.
And yes, this is far more than almost any of you wanted to know, judging by how often (virtually never) anyone offers any feedback on martial arts stuff. I guess this answers my "why do I write these" question from the intro though, eh?
Swimsuit Madness
I tripped over a link to
a page full of images from the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (
more here, or just go to the
SI site if you for some reason actually need to see women in non-revealing swimsuits), and had to comment. I'll save my rant about these stupid, cheesy,
poorly-photoshopped images for another day, since I just wanted to comment on swimsuit prices.
Malaya tells me that wearable women's bikinis and swimsuits are in the $20-$30 range at discount stores, and maybe up to $50 at department stores. Those are ridiculous prices if you're going by the amount of material and difficulty of construction, compared to other clothing, but since that's never an issue with "fashion," I won't beat that drum. I do find it funny when they have prices all open to comparison in the same photo, though.
Like the one you see here, for instance. (Yes, you can click it to see the whole image.) Terrible photo, not a great model, and not a great suit. But hey, at least it's (slightly) cheaper than a high-end all-weather, waterproof sleeping bag, or a pair of heavy-duty snowboarding boots. Both of which are things that require 50x the manufacturing time, expense, and expertise, and can be used repeatedly, while most of these overpriced designer swimsuits are covered in sparkles or dangly things that will fall off immediately, or even sooner if you actually wear the into the water.
This one doesn't even hold a candle to the most expensive suits they showcase, of course. I clicked
this one for the butt shot and coughed at the $350 price for a suit that's only partially seen as it vanishes into this woman's ass. Used to be women paid good money for clothing that didn't bind up like that, and this one's designed to! (Not that I'm complaining about the view, mind you.) I'm sure there are more expensive suits to be found, if you dare take the challenge of looking through every shot to find one. I'd recommend that instead you 1) get a girlfriend, 2) go look
at actual porn, or 3) go look at
actual sexy bikinis, but hey, it's a free Internet. (Some of it, anyway.)
I did like some of the shots in the new SI swimsuit issue; this one, for instance.
Click it to see the full shot. It's one of the body painting images, and while the model and the photo are mediocre, I love the realism of the copy. I don't know how they do it, but I think we can safely rule out someone spending fifty hours painting in every single little dot of the mesh-looking material. They must have some sort of pre-printed thing that goes on like a big sticker, but isn't plastic? Or maybe they just print it right on the girls, like they're newspapers or Silly Putty? There must be a lot of touch up required to fill in the paint in every nook and cranny, and no, that wouldn't be too bad a job.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Things of the Day, Thursday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process."
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Soul-Devouring Worry:The long fricking road ahead.
Answer of the Day:Because you can be motivated and horrified by the same display.
Curse of the Day:May you vividly discover just how woefully inadequate your abilities are, when contrasted against those of a true expert.
Books Lying Open:The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Harry Fricking Potter, by the richest woman on earth
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuinMovies to probably-not-see list:Fantastic Four, (Now playing, but probably not to us)
The Aristocrats, August-ish, 2005. (
Waiting for the DVD?)
The Brothers Grimm, August 26th (Doubtful.)
Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, October 5 (Oh yeah.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
New Kali Shiny Part 2
And then there were two!
As
I related last week, we bought our first martial arts sword in anticipation of using it in class and at the double stick/broadsword workshop tonight. As you can see, one sword for the family wasn't enough, and we decided to go with his and hers weapons. The second one is nearly the same size, but it's made from two pieces of metal, riveted together, and it's thinner and has a lighter blade and handle.
It would probably be best if this second one went to Malaya, since it's a bit lighter, and I took the first one, since I'm a bit stronger and more used to heavy stick. However she prefers the feel and heft of the first one, and she's already done some decorating on it with red and blue paint, so apparently she's keeping that one. I like the lighter and faster feel of the second one better, so it's all good.
Jinxie just likes the smell of them, as does Dusty. Especially of the very tip of the hilt, where cheap ribbons were tied on initially. What they're smelling with such fervor is unknown, but they certainly do go at it. Jinx liked the smell of the very tip of the new blade as well, and spent a good two minutes rubbing her cheeks against it and actually sort of biting at it, last night. I have no idea what it tasted like, but thanks to some recent scientific breakthroughs I think we can safely rule out them dipping the sword into sugar before sending it over from Taiwan.
And as a completely unrelated bonus, here's a photo of one of the family of spiders that busily form huge webs across our back patio. I have no idea what type it is, but apparently a whole litter of them hatched out there some weeks ago, since there are 5 or 6 of them spinning between the houseplants and the heavy bag and the patio table, and they are all identical in appearance and size. This one is the only exception, since it's a bit larger, and I assume therefore the best web-weaver.
Finickiness Explained.
Here's
an interesting bit of science news. New research shows that cats can not taste sweet things.
Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and their collaborators said Sunday they found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets, a sensation nearly every other mammal on the planet experiences to varying degrees.
Researchers took saliva and blood samples from six cats, including a tiger and a cheetah and found each had a useless gene that other mammals use to create a "sweet receptor" on their tongues. The gene in question does not produce one of the two vital proteins needed to form the receptors.
...
Brand said the "pseudogene" in cats is probably a big reason why they are carnivores that get by on a high-protein, "Atkin's-like" diet. "Its sense of taste has driven it to become a meat eater," Brand said. "Losing their sweet receptor has probably changed their dietary habits."
There is just speculation about why this is and how it's changed the behavior and diet of cats over the ages. And I'm sure thousands of cat owners have their own, "My cat loves chocolate." anecdotes to offer up in dispute of this science. I wonder about Dusty; he likes to lick and eat every sort of sweet fruit, including cantaloupe, watermelon, peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, and so on. However he also likes broccoli and various other vegetables that are definitely not sweet. Jinx has no interest in eating any of those things, and always looks quite annoyed when we give Dusty something from that list, she sees him eating, runs over with a jolly little "Brrrollllffff?" and then retreats in confusion once she gets a sniff of it.
So is his taste receptor different than those of cats with more conventional eating desires, like Jinx? Or is it just a learned idiosyncrasy? And what explains Jinx's love of popcorn and French fries and other starchy stuff?
For cats in general, is their lack of a sweet taste what makes them like dairy so much? Dogs aren't big fans of milk and cheese and sour cream and such, as far as I know.
Lastly, this might be a blessing for those of us who own domestic felines. Though cats tend to scratch furniture and curtains and such, they rarely chew things up the way dogs notoriously do. Jinx has gnawed through a few wires in her time (eating Malaya's old headphones off right at the plug, for instance), but you don't have to worry about your cats chewing up your shoes, or clothing. (Though Dusty is partial to anything stretchy and resembling a rubber band, which endangers the straps on some of Malaya's underthings.) It probably helps that a cat is smaller too; comparing the destructive potential of a 10 or 15 pound cat vs. a big 100 pound dog is no contest, and while the cat will never destroy an entire room out of spite, it may well do far more damage, pound for pound.
Rodents and rabbits and such take that cake anyway; given the way they love to eat wires and other valuable things. A dog can ruin a nice pair of shoes in nothing flat, and cats might mar your furniture, but neither is likely to render your new plasma big screen inoperable by eating the cord right up into the back of the cabinet. Remind me why we allow animals in our homes again?
Doom (ed), the Movie
The teaser trailer for
Doom, a movie based on the oh so imaginatively-titled video game
is now online. While admittedly I don't believe I've ever played the game (I played either Doom or Quake some, years ago, but can never remember which.), I have to say that this is maybe the worst action movie trailer I've ever seen. This one makes
AVP look like Shakespeare.
Doom stars a professional wrestler, it looks like a low budget rip off of Aliens, it's visually dead, and they pack half a dozen cheesy action movie cliches into less than two minutes of footage.
The whole plot of scientists creating genetic mutants who run wild has been beaten to death, but I assume that's the plot of the game they're basing it on, so I'll let it pass. Entirely aside from the plot though. Ugh.
There's the "Are you alright, friend?" shot, where the friend of course leaps out and attacks in horrible mutated form. There's the "Oh, that sound was just a rat, I'll relax and then get grabbed from behind/below/above." scene. There's the "We're losing containment! Everyone out!" shot of a crowd panicking as monsters descend upon them. There are at least four or five "What was that?" shots, as something runs past between the camera and the heroes, who are helpfully standing in the only light source around, and looking in every direction but the one towards the camera and the thing. There was even a shot of the hero swinging on a chain and kicking the huge and horrible monster in the head, which is certainly the first thing you'd do when fighting a monster twice your size that's equipped with teeth sufficient to bite you off to the lower thigh. And these are just in the trailer! Imagine how much formulaic shit they'll unleash with an entire movie to fill?
Playing a video game where you wander around in the dark and blast whatever monster leaps out at you is fun. Watching a movie of it is death, as AVP found out, and Doom looks likely to learn.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The ****ing Aristocrats
The Aristocrats is a new comedy documentary that I've been looking forward to for some time and looking for an excuse to blog about. Today
there's an article about it on Yahoo that serves as a decent, G-rated introduction to the film, so check it out if you haven't heard a thing about this movie. In a nutshell, The Aristocrats is a documentary produced by Paul Provenza and Penn (& Teller) Jillette, in which they interviewed more than one hundred stand up comics and asked them all to give their take on "the aristocrats," an old comedy standby that can be the dirtiest joke in existence, when told properly. As the Yahoo article says:
The joke begins when a performer walks into a talent office seeking work. An agent asks him about his act, so the performer explains it in the most vulgar terms including descriptions of body functions and sex acts. The punchline comes when the agent asks what the act is called. The performer answers: "The Aristocrats."
As punchlines go, it's not that funny. But the way some comics describe the act makes audiences howl. Others, however, won't repeat the joke, and still more startle audiences with a retelling that seems to be pulled from real life. What emerges is a sort of portrait of comedians at work and at play.
"It's like giving 100 canvasses to 100 painters and saying paint this nude person," said Bob Saget, the former star of wholesome TV comedy Full House. "Some people won't paint it because it's a nude person. Some people will paint it incredibly sexually; some people will paint it covered up. Some will paint it deviantly," he said.
Bob Sagat is in the documentary, of course, and if you think his comedic sensibilities extend no further than those insipid baby talk jokes he made while hosting America's Funniest Home Videos, you'll be shocked. I've always heard that he's actually a very good and very blue commedian, and he's said to be one of the stars of the film, for his version of the joke.
Others have singled out Gilbert Gottfried, who boldly told it at a Friar's Club roast for Hugh Hefner and threw in 9/11 references just weeks after that event, back in 2001, when lots of people were still saying no one (in America, at least) would ever be able to make jokes about that tragedy.
Check out the
ThinkFilm Page and
official movie page if you want to learn more; both are cursed with horribly inconvenient flash navigation, but they have tons of hilarous quotes about the film from various articles. The best content there is
this long article about the filmmakers and the process of creating the film. Unfortunately it's an Adobe file, so it will likely take you a minute to load and make you think your computer is locked up.
If you want media, there is
a trailer, but it doesn't convey much more than the basic premise. To really get a taste of what this joke can be like,
watch the South Park telling, from the film, starring Cartman. It's about as
NSFW as anything can ever be for the audio alone, so be warned, or wear headphones. You can even see what the critics think; there are
17 reviews now on RT, 13 of which are positive.
I'm curious enough to see this one in the theater, but we might just wait since the DVD is going to be even better. There's said to be hours more comedy that didn't make the film due to time constraints, and many other famous commedians (Seinfeld is named) who didn't get their version in the film but who now want to contribute.
A Tale of Two Salesmen
I have no idea where today went. I didn't sleep very late, and lazed around for a couple of hours in the morning before napping while Malaya was at the gym. When she got back we ran errands for a few hours, and then I went to the gym after that. I cooked after my workout, making a huge vat 'o refried beans and some roasted chicken for super burritos tomorrow and the next day, then read a bit before making dinner; stirfried portobellos with green pepper and onion on a bun. And after some light Kali and talk and such it was damn near midnight. Malaya went to bed, I tucked her in and did some surfing and now it's fricking 2am, and it's like I just got up an hour ago, for all I've actually accomplished.
And writing a painfully overlong and pointless introduction to my one blog post of the day isn't helping things.
Moving right along, I wanted to comment on two salesclerks we encountered today.
I often bitch about the ineptitude of store employees, and with good cause; most of them are pretty damn inept, either out of ignorance, indifference, or outright hostility towards their shit jobs. Today we've got one story of a case that definitely falls under the "ignorance" heading, and then for a radical change we've got a story of a store clerk who was actually good at his job.
Salesman #1, the dumb one. Malaya needed some touch up paint for her Toyota, to cover up a little ding she got in a parking lot. Easy enough, right? We looked up the color of her '05 Toyota, we went to a nearby Toyota dealer, and while she looked at steering wheel covers and such to avoid talking to the salescleark, I told him her car model, year, and the color. He asks my name and writes it down on a little pink receipt, which I thought strange, but whatever.
We continue browsing, expecting him to look up the color, since there was no way to do it ourselves. See they had a huge display of touch up paint in little pen-shaped dispensers, but they were all plain white and had letter/number codes, rather than color names, and there wasn't any paint color catalogue available. He's busy tapping away on the computer though, so we figured it was computerized rather than in a three-ring binder or whatever. More time passes, and finally he calls me over and asks for my name again. I'm not in the system, you see.
I tell him that it's not my car, and that we don't need to access Malaya's account, we just need to know which of those paints is Impulse Red, or whatever the ridiculous paint name was (I remembered it then.) That didn't compute with Mr. Salesman though, and since Malaya had come over by then she gave him her name, then waited for a good two minutes while he mashed keys before announcing that he couldn't find her listing either. So she gave him her mom's name, since maybe they set it up on her account, and surprise surprise, he couldn't find that either. This is after he's asked her to spell her last name like three times, getting it wrong each time, and spending a lot of effort frowning at the monitor.
Now keep in mind that there was no reason whatsoever to put anything into the computer. We told him what color paint we wanted; we didn't say, "We can't remember, can you look up the car purchase records to check for us?" Finally he gives up on finding her car "in the system" a phrase he uttered several times, as though it possessed talismanic power, and begins flipping through a big three-ring binder, looking over pages of paint colors and their corresponing codes. This goes on for a while, until he asks, "You said it was what, Starburst Yellow?" or something like that. "No, it's Impulse Red." I said, trading the dozenth look Malaya and I had thus far shared during this quarter hour ordeal.
Finally, mercifully, the parts manager, or someone, walks in from the direction of the service area, takes the binder, looks in it for five seconds, closes it, walks over and picks out one of the paints, and hands it to us. He then leaves, all the while being careful not to show any expression on his face.
Capping off the experience, the paint is like $10 for about a tablespoon in a squeeze tube, and since Malaya didn't have enough cash to buy it in the little parts store, he couldn't sell it to us there since he wasn't authorized to take payment from a debit card. So he gives us the tiny tube of paint, and the receipt, and asks us to go down the hallway to the cashier. We did, and we even went in and paid there, though of course we were down the hall, out of the store, and out of sight of the dim salesman, and could have simply walked off without paying.
To recap, did he do anything right other than not actually insulting us or breaking something? He wasn't some brand new kid either; he was maybe 40, white, male, and not drooling or anything.
Salesman #2. After that depressing experience, we headed over to Target to pick up a few random household items. We would have picked up
Constantine too, but since we missed the debut day (when it was on sale for $15) and it's now $21, we decided to wait a month until it's on sale used at Blockbuster for $10. We got some other stuff though, and as we were walking up to the cashiers Malaya asked if they'd try to stuff the new and very large dirty clothes basket into a bag. Knowing cashiers, we expected a slow, hilarious, and ultimately disastrous effort to insert the large plastic rectangle into a slightly less large plastic bag.
I didn't even reply to her, since well duh, it was a retail store in the US. Of course we'd get some idiot cashier who would waste three minutes trying to put the hamper into a bag. And if not he/she would at least put the few smaller items into a bag, and then awkwardly hand that to us, rather than just sticking it back into the hamper where we were logically carrying the items to begin with.
We picked a line with no one in it, and got an older white guy for our cashier. He was maybe 65, obviously working there since he'd been fired or laid off of some other job and needed the money, and obviously wasn't too happy about it. He wasn't nasty or anything though, and shocking, he made several correct decisions.
He didn't start off that well, since we had like five small things in the hamper, and he reached into it, stretching his arm over the top, and picked them out one at a time. Simply tipping the hamper over sideways would have been a better idea. He got the stuff out pretty quickly though, and quickly noticed that the bathroom caulk strips (they look like rolls of tape) had the SKU (barcode) printed on the back of the packaging, partially beneath the roll of stuff, which made them impossible to scan.
A panic situation for most clerks, and we expected him to call for the manager, or call for a price check that would never have been carried out. Instead he showed us the problem with the bar code, said he'd have to open one up, pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer beneath his cash register, cut off the side, and pulled out the label enough to scan it. Better yet, he knew how to hit the code to charge us for two more of them, and did that, rather than fumbling around and trying to cut open the other two packages as well. He even stuck all the stuff back into the hamper and just handed it to me, without wasting anyone's time with all "Would you like that in a bag?" bullshit. Bravo, I say. Bravo.
Malaya and I were duly impressed, and laughed as we went out, chattering about the fact that we'd have been there for a good ten minutes if we'd had some eighteen year old on the register. I've got to give the old guy credit; he's clearly smart enough to work in a real job, and probably did for many years, and has brought his common sense along to Target. It's got to be a lonely damn job for him; being surrounded by typical retail store idiots, most of them forty years younger than him, but at least he hasn't been completely beaten down yet. And his competency certainly made our day.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Pleased with myself, 1, 2, 3.
I am feeling uncharacteristically pleased with myself tonight. I'm not usually displeased, but I tend to keep a healthy "things could always be better" attitude going. That's still true, but just for now let me be happy.
1) I've gone to the gym the last three days, after slacking off and going just once or twice a week for a few weeks. It's been hot, we've sweated a lot and worked hard in Kali Tues/Thursday night, I was out of town in San Diego and doing a lot of yardwork there, etc. All excuses, and I decided last week that I'd work out every day over the weekend. And I have, and it's been fine. It's actually cooler in the air conditioned gym than it in the condo during the late afternoon, so even though I'm sweating, I'm sweating in cool air. Which makes a difference, somehow.
There was some worry Friday, when as I neared the end of my series of weight machines, I felt something tweak on the
back of my right arm. I couldn't really tell where, and it didn't hurt to the touch, but it hurt when I belt my arm to touch the back of my head, and it felt weak when I tried to finish my weights session. So I did more situps and leg machines instead, and walked home hoping I hadn't torn something.
Apparently I hadn't, since it felt okay that night, and while I skipped the arm weight stuff Saturday, it felt fine Sunday when I did my usual full workout and all of the weight machines.
2) Entering chapter five in my ongoing fantasy novel, I was a little unsure about it. I knew what main events had to happen in this chapter, and I knew how it was going to end, but I wasn't quite sure how to catch the reader up on events since the end of chapter four (five starts off 3 months later). That problem resolved itself pretty easily, and as I worked on the opening and filled out the outline for the chapter and the rest of the novel, I kept getting good ideas for the small details. Why no one else can go down into the ancient tunnels below the city, why they have the leave the city in a hurry, how they get out of the city without being pursued, what happened to the strange creatures they were traveling with at the end of chapter four, and so on. It sounds immodest, but I guess I'm feeling reassured by the fecundity of my imagination, at least when it comes to my own novel.
I really enjoy it when a novel has more to it than just the essential elements to move the plot along. Many people have remarked that what made Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels so great was the backstory. Even though you didn't have to wade through the appendixes of begats lists and elf language primers and ancient legends and such, you could tell they were there, and that he knew far more about the characters and their world than he put into the actual novel(s). I'm not going to that extreme with my fantasy world, at least not yet/not this one in my first novel/series, but I like to put in interesting tidbits all through and through. They're mostly throwaway lines that don't advance the plot, but they're fun to write and fun to read. Even for me, since I usually forget writing them and rediscover them when I reread a chapter months later.
I don't want to spoil any now, but just for instance one character reveals their magical armor in chapter two, and then tells a quick story about how they found it on a man who had been long buried in a deadly trap... and how the man wasn't quite dead yet. The armor's origin could have been left completely out of things and it wouldn't have made any real difference, but the background tidbit was interesting and I thought it added some depth, both to the world that the story takes place in, and to the character who tells it (in terms of why he relates that info and how he goes about doing so).
3) The one thing I'm not especially chipper about lately is Kali. It's not going poorly or anything, but suddenly I've reached an intermediate stage where everyone else who is a regular student is much more experienced than me, and they're better at all of the intangibles. Intangibles I wasn't even really aware of just a few months back, but that now seem all important.
It's all about movement. At first you strive just to keep up and learn to land your hits with open hand and stick, and then you refine them in control and accuracy, and then you work on your form and style, and that's the really tricky part I'm at now. The other stuff can be done merely with practice and timing, but the form and style require you to really change the way you move (at least the way I move). It's about flowing and staying loose and being "water." You don't punch by jerking your arm, you do it by sending a wave through your body from the other shoulder and up from your hips, and then flinging out your arm with the roll of movement. It's sort of like the dance move where you stand still with your arms out, start by doing a little dip with your left hand, and then roll up that arm, through your shoulders, and down the other arm. It can be done through multiple people; Dr. Evil does it while holding hands with Mini Me in
Austin Powers 2, and the wave travels through him and into his homunculus.
The form they had in the movie was terrible, and we're not standing around practicing break dancing moves in Kali class, but that's basically the theory of the motion. It's all generated from the hips and goes down the leg with a kick, or up and out the arm with a punch or a stick or sword swing. We obviously don't do that every single time, and it's usually far too small of a circle or wave to see it flow through you, but once you grasp the concept of the movement a lot of things begin to make sense. I can now see why the Gura and Tuhan look so fluid and flowing when they move, and how you can punch them on one side of the body and get hit by the hand or foot on the other side an instant later; they just transfer the wave of motion through their body and lash out when it reaches the other side.
This is probably all very vague and hard to follow from my words, but in practice it means that Malaya and I are spending a lot of time walking around the house with our arms waving like the branches of a sea anemone, or standing still and swaying so our arms swing freely as our torsos and hips move. The hard part for me is separating the movements; my hips and torso always want to turn at the same time, and to start a motion down low, turn my hips, and then let it go into my shoulders and then down my arms is very awkward.
The motivator is that it translates into superior Kali almost instantly. Just last week we were doing a series of moves (blocking a punch with the right arm, then swinging that arm into a sort of clothesline, then flowing into several punches to the side) that we've done before, and that I've always been far slower and less precise with than the Gura. While doing them, I tried to stay loose and let my shoulders roll and my hips move, and I suddenly realized that I didn't need to do the sidearm block, stop, then curl it into a throat strike, stop, then swing my arm over and hit them in the ribs. I was doing each move with decent form, flowing from my hips and torso to give it power, etc. But I was stopping between each portion of it, since I couldn't think about doing one thing with my hips while my shoulders and arm did something else at the same time. I tried it though, and suddenly I was able to start with my hips, throw my arm sideways to block, and while my arm was still going I swung my hips to the left, let the wave go out my arm, and used that to change my arm from a downward swing into a sideways one, to the throat.
I don't know how perceptible it was to my partner (he was an occasional student and not one who is very flowing so I doubt he noticed), but it felt so much better to me, and I realized that I was doing it far faster than I had before, and with far better form and power. It's basically what we do with stick; you don't swing it left, use muscle to stop it, and then more muscle to bring it back to the right. You turn your straight swing into a circle at the end of it, and use the momentum to keep moving quickly as you come back to the right. It's faster and harder, while requiring far less effort. Easy and simple with a stick, but far harder with the body. And of course as I learn more about moving I realize that my initial stick swings were almost all arm and muscle, and that if I flowed them more they'd go faster and I'd have more control and power.
One of the humbling things about Kali is that you're constantly realizing just how awful you were a few months ago, and how limited your understanding of the martial art was at that time. Everything I thought I was good at in January and February I now know I was barely adequate at; in form if not results. And I know that will be true in a few more months. At least I hope it is; if not I'll realize that my progress has stagnated, and that would be truly depressing.
3.1) A tale of two students.
Student #1 has been doing Kali for about 3 years, and is good at most everything we do in Kali, but he's got very little of the flow or wave movement the real experts exhibit. He just does everything with muscle and speed and reflexes, much like me, though he's better (at
everything but kicking) due to much more experience at it. Student #2 has been taking Kali for a couple of years and was pretty similar to me in results a few months ago. #2 has really been working on movement and flow though, and he's recently had some breakthroughs in his form. He can't quite work them into his Kali all the time yet, but suddenly his stick work is vastly improved, and it's scary as well as inspiring, seeing how quickly he got so much better. #2 isn't yet better than #1, but you can see huge potential for continued improvement, while #1 has basically been stagnating for 6 or 12 months, as he learns new tricks and refinements, but hasn't changed his basic movement enough to really make a big difference.
I hope it doesn't take me a year to get to where I can move like #2 is now, but I'd certainly take that over being #1 in two years. And even though I'm not either of them now, I'm happy to just see clearly enough to realize where they are relative to me. (And yes, I'll probably look back on this in 4 or 6 months and think what a completely clueless noob I was now. That's par for the course thus far, at least.)
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Weekend Box Office and DVD Stuff
The
weekend box office estimates are out, and while no one thought The Island would do huge business, no one thought it would flop this badly. I'm feeling too lazy to throw in a table this afternoon, so we'll just live with a quick list:
1 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory $28,300,000
2 Wedding Crashers $26,200,000
3 Fantastic Four $12,275,000
4 The Island $12,100,000
5 Bad News Bears $11,500,000
The second weekend of Charlie, Wedding Crashers, and Hustle and Flow (opening in 6th place) all did nearly double The Island's per screen average too, so it's not like The Island wasn't in enough theaters to compete. Perhaps the strategy of giving away the entire plot of the movie
in the trailers (not to mention every magazine article and interview) wasn't so smart after all, eh? Not to mention casting two leads with zero box office draw, and believing that anyone would buy a ticket to see a Michael Bay picture, (rather than a picture that looked fun and happened to have been hacked forth by Michael Bay).
Malaya and me saw no films this weekend, though we might plow through a DVD tonight. We've got several newish ones we've still never gotten around to watching, including
Kiki's Delivery Service, which was one of my birthday presents over a month ago. (Though we've yet to watch it, the fact that "kiki" is childish slang for "vagina" in Tagalog, which Malaya speaks, ensures that we never forget it.) We did watch a new DVD a few days ago, thanks to the 3 for $25 sale at Blockbuster. There we got National Treasure, The Incredibles, and Blade Trinity. We'd seen the first two in theaters and just wanted the DVDs for our collection (I took them both to San Diego and watched them both while there, enjoying them.) and were curious about Blade Trinity, since we'd sort of enjoyed the first two films, and had almost gone to see Blade 3 in theaters. How was it?
*coughing sound*
It wasn't the worst action movie I've ever seen, but that was only because it had high production values. It was certainly far and away the worst of the 3 Blade films, and was a terrible movie. It was borderline watchable just because there were a lot of fight scenes and exploding vampires and such, but the story was idiotic, the plot had zero momentum, and the actors looked about as happy as the international guests in Guantanamo Bay. Word from the filming was that Wesley Snipes went insane and stayed "in character" for the entire shoot, and since his Blade character is basically a brooding asshole, that couldn't have been real pleasant. I'll do a full review and categorize why it was such a train wreck at some point... but not today. Stay away from Blade Trinity though; it's 2 hours of stupid stuff with far too little decent action to make up for it.
Presidential Responsibility
I thought this article about
Clinton expressing regret and personal failure over not stopping the Rwandan genocide contrasted nicely with the current Bush administration's failure to take responsibility for pretty much anything.
"I express regret for my personal failure," Clinton said before touring the museum, which features graphic images of people being decapitated and bodies twitching on the road.
"I think it faithfully, honestly, painfully presents the truth of the Rwandan genocide," he told reporters after seeing the museum which his Clinton Foundation partially funded. "It is an important contribution to the history of the world, that the world cannot afford to forget."
...
Clinton administration officials avoided the word [genocide] in public for fear it would spark an outcry for action they were loathe to take, six months after U.S. troops were killed by Somali warlords in Mogadishu.
And then when I read
this editorial about Bush's failings and the opportunities they have created for the Democrats, I had to contrast them. The whole piece is a home run, but I liked two quotes especially, to compare to what Clinton said above:
President Clinton's success became all the more apparent when juxtaposed with President George W. Bush's gross failure on the same subjects. We have a record deficit, out of control government spending and a larger and more intrusive government than ever before. What happened to fiscal and personal responsibility?
All we hear now is excuses. There was a recession, September 11th, business cycles, yada, yada, yada. It's your presidency now and you own it. You didn't have to spend $198 billion in Iraq and still counting, you don't have to keep buying nuclear missiles for our Trident submarines, you don't have to spend $10 billion on a defense missile shield which isn't going to work, you don't have to give away $12 billion to the energy companies for "energy exploration" (read "oil drilling"), you don't have to give Halliburton a $72 million bonus (yes, I said bonus), you don't have to have billions of dollars in farm subsidies, etc., etc. Corporate welfare is still welfare. What happened to personal responsibility?
...
This president does not understand the consequences of his decisions. He never has. When he did poorly in school, his father got him into a better school. When a war started, his father got him out of the war. When he didn't take his physical in the National Guard, powerful people made sure he didn't have to. When he did poorly in his businesses, his father's friends started new businesses for him with new investments.
The rest of us learn the hard way that if you run a business into the ground, Texas and Saudi millionaires don't materialize out of nowhere to give you millions more for a new business. When you don't take your required physical in the Armed Forces, you get court-martialed. When you don't do well in school, you don't get a great job, like the owner of the Texas Rangers or President of the United States. And when you start war, your daddy won't be able to bail you out of it if you didn't properly prepare.
Remember the 90s? Peace, prosperity, and a press corps obsessed with possible oval office blowjobs. Seems quaint, compared to the burgeoning worldwide terrorism we have now, fueled by constant reports of US soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq and Cuba, and the smoldering fuse of civil war in Iraq.
And with that happy news item, enjoy your Sunday!
The Tour de Lance
Well the Tour de France has ended, and for the seventh straight time,
Lance Armstrong won it. He's retiring while on top, so make all the "that took a pair of brass balls" jokes you want, and loathe him if you must for starting the goddamned plastic bracelet fad, but winning a 2300 mile three week bike race seven years in a row is still an amazing achievement. Not that he cares about your jokes or loathing, not with his millions, his international fame, and his non-fugly rock star girlfriend.
I do wonder though, who actually watches the Tour on TV?
It looks like fun in person, sitting out and picnicking in the countryside and yelling when a bunch of sweaty guys go coursing past on bikes, but on TV? What's the point? It's on the Outdoor Life Network in the US, displacing their usual "killing God's creatures" programming fare. OLN is only on cable, and if you get it it's usually like channel 91, squeezed in between Telemundo and QVC. When they show the Tour live it's on at like 3am, due to the 6-9 hour time difference between the US and France. They replay it during the day, of course, but it's not exactly an event made for television: Each leg is like four hours long, there are only three or four guys out of hundreds of racers who are actually in competition for the overall title, and since it's a road race you don't get to see them passing each other as they do laps around a defined course. The main fun is waiting for a racer to run into one of the buzzing cameramen motorcycles, or for some costumed lunatic to leap out onto the course and sprint along beside the racers (this happens quite often), or actually knock into one or stab him (this happens less often).
My dad had it on in the morning several times while I was in San Diego earlier this month, and while it's sort of peaceful to watch them pedal along in their brightly-colored outfits, that keeps you going for like five minutes. After that you're ready to see if ESPN 2 has K1 on.
Friday, July 22, 2005
BlizzCon?
So Blizzard got the bright idea to host their own convention this year. They're calling it
BlizzCon, and running it for two days, the weekend before Halloween. Here's the quick event run down:
BlizzCon 2005 will spotlight World of Warcraft, but will also feature hands-on gameplay of StarCraft: Ghost and other Blizzard games. Some of the activities at BlizzCon will include:- Q&A panels with the World of Warcraft and StarCraft: Ghost developers
- Playing World of Warcraft Battlegrounds live with friends
- 1st public hands-on gameplay of StarCraft: Ghost
- BlizzCon Invitational Tournament, featuring top Warcraft III and StarCraft professional gamers from around the world
- A separate LAN area stocked with PCs for your gaming pleasure
- Contests for die-hard gamers to compete in for great loot
- Custom BlizzCon merchandise and other Blizzard merchandise in the BlizzCon store
- A blowout closing night concert featuring a to-be-announced band – more details to come!
To quote a commercial many of you are probably too young to remember, "Where's the beef?" If you're dying to meet some Blizzard employees (hope you like skinny 20-something white and Asian guys in jeans and black t-shirts) and can't get into E3, it's golden. And if you're dying to play WoW in front of other people, rather than just at home alone, it's golden. Otherwise, why?
To recap, you get to (distantly) watch a live version of a gaming magazine interview, watch other people play computer games you can play at home, play a game you already own in a LAN on a rental PC, wait in line to play two minutes of some small demo area in an upcoming X-Box game no one really cares about, and pay convention prices for merchandise sold by the company that's hosting the convention.
For $120?!I hope whoever thought this up gets a bonus and a bigger cubicle, since it's purely an act of genius. Blizzard is hoping to sell 4400 tickets "though Blizzard reserves the right to sell additional tickets in the future." and at $120 each that's $528,000, not counting the $20 a piece (at least) people will be dropping on merchandise.
The saddest part is that I'm considering going, and would actually want to go, if they were doing anything with Diablo, and if everyone I knew from Blizzard North hadn't quit over the past two years. It would be fun to chat with some of those guys,
but they're all
gone now, though I think a few of the guys I used to know who worked on Battle.net are still around, in Irvine. It's even sadder when you consider that the
last time I went to E3, 3 years ago, I left in half an hour, and
E3 is the biggest electronic entertainment show on earth. This BlizzCon is basically Blizzard's E3 display, with a LAN area tacked on and an interview panel or two.
I bring this all up since I got an email from
D2 site co-worker (sort of, it's not like we interact more than every other month at this point) Elly, who asked me if I wanted to go and report on it for her
WoW site and
Loaded Inc. She'll even pay the ticket price, though I'd hope a comp ticket for media could be arranged, given the long relationship her websites have with Blizzard Entertainment.
I don't much want to go since I don't play World of Warcraft and any Diablo II presence there will be minimal (understandable, given that the game is 6 years old). The hope is that they'll announce and show something about Diablo III there, but they've given no hints of that, and as slowly as they make games I wouldn't expect that announcement anytime soon. One might also hope that they'll announce some more cool stuff between now and October, but the problem is that they're only selling tickets online, with no refunds and no options for reselling them, and they're not even selling them at the door (or so they say now, as they try to sell them for full price in advance). So you've got to commit to it well in advance, and then hope for the best.
I may still go, (though I'll take a book and leftover cell phone minutes) but only because Anaheim is about 100 miles from San Diego, and I could visit my parents before or after the show. I also know a couple of people I could stay overnight with in LA, so I wouldn't need to lay out cash for the hotel. I'd still have to get there though, and while it's just 100 miles from San Diego, it's 400 miles from here. So if I go I'll probably fly down to SD, stay a couple of days, borrow a car from mom or dad and drive up to Anaheim, then go back down to SD and fly home a couple of days later. Meaning that the little two day convention for games I don't care about would swallow a week of my life. *sigh*
Friday Things of the Day
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Art is a jealous mistress."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Soul-Devouring Worry:The future shiny not being nearly shiny enough.
Answer of the Day:Because not sharp enough to cut is still sharp enough to hurt.
Curse of the Day:May your favorite sports writer take two weeks off, before returning with a
five-page article about the same boring thing he wrote approximately seventy-three straight columns on last fall. (I skimmed the first page before giving up.)
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Movies to probably-not-see list:The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (probably not)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryWar of the Worlds
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it.
To no one's real surprise (except for perhaps the weather bureau) the forecast of sun and hot and more sun and hot has completely broken down. Today it's cloudy, windy, and cold, with the thermometer standing at 63 right now, at 3pm. Today's forecast is undeterred, proclaiming an eventual high of 83, and though they've erred slighly on the side of caution with an 83 and "mostly sunny" prediction for tomorrow, Saturday jumps right back up to 89 and cloudless, which is what
they boldly predict for the rest of the week as well.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
New Kali Shiny!
Thanks to the fun we had playing with a broadsword last week in Kali class, and thanks to the announcement that this month's Kali workshop is going to cover broadsword and double stick... Malaya and me went and got a broadsword today. Behold!
The broadsword is there, with two sticks and a long kitchen knife beside it, for a size comparison. It's made from welded aluminum and is a nice weight and size. It's a practice sword, i.e. it has no blade, though you could still inflict quite a bit of damage with it if you were trying to (or were careless in Kali class) and the point is plenty to skewer someone with. Neither Malaya or I know quite what we're doing with a broadsword yet, but it's a lot of fun to swing it around, and they only way we'll gain the control and precision to use it well is by practicing.
A broadsword has slightly more reach than our sticks, and with the hilt protecting the hand it's deadly against a stick, since you can simply go for the hand of your attacker every time, and outreach them most of the time, hit harder with your narrow metal blade, and you've got a hilt to protect you in case of a tie. The drawback is that it's a bit slower than a lighter wooden stick, and that makes it hard to manipulate with very short strokes or in close quarters. You've got to use the weight and the speed of it (the narrow blade cuts through the air very quickly) to your advantage and keep moving, flowing each swing and cut back up to another one, with circular motions. That's how we do most stuff in Kali anyway, so it all works together nicely. It's also very effective with wrist twisting fencing type motions, since you can stab while rotating your wrist, and due to the curve of the blade the tip will change location by half a foot or more, making it trickier to fend off for your opponent. Broadswords are also very quick to swing and pump over, thanks to the concentration of weight in the handle, and this changes the moves you can make as well.
Of course I'm talking about fighting with the practice sword against wooden sticks here; with a real bladed sword you'd simply chop through the sticks with any hard impact, and pretty well disarm your opponent just like that. In a real fight against a real sword the person with the stick(s) would be on the defensive, and would have to do a lot of jabbing, fencing type movements, while trying to get an opening to get inside the longer/slower sword's range.
I'll likely bore you with many more sword stories in the future, so I'll stop for now. And yes, if we could afford it and knew what to do with them, we'd buy a lot more swords. As the years to come will doubtless prove.
Writing and Blogging.
After being well-delayed by various vacations during the month of June, I worked pretty heavily on the novel over the past few days, and have at last put another chapter to bed. It's finished, at least well enough to print out and let my mom and Malaya have a look at it, and while a chapter doesn't sound like that much, my problem with this novel is how goddamned long the chapters are. Call them "sections" or something like that if you prefer, since they have multiple mini-chapters in them; 26 in the one I just finished, dividing up the 85,000 words into managable chunks. The total for the four chapters to date: around 370,000 words.
To put this into comparison, I'll look at the novel on my desk.
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin, is 246 pages long, with 30 pages per line (relatively large print) and about 11 words per full line. Simple math tells us that's 330 words per page x 246 pages = 81180 words. So this whole novel is shorter than my last chapter, and it's probably quite a bit shorter, since LeGuin's novel has blank pages where chapters begin, lots of lines are shorter when paragraphs end or there is dialogue, and so on. It's likely down around 78k for the actual word count. Longer novels are usually in the 120k or 150k range for 350-400 pages, with really long (fantasy, often) ones getting up over 200-250k for the 750-900 page doorstops.
So in theory I've written nearly a trilogy's worth so far, or at least a novel and a sequel, and I'm barely getting started with my story. Chapter one introduces the two main characters and tells of some of their early adventures, and while the novel version is much changed from the early D2 Halloween
story online, it's still recognizable as the same story, and it alone is 44,500 words. That's more than half the length of this entire novel by LeGuin, and in terms of the novel as a whole, chapter one is just a brief introduction; like that opening action scene in every James Bond movie. Chapters 2 and 3 are more about the two characters and their traveling and getting to know each other, and then 4 is where stuff starts to happen as they interact with others in their magical, medieval world, before other characters come in in chapter 5, and the novel really takes off. In theory it's better to be too long than too short, since I can always edit down, but damn... when the story isn't in full swing yet and you're into book 3, that might be a problem.
Four is actually the most on target chapter yet though, since chapter one, in terms of having minimal dead time and keeping things moving along. It's also somewhat similar in form, since 1 and 4 both tell an exciting tale of one night's wild adventures with fights and escapes and magic and treasure and such. Apparently my writing style tends to run very long on words, and while it's not really a conscious technique, I really detail every bit of action and thoughts by the characters as I'm telling an action scene. See the link to chapter one online for an example. In light of that, I don't see how I can cut down the length that much from her on out through the 10 or 11 total chapters, since so much of the remainder of the book is one wild action scene after another.
I could easily cut out most of the background stuff and world info and downtime, and just do a bunch of, "...two months later, Valena looked up at the city gates they were riding towards and thought of the battle that was sure to come..." but given how long my descriptions of battles and action sequences run, that wouldn't necessarily make it much shorter. Plus I don't want to ruin it by writing it differently than I've envisioned it all along.
So I'll just keep plugging away and trying to get right to the point in each chapter, and if it's really, really long... it's really, really long. I hope the eventual editor/publisher doesn't force me to cut it to the bone, but in any event I'm saving all of my supersized drafts, so they'll always be around for some future unexpurgated edition, even if my grandchildren have to publish it posthumously, for your grandchildren to read on their holobook displays.
Oh yeah, and I part of the reason I was posting this book blub was to explain why there haven't been many blog entries for the last couple of days, and why I haven't read more than about 100 pages in total of the 4 novels I've got lying open at the moment. I've got notes written for half a dozen interetsing blog entries, I've got 4 book/movie reviews to write, and so on, but since I've been working on the novel so much to finish reviewing chapter four, I haven't gotten to any of that. And I can't say when I will, since I'm eager to start on chapter five later today, once we've gone shopping and hit a martial arts store for some new weapons. Practice (no blade) broadswords, hopefully.
London Bombing Motives
We've all read about the terrible death toll from the recent London bombings, and other news apparently proving it was the work of Al Quida sympathizers. I was initially surprised that it was such big news; I had thought the IRA blew up that much and more on a monthly basis for a couple of decades, but I guess they were more into personalized murder and bank robbery, rather than creating a massive death toll. Anyway, the very liberal London mayor
has made some comments about the bombings, and his comments are, for some reason, considered very controversial.
Livingstone, who earned the nickname "Red Ken" for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days.
Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama bin Laden.
"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," he said.
Police say they believe there is a clear link between bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.
"You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.
"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.
"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio.
Honestly, what is there to argue about that? I mean it's a hard truth, and it sucks to look in the mirror, but his comments seem perfectly logical and historically-accurate to me. He's being savaged for them anyway, of course, despite the fact that most Britians are savvy enough to agree with him.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has insisted the bombings have no link to its foreign policy, particularly its decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States.
But an opinion poll this week showed two-thirds of Britons see a connection between the Iraq war and the bombings. A top think tank and a leaked intelligence memo have also suggested the war has made Britain more of a target for terrorists.
That did not stop the right-wing Daily Telegraph castigating Livingstone, a maverick member of Blair's Labour party who was celebrating London's selection as host of the 2012 Olympics just hours before the bombers struck.
Wednesday's edition of the paper featured a picture of the mayor between photographs of two radical Muslim clerics under the headline: "The men who blame Britain."
It's funny how much some people hate to face reality and the complexities of it. Some of those on the US right wing are fond of saying liberals "hate America" and that they "blame America" and that terrorists "hate freedom." I always assume that's sort of sarcastic hyperbole. No adult could really see the issue in such blacks and whites, could they? I mean really, they have to know better and know that the London mayor is speaking the truth; they just choose to go on the crazy attack against him since it's easier than being an adult and facing up to the realities of a complex situation.
I can see the temptation to just say, "We're prefect, they're crazy, we've done nothing wrong." but I could never do it. It seems laughable to me, to try and boil down such complex issues to something so stupidly simple. As if there are these "bad guys" who sit around fuming at our freedom to have a Starbucks on every corner, and want to blow themselves up just out of spite. And honestly, if that was the real situation, and they hated us just for existing, we'd be screwed. It would be like fighting robots or alien invaders in some movie, and they'd never stop coming. They might not triumph ultimately, but they could certianly turn the world into one huge armed camp.
The fact that they are just people with a different perspective on things is good news, in my view. After all, points of view can be changed, and when/if their homelands are given some democratic freedom and shared economic prosperity, most of the support for war and suicide attacks will be gone. I'm not saying that the West should give into every demand and complaint, but it's pretty stupid to keep standing on the fire ant hill while insisting we simply need a stronger insecticide to keep our feet from being bitten.
Things of the Day, Late Tuesday Night Edition.
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
--Mark Twain
Soul-Devouring Worry:Extreme fatigue.
Answer of the Day:Because fluidity isn't just for non-frozen water.
Curse of the Day:May the first late arrivals make everything all wrong, and the last make everything all right.
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (probably not)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryWar of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Forecast or Poorcast?
Since I've been complaining about the weather a lot lately (with no real cause,
compared to the rest of the country), I have to mention that it was suddenly and inexplicably about ten degrees cooler on Monday. The high was maybe 82, in the shade at least, and we didn't even need to run the fan much in the evening to cool things down. By 10pm we even closed the back door since it was down around 65 outside, and now at midnight it's almost cold outside, in the high 50s.
The weird thing is that
according to the weather.com page, Monday was just the same as Saturday and Sunday, and Tuesday-Friday is going to be more of the same high 80s/low 90s temps. I don't really care that the forecast missed the sudden and very welcome dip in Monday's temps, but it's very odd that they aren't even admitting that it occured, after the fact. I'm not sure if I should be hopeful for cooler temps the rest of the week, or pay no attention at all to the weather.com info from now on.
It's also odd how fine an edge there is between comfort and unhappiness, when it comes to the temperature. I probably wouldn't even notice a difference between 40 and 50, or 50 and 60, but 80 to 90 is huge, since in one I'm relatively comfortable, and in the other I'm sweating and miserable. YMMV, as always. By the way, it was
130 in Death Valley yesterday. That's 55C, if you're wondering. Or about as hot as a toaster oven.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Free, Quick, and Fun Online Games?
A question and a request, of sorts. If anyone has a favorite online game, or gaming site, for quick, free, and of course fun games, can you share it? I've had a few favorites for some months, but they're all losing their luster for various reasons, and I think we could all do with some suggestions.
By "quick" I mean something that is fun to play a full game of, challenging, but that doesn't take more than say 10-15 minutes. Even shorter is not a bad thing, since I generally want to play for just a few minutes to take a mental break before or during or after some time spent writing, but I don't want to get involved in something that sucks up hours of time. That's why I can't really imagine buying any computer games at this point.
Anyway, my current (fading) favorites are:
Heavy Weapon -- This PopCap game is a lot of fun and is very fast-paced, but as I've improved at it it's beginning to take too long to play. Initially I could have a fun and intense game in 5 or 6 minutes, but since it now takes me at least 11 or 12 per game, and more like 15-16 on a good game, it's becoming a time sink.
Bejeweled 2 -- Another one from PopCap, and I've got the same problem here. I used to die on lvl 5 or 6 and in under 10 minutes. I now almost always make it to lvl 8 or 9 (never 10, yet) and games take anywhere from 15-25 minutes. (Sometimes I can't quite get the combos to beat 6 or 7, but I'm fast enough to keep the timer treading water, and it goes on seemingly forever.)
TeaGames.com -- has numerous fun games, most of them relatively quick. For super quick games try the
BMX Ghost tracks; you'll quite often play those for literally 4 or 5 seconds before you die, but with practice you'll improve until you can start to get near the top 100 times ever, all of which are well under 30 seconds per track. I don't have any of them, though I've been very close on several tracks. In theory BMX Ghost should be perfect games for my quick break playing, since each game is 30 seconds at most, but in practice I wind up playing the same track for far longer as I try to improve or get a perfect run, and in any event, I'm pretty sick of all of those tracks and the maddeningly precise button clicking required to compete on them. There are a lot of other fun games on that site too, but
BMX Backflips is too slow and retro,
BumperKarts takes 30 minutes or more,
Funky Truck takes too long and isn't that much fun, and I'm disappointed in the lack of challenge (and ludicrous high score format) of the new
BMX Backflips 2.
Seven Seas -- is another one by PopCap that was my favorite a couple of years ago. It's still fun once in a while, but it also takes too long, and it would take even longer if they had ever fixed the ridiculous bug that causes it to crash, sooner of later, on every level that has a sea serpent on it. (This makes Hard a random crash game of Russian Roulette, and does the same to Medium after lvl 15.)
Yeti Sports -- These games were fun for a while, but I only really liked game five (Pengu Golf) for anything resembling long term play. Game One (baseball) was fun but too simple (even when you remove all skill, while adding
decapitation, gore, and landmines), game six (Bigwave) was only mildly amusing when trying to catch the biggest air possible, and game eight (Jungle Climb) was never fun, only challenging, and when
I reached the top after several hours of obsessive play I vowed never to play it again. (And have not had any trouble keeping that vow.) The new and last one, Llama Spit, doesn't do much for me either.
BlackJack -- I occasionally play this one for a few mintues, which is about as long as it takes me to lose $1000 while rolling more 13s and 14s than R. Kelly (to steal an old joke). It is helpful to remind myself why I would never gamble with real money I didn't fully expect to lose every cent of, though.
FreeKick -- A fun little soccer game, this was fun until I figured out how the angles and heights worked and learned to score a goal every single time. It's still fun for a few minutes here and there, though the constant scroll of UK soccer gambling odds is annoying enough to make you tape something over part of your screen, or squeeze in the right side of the browser window.
Dynomite -- This was my favorite PopCap game for months, but like most of the others, it eventually
got too easy.
Proximity -- This is a nifty little strategy game that I haven't played very often and aren't sick of; I just wish it had better AI, since it can't compete on the default settings (where a placed piece increases the value of other pieces of yours around it) since the computer never learns to play with any thought to defensive position. I'm also not sure how fair this one is, since the computer possesses a seemingly magical ability to constantly draw a 16 immediately after you play a 15.
I could list more, and I still even play a quick game of D2 (Hell Baal runs with my lvl 93 SP v1.10 Javazon.), but these are ones you guys might enjoy checking out. The key issue to all of it is taste, and of course everyone's is going to vary. Games I love other people won't, and vice versa, which makes it a challenge to find one that's free, fun, and fast, and that can stay that way. Heavy Weapon is probably the best bet there, since on the Survival game (which is all I play on the online version) it just keeps getting harder, and you stop getting powerups the big powerups after 9 minutes, and you will eventually get such impossible spawns that it's just impossible to survive them long enough for a chopper to bring you another nuke.
And yes, if I didn't make it clear above, I'm asking you guys to please post your gaming comments or suggestions or questions in the comments, or via email, if you prefer. Also, I know there are tons of PopCap-like sites with tons of games, but the problem there is I've got to spend many minutes trying each one out, playing it a while to see if it's any good, etc. And I'm looking to not spend very long playing, and certainly not very long looking for something to play. I'd just install Warcraft III if I wanted sure fun and had unlimited time to indulge in it. And will, later this summer, with any luck. Once Malaya finishes her big writing project and wants a reward/break.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Things of the Day, Sunday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Never judge a book by its movie."
--J. W. Eagan
Soul-Devouring Worry:Electrical failure.
Answer of the Day:Because it was another form of green.
Curse of the Day:May you discover just how much your cats' talons can grow in a week.
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (maybe)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryWar of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Anniversary #100... +2
This is the 102nd post made via blogger, and while I'd been planning to do this two posts ago, if anyone has any comments on the blog format, the type of posts I've been making, requests or suggestions for other things to post about, etc, this would be a good place to put them. Especially if you've been reading for more than the past 102 posts, and want to compare/contrast
to the old, thrice-weekly format.
One general request; if you're commenting anonymously, on this or any entry, please sign a name of some sort in your post. I allow all comments now; you don't need to have a blogger account or use it if you have one, but sign your comment with something; I think everyone gives it more weight with a name on it, even if it's just an internet alias.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
For Saturday evening's "Escape the hot condo" activity, we headed over to Walnut Creek and visited Borders Books, and then saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 6:30. Borders was a sad sight, for they had Harry Potter decorations up everywhere, bunting with wizard-ish sigals and props and book displays... and not a copy of the new Harry Potter to be seen. They were completely sold out, either that day or perhaps even Friday night during their midnight sale. (If they had one. I assume they did but wasn't there to see; the crowds I blogged about Friday night were at a Barnes and Noble some miles distant.)
Malaya and I didn't care; we weren't looking to buy the book anyway, though we'll probably get it this week whenever we next hit CostCo for food and other things. But really, how can a major bookstore, the only one in a huge shopping mall in Walnut Creek, not have enough copies to even last one full day of the biggest book launch in history? (At least until HP book 7 comes out in a few years.) Not the best advance planning there, was it?
The book store was just a side trip to kill some time before the movie though, and after browsing around a bit and using their bathroom (always shorter lines than in the movie theater), we headed over to the Chocolate Factory.
In
yesterday's blog I quoted some critics who didn't much care for the film, or at least for Johnny Depp's performance in it, and I suppose I have to agree with them, at least a little. I didn't spend the whole movie with Michael "Magic Fingers" Jackson on my brain, as Ebert did, and I didn't find Depp's look and manerisms so odd that they kept me from feeling involved in the story, but all the same, Depp's portayal of the recluse chocolatier was not the highlight of the film, as I'd expected it would be.
What was the highlight, then? I really couldn't say. Nothing in it sucked, but nothing was stand out brilliant either. The sets were great, the special effects were pretty good, the segment with the nut-sorting squirrels wasn't as cheesy as it looked in the trailer, and none of the child actors was "fingernails on the blackboard" awful, as child actors often are. The songs were actually catchy and enjoyable, the digital effects to shrink and turn one guy into hundreds of Oompa Loompas were pretty seamless, and the hero child and his family were well acted and cast.
Really, the only major problem with the film was that it was a children's film that we attended opening weekend at an early showing. The audience was therefore chock full of children, and they did as children usually do in movies -- they talked all through it. Not to be annoying, just talked as kids do when their over-indulgent parents haven't properly trained them that there are times to babble out every though in their heads, and times to stay silent. So during the film there were constant loud voices asking, "What did he say then, Mommy?" and "I bet he's the bad guy!" and "Oooh, he's going to get in trouble now!" and so on. It was like really bad play-by-play announcing, with several kids announcing every obvious plot twist a few seconds after it happened. And yes, it's very easy for me to condemn parents for not properly-training their children in these dwindling months before I am married and then inflicted with no-doubt-unwieldy rug rats of my own.
The other thing that didn't work for me about the film was the unreality of it. It's obviously a fantasy, with magical things happening to various characters, and there's clearly no way Willy Wonka's candy factory could exist under any working law of physics. I can accept that without a problem, but at the same time some of the things were meant to be realistic, and it made for a weird juxtaposition of fantasy elements with reality. There were factory assembly lines (not in Wonkaville) that looked sort of realistic, but that had people doing the sort of simple, mindless, and repetitive tasks that robots were invented for. Most of the architecture and aspects of the world looked like they were straight out of the 1800s, and then there were video games and computers and satellite dishes that were completely modern.
They combined in odd ways too; the world media was in a frenzy about the five golden tickets, and every winner was immediately on TV, and yet somehow no billionaires offered millions for a winning ticket, people weren't hijacking shipments of the candy bars on their way to the stores, and guys weren't running through candy stores weighing every bar or using a metal detector or x-ray machine to try and find the golden tickets without paying for them (which is exactly what happens when they include valuable metallic cards or holograph cards in packs of sports trading cards). Also, these five kids and their guardians were the first people to enter Wonka's factory in a decade, the entire world wanted to see what was inside, and yet none of them took or smuggled in a camera?
Plus, they all knew that one of the five kids would win a special prize beyond all other prizes, and at least three of the other kid/parent teams were super competitive and scheming, and yet none of them made any effort to outlast the others and win the prize. The basic theme of the story (I've never read the book and hadn't seen more than bits and pieces of the previous Gene Wilder-starring film.) seems to be bad parenting, in the form of parents who either exercise no control over their kids by spoiling them rotten, or by not setting them any limits. That's fine, but with one mother telling her daughter to "keep her eyes on the prize" and another insisting that she win almost as a birth right, why didn't the parents make any effort to get their kids to win the super special unspoken prize? They just sort of let the kids do whatever they wanted to, and thus the kids did something stupid the first chance they got and were eliminated. True, that's sort of the cautionary moral of the tale, but the parents watched their kids get (nearly) killed almost without objection. They should have either displayed a twisted sort of caring love, or been like the
crazy coach dad types and screamed about how they were being stupid and letting down the team. (As you know, there's no "I" in team. Although there is a "me," ironically.)
It wasn't great, but it was enjoyable, more for the overall story and performances than for any individual aspects of the film. This isn't my real review, I'll bang that out tomorrow, if I have a chance, but just to put up the scores while it's still fresh in my mind:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4/8 (adults/children)
Overall: 7
It's adequate and enjoyable and probably great for families, but it certainly wasn't the film I would have made if I'd been directing/writing it. But since my film wouldn't have been suitable for children, that's probably for the best.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
The Melting Point.
This is a pointless little observation, but given that this is a blog and you've probably come to expect such observations, I'll let 'er rip.
Ordinarily it's around 70 (21C) inside our condo. Bit colder in the winter, especially in the bedroom, but I'm talking about the kitchen and the living room. At those temperatures we can leave a container of margerine, or sour cream, or other such solidified liquids out while we're making food and not notice any changes in the substance. For the past week though, it's been hotter. Eighty (27C) or more inside quite often, hotter yet in the early evening before darkness and the fan brings cooler air, and at those temperatures sour cream begins to liquify almost immediately.
It's creepy, but by the time I dab out a few knife's worth and drop them over my burrito, the sour cream is becoming visibly and tangibly runnier. It's not soupy, at least not that quickly, but it's well on its way, and the margarine isn't much better. Looking at it just a moment ago as I spread some over toast, there was a little melted slag pool filling the lower indentations in the substance, like a tide pool lingering in the low rocks.
I don't know where to go with this observation from here, other than to futily express the redundant hope that cooler temperatures will soon return. We're well above the
average highs for this (or any) time of the year, and looking at
the ten-day forecast for this area, it's exactly the same as it's been since Monday, when I returned from San Diego and was driven to start checking. (You'll note that I never check the weather here in the spring, fall, or winter, when it's cool and sometimes cold and raining; only when it's hot and I'm hoping it will stop being hot.) They say it'll be around 90 today, and for the next few days, before gradually returning to the 80ish temps we average in July.
The funny part is that the forecast hasn't changed at all since Monday: then it was supposed to be around 90 (32C) for the next few days (Tues-Thurs, at the time), with cooling beginning Fri. Now that it's Friday, it's supposed to be 90ish for the next few days (Sat-Mon), with cooling beginning Tuesday. So basically their ability to forecast the weather extends roughly three days, during which they say it will be the same as it was yesterday. The fourth day from now will be somewhere between yesterday and the average for this time of the year, and then the fifth through tenth days will regress completely to the mean. And to gain this expertise people attend years of college, and companies pay millions of dollars for weather satellite information and doppler radar.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Friday Night Out
Rambling stream of consciousness blog post ahead. You were warned. (Those of you who enjoyed the pre-blogger style of updates should get into this one, though.)
So partially because Malaya just got home, partially because it's like 84 degrees, and partially becuase Malaya was dying to ride around some in my new sports car, we ventured forth Friday night. Not to anywhere in particular either; we just wanted to get out of the hot condo while the fan blew out and sucked some of the cooling night air in. Unfortunately for our plans, it was nearly 9pm by the time we started off, which meant most things were closed. A bad choice on the part of the merchants, it seemed, since when we got over to downtown Walnut Creek the streets were thronged. It wasn't exactly Mardi Gras or anything, but there was more foot traffic than you see there most afternoons. Apparently a lot of other people had the same "get out of the house on this warm evening" idea we did.
We were momentarily confused by the huge line at Barnes and Noble though, until I recalled seeing some blog posts about the Harry Potter book, and connected the mental dots. Check out
this article on Yahoo for more details; they had stacks of those special Harry Potter shipping boxes stacked up at the store we walked past, right against the glass windows facing the main street. I would have loved to seen someone throw a rock through and start grabbing out cases; would the crowd have surged forward to claim their hardcover copy and would we have seen a full-fleged riot? I think not, not in bougie and almost-entirely white Walnut Creek, but it was fun to pretend.
We walked through the store a bit and browsed, but left soon since the constant overheard Harry Potter-related conversations were annoying, as were the yawning 8 y/o's in every aisle. And it wasn't even 10pm yet; they had 2+ hours yet to wait. Hope their parents were prepared to carry them home in one arm and the book in the other.
I'm looking forward to reading it, but I've got three library books with the clock ticking, and
The Historian after that, so my reading schedule is sort of booked for the short term. Especially since I'm trying to get a lot done on my novel now. Then again, I always say that and yet it is, far from finished. We'll probably pick up HP6 next time we're at CostCo, but neither of us is feeling any real urgency to do so. I don't really see the point in waiting in line for a book anyway; it's not like a movie that you're going to see in two hours and be done with; you'll need days to read the full novel, especially if you're eight, and it's not like the bookstores are going to sell out of the title. I suppose I'd be more enthusiastic about it if it were my book they were in a frenzy to buy, but even then I'd be like, "Wait and buy it tomorrow; you've got the rest of your life to read it."
The funniest sight in the bookstore was a little kid in the full black Hogwarts cape outfit... and short blonde hair. Honestly, he looked just like a younger version of the kid they've got playing Draco Malfoy in the movies. Draco, if you've not read the books, is one of the bad guys, a spoiled asshole kid who is Harry Potter's main rival at school. So what do you do if you're a huge Harry Potter fan, and you're a little kid, and you happen to look just like the bad guy? The kid wasn't in HP disguise; no big Groucho glasses or black Beatles' wig, and not even the requisite lightning bolt face paint on his forehead. I would have given him mad props if he'd gone to the darkside, and worn a Slitherin cloak and sneered a lot, and perhaps even found two lumpy kids to follow him around like Draco's incompetent sidekicks. Not a lot of ten year olds have the balls to stand out like that, though.
After the bookstore, we walked around a bit and enjoyed the cool night air. Malaya wanted a treat, on this last day of being sort of off her diet, but much to our chagrin the local Ghirardelli's store was closed, and had been for hours.
Ghirardelli's is a famous and very classic ice cream/chocolate store, one that's apparently too classy to stay open late on a very hot Friday night when thousands of families are wandering around, waiting for midnight to chime so they can buy the goddamned book and get home with it. Nice choice there by the management.
A block away we found the formerly unknown Maggie Moo's Ice Cream, which had a line out the door and around the corner, with six teenagers furiously scooping away as they tried vainly to keep up with the crush of customers. We waited anyway, and split a chocolate/vanilla/strawberry hot fudge sundae, with nuts and whipped cream. It wasn't bad, for ice cream.
Back home the condo had cooled off a bit, though Dusty was fully wound up by our absence. He's been meowing pretty much non-stop since Malaya returned home with him, and while we assume he gave it a rest while we were gone, there's really no way to verify that. At first he was excited to be home, then he was annoyed by the heat, then he was excited by lick and bite at Jinx, then he was excited that we were gone, and then he was excited that we were back home. (And by "we" he means "beloved mother Malaya and that annoying male human who takes up space on my bed and is always petting me the wrong way and squeezing my toes just to make me kick.") I found it sort of weird being around mom's cats down in San Diego, since neither of them ever makes any noise. I think I might even have missed the meowing.
What was I thinking?
Movies, Past, Present and Future
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is opening this weekend, and getting good reviews. It's at 73% approval
on Metacritic, and 83% positive
on Rotten Tomatoes. The odd part is that it's getting some of those scores in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which most people assumed would make or break the film. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post gave it the lowest score of any major reviewer,
and said of Depp:
There's a smidgen of Mr. Rogers here, a bit of Dana Carvey's Church Lady there; the exaggerated top hat, foppish coat and waxy green pallor suggest a creature worthy of Dr. Seuss, and those prosthetic choppers can't help but recall Depp's own performance as the title character in Burton's 1994 movie "Ed Wood." And that hair--a lacquered pageboy with wisps of Mamie Eisenhower bangs -- that hair can bring to mind only one person these days, and that's the currently incarcerated New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
The cumulative effect isn't pretty. Nor is it kooky, funny, eccentric or even mildly interesting. Indeed, throughout his fey, simpering performance, Depp seems to be straining so hard for weirdness that the entire enterprise begins to feel like those excruciating occasions when your parents tried to be hip. If you have to try that hard, you just aren't.
Ebert liked the film enough to give it 3/4 stars, but his approval came about despite Depp's performance, which is compares to just one existing celebrity -- one no one wants to be compared to.
Johnny Depp may deny that he had Michael Jackson in mind when he created the look and feel of Willy Wonka, but moviegoers trust their eyes, and when they see Willy opening the doors of the factory to welcome the five little winners, they will be relieved that the kids brought along adult guardians. Depp's Wonka -- his dandy's clothes, his unnaturally pale face, his makeup and lipstick, his hat, his manner -- reminds me inescapably of Jackson (and, oddly, in a certain use of the teeth, chin and bobbed hairstyle, of Carol Burnett).
We'll likely see it this weekend anyway, so stay tuned for my oh-so-important critical reaction.
Speaking of critical reaction, I've recently watched The Incredibles twice on DVD (once in San Diego with dad, once here while bored in the late afternoon heat) and it's really grown on me. Looking back at
my original review I see that I gave it an 8, but more because I thought I should than because I really enjoyed it. I appreciated the quality and intelligence of it then, but didn't really connect with the characters on an emotional level. I now do, while appreciating the rest of it even more, and really can't say enough about it. The action sequences are genius, the characters are smart and realistic, and the actual acting performances, animated though they are, are really quite brilliant. Watch virtually any conversation scene in the film and really study their body language, facial expressions, and so on. Better than real humans can do them, for the most part.
Inspired by The Incredibles, I finally got around to watching Finding Nemo again. I wrote about it last year when I saw it for the first time on DVD, but never put up an actual review. Well,
there's one up now, and happily I liked the movie a lot more the second time through. I don't love it, mostly because it's just too aimed for children to give me that much adult satisfaction, and I wish there was more to the plot than Marlin and Dotty's endless roadtrip, but I'm sure kids worship the film, and it's good enough for adults to sit through as well.
Finally, I must admit that the constant barrage of "Coming this Tuesday!" TV ads for the
Constantine DVD (18 minutes of bonus footage!) are starting to work on me. I was surprised at how much I liked the film when I saw it in the theater last year, I especially loved the glorious imagery, and since that's what the commercials are ladeling on, I'm itching. Buying it new would be foolish, since it'll be used at Blockbuster in a month for half price, and since we've got 2 DVDs here now we haven't seen yet, plus the Chocolate Factory movie this weekend... And yet my urge to possess it forthwith is, like all desires, essentially untrammeled by logic or rationality.
Things of the Day, Malaya's Return Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
--Krishnamurti
Soul-Devouring Worry:Sharp objects.
Answer of the Day:Because I was all alone.
Curse of the Day:May the sun beat down unrelentingly.
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, July 15th
The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (maybe)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
War of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Misc Kali Bruises: #03
The bruise victim this time is not an arm or a leg, or even a nose. It's a stick. Click them for larger views.
Yes, those are the lovely new sticks I purchased in staff form less than a month ago, cut down, filed, and varnished to perfection. Yes, it was worth it, since they got chopped up by a sword blade, while we were sparring with double sticks vs. broadsword. It wasn't a bladed sword, fortunately, or I'd be short two sticks, and about half a dozen fingers. Metal is very different than wood though, even when it's been dulled for use in class, and not only did I get to swing at the person holding the sword, I got to use it myself, which was also a first.
I'm not sure if it was the best Kali class ever, but I certainly enjoyed it. Double stick is my favorite, or at least it was before doing the broadsword, but since I probably won't get to play with one of those again for some time, I might as well not dwell on it. It did remind me though, that one of the main reasons I'd always wanted to do some form of martial art was since I'd always loved swords and watching sword fights in movies. I still love and covet them, but with more respect for them, knowing how dangerous just a wooden stick can be. On the other hand, my appreciation for sword fights in movies has done way down, now that I know first hand just how woeful the style, technique, and realism of those fights is.
The most interesting quick observation about a sword vs. a stick? The sword is heavier and has a slightly longer reach, but it's very differently-weighted. A stick weighs basically the same over the whole length, and since you're holding the very end, the weight is obviously all going in one direction. The broadsword, on the other hand, has a long, curved blade, and a heavy metal handle. This totally changes the weight, putting more of it in and behind your hand than you're used to. It also makes the heavy weapon a lot faster than you expect it to be, and makes it very good for swinging and carving and slicing, especially when you factor in the narrow blade and lack of wind resistance.
Waving around a blunt broadsword and using it to chop off the hands of an attacker armed with two sticks was a lot of fun, and while it's far, far, far from my eventual goal of fighting full speed with a real sword, it was a fun step in that direction. It was also nice to see that the Gura had enough confidence in me to put a sword in my hands. I'm not so sure my fellow student shared that confidence, since I've never seen him show any trepidation at all, but when we started off with him using double stick and me the broadsword, he was moving
very carefully.
Kali students get to start using sticks from their first class, but no swords until they've shown they can be trusted with them, since after all, we're not just swinging our weapons around in the air, or hitting a dummy; we're working at speed and complete improve style with another living human, and constantly touching each other with our weapons. The blunt blade wouldn't cut off your head or slice through an arm, but it could very easily crush or even amputate fingers, not to mention breaking bones, poking out eyes, cutting off ears, and so forth. Fortunately, the only damage it did tonight was to wooden sticks, but there's always next time.
Book Review: A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
Prior to reading this novel I'd read (
and reviewed/discussed) five Jeffrey Deaver novels, all in his Lincoln Rhyme series (I'll read the sixth in that series soon, once my turn comes up at the library.) Aside from that series of novels, Deaver has written a dozen or so other novels, all one-off thrillers with original characters and stories that do not connect to each other or to his ongoing Lincoln Rhyme series. A Maiden's Grave is one of the one-off novels, and since I was curious about his other work, and since this one had about the best reviews from Amazon.com readers, I picked it up from the library a few days before my recent San Diego "vacation."
It came in handy too, and I read the first 90% of it over two consecutive nights, until I paused for a couple of days after losing interest with about fifty pages to go. That's not a good sign in a thriller, if you're wondering. The novel wasn't awful, and Deaver's prose flowed as quickly as ever, making it a very fast read, but it was definitely the least-enjoyable novel by him I've yet read, and it's given me cause to strongly considering reading nothing else by him outside of the Lincoln Rhyme series. To the scores:
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
Plot: 6
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 4/8
Characters: 6
Horror: 6
Humor: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 4.5
The story doesn't suck, and the characters aren't bad, and there is some tension, and there were things that could be considered scary and suspenseful. It had all the elements of a successful novel, and I'm not sorry I read it, but it just wasn't very good. Oddly enough, you might enjoy it more if you've not read much/anything else by Deaver, since then it will seem fresher and more original to you. The characters were mostly original, as was the plot. The elements of the plot were not though, and I saw most of the twists and character betrayals coming well in advance, simply because those types of things and twists always happen in Jeffrey Deaver novels.
I was surprised how unsurprising the novel was, since while he uses the same few tricks over and over again in his Lincoln Rhyme novels, they work there. I know that in every Rhyme novel the criminal will be a scheming genius, that he'll appear to have Lincoln and his team outwitted and beaten several times, and that Lincoln will make some brilliant deduction at the last instant to save the day. I still enjoy them though, simply because the twists and turns are so clever. In
A Maiden's Grave there were not very many twists, the ones that came along weren't really all that clever, and they were also familiar. Unfortunately.
The plot had potential too. The premise is that three merciless killers have escaped from prison and are on the run. Their car crashes into another car on a deserted road, and when the next vehicle to pass by is a school bus full of eight deaf girls and their two teachers, the convicts take them hostage and hole up in an old slaughterhouse. The police surround them, the FBI comes in, and the main character of the novel is a middle-aged FBI hostage negotiator, who, along with his team, attempt to talk the prisoners into surrendering and not killing any of their hostages. The convicts are merciless, their leader is cold and brilliant and deadly, and the deaf girls are terrified and helpless; or so it seems.
The novel takes place over less than a day, with one tense phone conversation after another taking place between the prisoners and the FBI, as the HTs (Hostage Takers) demand a chopper and a pilot, and Arthur Potter, the FBI lead negotiator, tries to lie, bargain, and compromise with them to string things along until his rescue team can assemble, or he can get the HTs to give themselves up.
Things are complicated by the remote location, the scoop-maddened media, and the scheming interference of another Deaver staple; rogue cops and/or politicians who charge into the fray and insist upon involving themselves out of idiocy, ignorance, or a desperate desire for publicity. The unblinking gore, the suggestions of truly horrible things, the criminal genius, the Judas among the good guys, and the other stuff that Deaver always includes were all there as well. The only thing missing were the plot twists.
In all of the Lincoln Rhyme novels, there are at least half a dozen surprising twists and turns, as characters do unexpected things, bad guys trick cops, cops trick the reader, characters we thought were dead appear alive and kicking, and so on. His books aren't quite rollercoasters, but they do keep you on your toes and give you regular shocks.
A Maiden's Grave didn't. Stranger yet, it didn't even try. This one was more of a suspense thriller, I suppose, with our intended horror at the thought of one of those poor deaf girls being hurt or killed was supposed to keep us reading as the "I'm going to kill one in an hour if I don't get my chopper." deadlines continually approached, looked carved in stone, and then were defused in some surprising way.
This might have worked for some readers, and I guess it did, judging by the high scores this one
has gotten on Amazon.com, but I was never really involved in the suspense of this one, and I didn't really care how it turned out. It was obvious to me all along that there was more going on below the surface than we (the readers) were being told, and I kept expecting more shocking developments to occur. Plus, I think Deaver made Lou Handy, the brains of the HT team, too ruthless and unpredictable. Deaver shows how cold and deadly Handy is very early on, but Handy seems so deceptive and prepared that I never really trusted anything he said. He might have killed all of the girls at any minute, just to fuck with the cops, or gone back on his agreed-upon deadlines just for fun, so I didn't believe anything he said and didn't invest much in their intended-to-be intense conversations.
Besides that, I thought the big twist, the one the whole novel was building towards, was telegraphed hundreds of pages in advance. This was probably due to my having read several other Deaver novels, so I've grown wise to his, "it will be the last one you would have suspected" trick. I suspected literally 250 pages in advance, and was therefore not surprised what happened, when it happened and how it happened. Even if I hadn't, this was one of those books where it appeared to be almost over, and yet there were like 50 pages left, so I knew more had to happen. I have the same problem with TV shows; when it looks like things are wrapped up and it's just 6:40, or it looks like they're nowhere near wrapping up and yet it's 6:52. Movies in theaters are fun for that reason, just because I don't know how much longer they're going to last, and I also enjoy books with appendixes and bonus chapters from other books after them, so I don't know if I've got 10 or 40 pages yet to go.
I actually enjoyed the last 50 pages in
A Maiden's Grave the most, simply because the action was faster, the characters were confused, the setting was different, and I didn't know what was going to happen next. The whole drawn out hostage situation wasn't ever that interesting to me, but the chase scenes and action stuff that came after it ended were very cool, and that's the only reason I'm even considering reading any more of Deaver's non-Lincoln Rhyme novels. He doesn't have the writing chops to pull off a suspense story in a static location with very little action going on, but he's very good at pursuits and action sequences and having characters think on their toes while crazy stuff goes on around them. And while
A Maiden's Grave doesn't really play to his strengths as a writer, I can envision other stories that might.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Broadband Serendipity.
An odd chain of events:
1) My dad recently signed up for DSL through SBC (phone company) and his Internet connection seemed pretty fast when I tried it out while in San Diego last week. I was also intrigued by his $15 monthly bill, considering that Comcast gouges us to the tune of $40 for our cable modem service.
2) Yesterday's mail brought a glossy, multi-page brochure for the SBC DSL service, at an introductory rate of
(as low as) $14.95 a month
(with qualifying services).
3) During Wednesday night's phone chat with the temporarily geographically-distant Malaya, I mentioned the possibility of switching to DSL for the $25 a month in savings; a suggestion that got a very frosty response. She doesn't want to be bothered with the technical issues, she doesn't think the money saved would be worth the trouble, she reminded me of my frequent comment that DSL is slower and entirely dependent upon our distance from the nearest relay station, etc.
4) A few hours later,
I saw this article on the ongoing price/customer war between cable companies and phone companies, which included the following quote:
The cable and phone companies are betting that existing customers will find it too inconvenient to switch. That's why cable operators -- which are ahead of phone companies in signing up broadband Internet users -- don't feel as pressured to slash prices as deeply...
Don't you just hate it when the corporate bastards have you pegged?
5) After my DSL suggestion was shot down, I lamely segued into a futile hope that perhaps Comcast would lower their prices, now that SBC and others are giving them some competition.
...by limiting the price cuts to new customers, the companies may risk angering their current subscribers.
"It's frustrating that they're not giving their loyal customers the same kind of deal," said Kerry Smith, an attorney from South Philadelphia who subscribes to Comcast for cable, but pays Verizon for Internet and phone service.
Even in markets where DSL prices have dropped, cable has not been hurt badly, Paxton said. "It's frankly a pain in the butt to switch," he said.
Hopes and dreams... crushed...
As the article details, the larger issue is all in one product packaging, now that cable companies are going to begin offering land lines and cell phones through the fat copper cable, and phone companies are going to run DSL and TV through their new fiber optic phone lines. There may yet be some sort of price war though, since they each want to lock us up for everything though one provider. They'll lose some money at first in the price war, but once we're settled in they'll jack up the prices, knowing most of us will be too lazy to bother switching at that point. And judging by the DSL issue, they'll be correct.
PETA Profile.
I've posted about PETA
lots of times, more as a testiment to their skill in grabbing headlines than because of any ideological agreement or disagreement with their ends or means. So when
I saw this article about the organization on the whole and their current campaigns, I had to post about it as an FYI.
This summer, as PETA celebrates 25 years of largely successful campaigns, the group has set its sights on one of its toughest challenges yet as it seeks sweeping change in the $29 billion U.S. poultry industry.
PETA wants the estimated 9 billion chickens slaughtered each year in the United States to first receive a mixture of gas and oxygen to make them unconscious, a method used in Europe, but one that would require costly overhauls of U.S. poultry slaughterhouses.
National Chicken Council spokesman Richard Lobb said the current slaughter system is both "effective and humane," and PETA's latest reform requests are efforts to drive up costs and put chicken companies out of business.
What is the current method?
Current U.S. systems shackle live chickens, hang them upside down and run them through electrified baths to stun them before their throats are slit and they are put into scalding defeathering tanks. PETA cited USDA reports as evidence that millions of chickens annually are conscious through most if not all of the process.
Well, that's a lovely image. Point to PETA there, I think. Seriously, shocked unconscious (at best) under elecritifed water before being bled to death. Isn't that pretty much what the the little Asian guy did to torture Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon?
Two asides: 1) Re:
Lethal Weapon, it really is amazing when you think back over Mel Gibson's film career and notice that his characters were beaten and/or tortured in virtually every film. It's only become obvious since his Jesus-fixation came to light with
The Passion, but he's clearly had a martyr complex all along, and managed to work it into the script.
2) So the US Poultry industry is worth $29 billion (a year, I assume) and the industry goes through 9 billion chickens? They only clear $3 a bird? Damn, no wonder they grow them by the hundreds of thousands in huge farm factories. And it might even be less than $3 a bird, since the $29b is for the entire poultry industry; turkey has to be at least 10 or 20% of that, doesn't it?
Lastly, I enjoyed this earnestly-naive quote from some PETA guy:
"I don't understand how anyone with a conscience can learn about the horrifically cruel conditions for chicken slaughter and not want to do anything about it," said PETA campaign director Bruce Friedrich.
Well, I'll explain for you, Bruce. It's because people don't give a shit about how chickens live or die, and frankly, they don't want to learn anything about it. For most Americans, there are only two things they want to think about when they think about chicken; regular or extra crispy.
Besides, while everyone knows that slaughterhouses are horrific and that the animals killed there suffer horribly, almost everyone enjoys consuming their tender flesh, and we therefore choose not to dwell upon the harsh realities of their execution. Humans are very good at ignoring things we'd rather not dwell upon, especially when said dwelling would possibly require making changes in lifestyle or diet.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Pot Meets Kettle
Here's
a news item that starts off ridiculous, and ends up amusing.
TOKYO - A group of teachers and translators in Japan on Wednesday sued Tokyo's outspoken nationalist governor for allegedly calling French a "failed international language," a news report said.
Twenty-one people filed the lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court, demanding that Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara pay a total of 10.5 million yen ($94,600) compensation for insulting the French language in remarks last October, national broadcaster NHK said.
In their suit, the plaintiffs accused Ishihara of saying: "French is a failed international language because it cannot be used to count numbers."
In French, some numbers can be unwieldy to say, such as 90, which translates as "four-twenty-ten."
Ishihara is apparently an asshole, regularly spouting racist and xenophobic remarks, but it sounds like he's got a point about number in French, at least going by this one example. That aside, what about the larger issue? What the hell are they suing him for? Expressing an opinion? Their complaint doesn't have a leg to stand on under US law, though things may well be very different under Japanese law.
The laughs come in at the end of the article, when the worm turns most cruelly:
Japan's counting system can also be tricky. Adopted from Chinese, the Japanese numeric system ignores the western system of classifying large numbers every three digits. Though one thousand is the same, 30,000 would translate as "three-10,000," 4 million would be "400-10,000" and 4 billion would be "40-100 million."
Counting one pencil or one bottle of beer ("ippon") in Japanese differs from counting one sheet of paper ("ichimai") or one book ("issatsu").
Even besides that, don't you need to memorize like 10,000 characters to be able to read or write even basic Japanese or Chinese? Who's got the failed international language again?
Pictures Galore.
A few recent photos. Three cell phone pics first, two by me, one by Malaya.
Courtesy of Malaya's cell phone cam, here you see Jinx, mid-mmmrrrrooowwww while in the back of Malaya's car on the way to Malaya's parents' house, where the cats are staying this week. Jinx makes more noise in ten minutes in the car than she does in a month in our condo, and it takes a lot more than ten minutes to drive to Malaya's parents' house. The fact that Dusty is a noisy son of a bitch all of the time, and that he kicks it up an Emeril-like notch when in the car and spurred on by Jinxie, makes Malaya pretty unhappy about the whole process.
Which is, of course, exactly how the cats feel.
Bella here, the prettier and friendlier of mom's two cats, remains well-hidden behind the stereo after the carpet cleaner guy finished, dried the rugs, and left. Her brother went far deeper to ground, burying himself in the storage closet below the stairs, and did not emerge for something like eight hours. Evolution did not adequately prepare cats for electric motors.
I went to a wine-tasting with dad while in San Diego, and frankly, this was the best thing about it. The wine bar sold half platters and platters (this is a platter) of cheese, bread, and some sliced meat for something like $7/$12, but we got one to share as part of our wine tasting fee. The place was deafening, the wine service was slow, and I didn't especially like any of the vintages. I did enjoy the cheese and bread though. Havarti is my new favorite cheese, based on this tasting. It's the square stick-shaped ones, it tastes a bit like creamy Monterey Jack, and it's very fluffy and light in texture, almost like a marshmallow. I've no idea how it would taste on a turkey sandwich, but by itself or with some sliced baguette and wine it was divine.
And here's one of my new, dad's old, car. 2001 Celica GT-S, if you want to research it on your own. I'll post something later about driving it up here and give some overall impressions of the vehicle. So far it's comfortable, fun to drive on the freeway, and handles amazingly-well. Only the acceleration from a standstill is lacking, and that's entirely due to it being just a 4-speed automatic, which is geared so you can start out smoothly. It doesn't shift to 2nd until at least 20 MPH, and is therefore not very quick to get there.
"Corn!" or possibly "Snow!" I have no explanation as to why my dad's cul-de-sac was infested with crows, but there they were; half a dozen of them picking around various yards or squatting on various roofs at all times. The fact that they, or other birds very much like them, shat upon my new car at least twice made me less than cheerful.
The result of several hours of yardwork while wearing Tevas. I now have clear tan lines across my feet -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my otherwise pale feet gained a tanned polygon in the center of them.
Dad's neighbors certainly do like SUVs and minivans, don't they? The funny thing is that I posted a shot (which I can not currently locate) of this same house a couple of years ago, before the old neighbors moved out and the new ones moved in, and the vehicle roster was virtually identical. I think they were 4/1 SUV/minivan, rather than 2/3, like the new people, who have no where near enough kids to require that much cargo space. White people in the suburbs just don't make any effort to stand out anymore.
This bird's nest can be seen straight out our kitchen window, perhaps twenty feet away. We never would have noticed it if not for Jinx's help, since when she spent much of the week before my recent San Diego trip standing at that window and meefing and pawing at the glass, it was hard not to notice that something had claimed her attention out there. The saddest part is when one of the birds flies over the roof of the condo, and she stands up in the windowsill and reaches up behind the blinds, as if she weren't ten feet too low and on the other side of a ceiling. As we say, "spatial relations kitty."
This unpleasant sight greeted me last night, when I cut into an apparently edible apple and found that the inside had been transformed into some sort of carmelized tar. It was hard and slick, and entirely undetectible from the outside, with the only external blemish the bruised-looking bit you see in shot #1. Glad I didn't bite into this one.
This is the sort of thing that lets me understand why some people don't like fruit. Snickers bars and Cheetos have a thousand calories, but they all taste the same, and you never find an oil slick in the center of one when you bite into it. Besides, even if you did you could probably sue the manufacturer and get rich over emotional trauma and pain/suffering, or something equally-ridiculous.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Movie and Book Thoughts.
The Fantastic Four opened over the weekned, and did box office as good as the
reviews were bad. It's been on our "movies to see" list for weeks, and we certainly would have seen it already, except that I was in San Diego all week, and Malaya left for a week-long business trip on Saturday. So if we do see it that won't happen until next weekend, and fickle creatures that we are, now that it's getting ripped by the critics, we may not see it at all.
Complicating things is the fact that
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is opening this weekend. It's doing
100% on RT so far, and is probably Malaya's #1 most anticipated movie of the summer, largely due to the presence of the ideally-cast Johnny Depp. So we're sure to be at that, and since we seldom do more than one movie per weekend, and just bought three new DVDs the day before I left town...
The FF might be SOL. I'm sure you and 20th Century Fox are equally heartbroken.
Moving right along to the literary side of things... as you may have noticed in the "things of the day" entry earlier, I picked up a few new titles at the library today.
First comes
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.
Check this entry for a bit more detail if you so desire. I've yet to crack it open, other than that first day when I read 30 pages or so in CostCo, and I doubt I will read it for a while yet, with a few other library books to go through first.
Next up is
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter. You can get a taste of it here, from the
Amazon.com editorial reviews. Here's a blurb, which goes much like what I read on the book's inside cover:
From Booklist
Ace serial-killer biographer Schechter doesn't buy the yap about movie/TV/video-game violence being worse than all previous gruesome entertainment and inspiring worse behavior. Violent crime rates are declining even if video games are getting gorier. Moreover, the history of violent entertainment suggests that humanity is kinder, gentler, and more squeamish than ever. As recently as the famously wholesome 1950s, shoot-'em-up westerns dominated TV, producing more corpses per half-hour during after-school and prime-time viewing hours than ever since: where are the westerns now? Farther back and for centuries, thousands mobbed public executions now considered appallingly sadistic, buying the likes of miniature guillotines (to decapitate birds and mice for children's amusement) as souvenirs. Only late in the nineteenth century did violent amusement become strictly representational, and the epicenter of theatrical gore, Paris' Theatre du Grand Guignol, closed in the 1960s. Nowadays action movies may be louder than ever, but onscreen mayhem is minimal.
There are some reader reviews as well, but with just three of them there's no concensus. It's a slight book, just 163 pages plus notes and an index, and can't be all that thorough at that length. Going by what the reviews say, it's mostly an examination of violence in historical forms of entertainment, with little attention paid to the societies that produced them, or recent studies of how children are impacted by the constant news barrage of violence we get today, or by the immersion of acutally controlling the killers in a video game, for example.
I have yet to read a word of it myself, but it looked interesting when I saw it in the new releases section of the library, so I snapped it up.
Along with that book I picked up two fantasy novels (One is actually a collection of related short stories, rather than a novel, but close enough.) that I'd been meaning to read for years, never saw on the shelves, and finally put on order within the library system. Both are by Ursula K. LeGuin, and they are the 5th and 6th books in her
Tales from Earthsea series. Which brings me to my next point.
I keep meaning to
write some more reviews of older novels, ones I read years or decades ago, and enjoyed then and probably still enjoy now. I've reviewed most of the books I've read for the first time over the past few years, along with movies that also meet that definition, but I never seem to go back and review older stuff I would actually have something to say about. I've read most of Steven King's books, including everything he wrote up until the last 90s, yet my only reviews for him are of the last couple of Dark Tower novels, and the entirely-forgettable
From a Buick 8. I loved almost all of his early novels, and in fact those are the books that first made me consider trying to be a writer myself, when I read them (beginning with Firestarter) back in my teens. Yet I've hardly talked about them on the blog, and haven't reviewed them at all. I consider Clive Barker my favorite horror writer, and think several of his novels are among the best I've ever read in any genre, yet I have zero reviews of his work, and only a brief mention of him and some of his short stories on my
Horror Novelists page. I greatly-enjoyed the first seven or eight books in
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, yet my only reviews are of the last two disappointing efforts. And so on.
I have no idea when or if I will rectify this situation, but I am at least trying to whittle away at it. I recently re-read and wrote reviews for the 2nd and 3rd novels in
Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series (#3 will be online soon), and now with these Ursula K. LeGuin novels, I can read them and write reviews, and will then be motivated to go back and skim over books 1-3 and add those reviews. Currently I have a review of only
Tehanu, the 4th book in the series, which is probably the worst of them, for various reasons discussed in the review.
Why I'm worried about adding reviews of books that are decades old, in most cases, when no one ever requests more reviews, and I don't think my current ones are anywhere near the most popular features on this website, is another question. One that I don't have any answers for. I guess that's why they call it a "home page." It's my page, and that gives me the right and privilege to do whatever I want to on it, while trying to balance that desire with the desire to not completely bore the regular readers I'm lucky enough to possess.
Things of the Day, Homecoming Edition.
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
--Henry David Thoreau
Soul-Devouring Worry:The sudden arrival of summer temperatures.
Answer of the Day:Because cutting and pasting from a remote location is apparently impossible.
Curse of the Day:May your mother unexpectedly exhibit a bit of the Lannister.
Books Lying Open:Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, July 15th
The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (maybe)
Fantastic Four, (now playing, but probably not to us)
War of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Monday, July 11, 2005
Incoherence Personified...
Well, maybe I'm not quite
that out of it (though the fact that I had to backspace to fix typos four times within the first eight words of this sentence, a correction total that now stands at nine, might argue otherwise), but I'm not exactly at my sharpest. And yes, I just typed "at my sharpies" before fixing it. Whether I was referring to pens or little rolls or sugar candies has yet to be determined.
Anyway, the drive back north wasn't too bad. I'll blog more about driving and the new (to me) car and what I did in San Diego tomorrow (well, later today, but after I sleep, at any rate), but I made the 500 mile return trip in just about seven hours, and didn't hate it. Dad's ex-car, my new car, is fun to drive, the leather seat is comfy, and while the cruise control was largely useless with my speed varying from 60 to 110MPH depending on how much the other vehicles were blocking my path, it was fun to play with and I enjoyed driving foot-free for long minutes at a time. It doesn't entirely make up for the lack of my beloved manual transmission, but I've got to admit that I enjoyed not having to think about shifting and not having to move my arms while driving 7+ hours with just one quick stop to get gas and pee all day. Especially when outside
temperatures were over 100 for like 4 hours straight through the endless and remorselessly-flat Central Valley. My A/C worked without fail, but I was still sweaty and hot in the sun. Why my arms and hands aren't sunburned I couldn't tell you.
Highlight: Getting here and not having to drive anywhere else until tomorrow night.
Lowlight: The CHP cruiser that exited just ahead of me heading into
The Grapevine, then crept up the entire goddamned pass at the speed limit, thus creating an impressive bottleneck that he finally broke by exiting well down the other side and allowing those of us who wanted to actually drive to rip ass unimpeded over the all-but-empty road for the remainder of the descent.
Also:
1) Long distance truck drivers don't care. Not even a little bit. No, not even about you, no matter how special your mother said you were. If they want to change lanes and pass a slightly slower truck, they'll do it, and the fact that you're screaming up behind them at nearly twice their speed means nothing. After all, it's not their truck, and they're pretty sure their steel rear bumpers are stronger than your plastic car.
2) They still put rearview mirrors in SUVs, right? I mean they didn't stop installing those when they gave up any hope of meeting fuel economy standards? I'm just wondering, since maybe half of the sluggish road dinosaurs I charged up behind today didn't so much as flinch towards their rightful place in the right lane, nor did they budge from their solitary contemplation of the left lane once I shot past them on the right, slid back over into the passing lane, and tore off towards the ever-retreating horizon.
3) An open letter to several dozen drivers, all of whom have simply fascinating rear bumpers: Just in case you're wondering, 80MPH isn't fast enough in a 70MPH zone, when the road is wide open and ten cars are stacked up behind you, all itching to pass while you amble along at a speed slightly greater than that of the endless procession of 18-wheelers to your right. Yes, it's 10MPH over the speed limit, but when everyone else would gladly drive 85 or 90, and we're out in the middle of nowhere and everyone's got 300 miles yet to drive that day, you need to get out of the way. No, it doesn't matter that you think it's fast enough. No one cares about your opinion, or they'd be reading your blog. They just want you to accelerate (try the pedal on the right), or change lanes. Both would be okay too, if you wanted a third option.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Going Alone Home
Sunday afternoon and yes, the blog entries have been pretty sparse. I've hardly been on the computer at all, which is pretty much the same story as last time I was down here. I figure I'm online all the time at home, and when I'm in San Diego, I outta do other things, like spend time with my parents who I hardly ever see. Apparently they love me, or something.
Love or not, I'm leaving them tomorrow and driving home Monday afternoon. The drive was about 7.5 hours on the way down, so assuming it's the same on the way back I'll arrive around dark o'clock. I'm eager to spend some time online on a decent computer where I can enjoy surfing, and I'm eager to try and get more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep in a given night, but once those things are out of the way, I'm going to really nose to the grindstone on my novel. I've not been writing or editing any here, but I have been thinking about my novel a lot, and I'm eager to get back to work on it. I was editing very well the last couple of days before this trip, and with Malaya gone on business until next weekend, I've got no excuses or distractions to keep me from dialing in. I've even got some fun reward time distraction, in the form of
The Historian, the new book
I've been sorta coveting for some weeks.
I got dad to CostCo this morning and there it was, in a huge stack on the aisle endcap. $14.72 = destiny! Since I'd done like 10 hours of work in his yard over the past few days, I figured he owed it to me. And no, the fact that he's giving me his old car for very cheap doesn't factor into this equation. Not at all. Nope.
At any rate, blogging should resume on a more regular schedule beginning Tuesday. Hope you enjoyed your weekend. Assuming they have that sort of thing in your country.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Vacation Reading!
I brought two books along with me to San Diego. I'll be reviewing one of them in a few days (
A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver, which is easily the worst of
the six novels of his that I have thus far read), assuming I finish it and have time/interest in reviewing it when I get back home. I'm only about 50 pages from the end now, but it's not very exciting and when the requisite big plot twist finally came, it was something I'd seen coming 300 pages in advance. I'll probably finish it anyway, just to see how the good guys end up triumphing against all the odds, like they do in every Jeffrey Deaver novel.
The other book was a hardcover we got free at the last library giveaway, and that Malaya tried to read a few weeks ago and gave up on after skimming 50 pages. I lasted far less than that, and quit after 25, though it left me with enough questions and curiosities that I had to blog about it. The book is
The Homing, by John Saul.
I've written about him in the past, in
fairly non-complimentary fashion, but that was mostly out of surprise. I'd heard of him forever as a popular horror writer and I like horror (in theory more than in practice, as I read more and more from really awful horror writers), so it was just sort of chance that I'd never read any of his work. So when I found myself killing some time in a used bookstore, and saw a stack of his paperbacks on the shelf, I picked one off at random and made it through the introduction, but only just, and with my mouth hanging open at the hackitude of it.
When I blogged about that experience I hunted up some more of his work online and found it equally-astonishing, and not in a good way. So it was with that in mind that picked up The Homing at the library giveaway, largely out of curiosity. It couldn't be as bad as the other one was, could it? I didn't think he could possibly be a good writer, but maybe his characters and the action would be good enough to interest me? That happens with lots of the fiction I read, actually. Not with this one though, and while I can't review it, not after making it through less than one sixteenth of it, but I can't help but speculate about it.
Just so we're clear, I thought it was dreadful. Largely due to the prose, which was wretched and very lazy, but also for the characters, who were straight cookie cutters that would fit into any and every low budget horror movie you've ever seen. It was the writing that really put me off though, since I'm always scanning and analyzing the writing in books I read, being as I'm supposedly a writer myself. I'm sure there's an author out there who is even lazier than Saul about using cliche phrases and boring metaphors and such, but if so... I've never read his/her work.
I suppose it annoys me since it's lazy, and lame, and since I constantly spend brain cycles while doing my own writing (fiction, not so much blog) trying to think up more interesting and creative ways to say things. And when I start reading a best-seller by millionaire author John Saul, and within the first eighteen pages he's got one sixteen year old girl exploding as she "releases pent up resentment" and another whose "smoldering anger flares up," I can't help grinding my teeth. (Yes, that's a cliche I'd flag from another author. Never said I wasn't a hypocrite, did I?)
In my world, when the phrases you use to convey emotion and situations in your novel are the first phrases any ten year old would pick to describe those situations and emotions, it's a bad thing. (With the possible exception of when you're writing dialogue for a ten year old character.) This is just one example of the many and many I could make, by the way.
Just as bad, and probably worse to most other readers, are the characters. Boring! Cliche! Predictable! Melodramatic! They almost move beyond being stereotypes and become actual archetypes, which you could forgive if they did something interesting.
The book prologue features a 16 y/o girl who has been left home alone by her hard working waitress mother, with her mom's new lazy, drunken, jobless boyfriend, who has of course been giving the jail bait daughter lecherous looks, none of which mom sees, and mom doesn't believe the daughter when she tells her, because the boyfriend has a certain animal cunning about him. Inevitably, the girl walks into the kitchen one morning while mom is already at work and finds the boyfriend already drunk. He of course immediately tries to rape her, and is repulsive with his coarse facial hair, smelly body, ugly face, hacking cough, ungainly motion, etc, etc. I laughed out loud though, when Saul had him drooling. Actually, physically drooling. Like a bulldog, or perhaps a troll. I didn't want to quote, but I just have to:
Sensing her fear, Elvis Janks rose from the table and lurched toward her, his lips twisting into a mocking sneer. "Come on, baby," he rasped, a rivulet of saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. "You know you want it as bad as I wanta give it to you." An ugly cackle bubbled up from the thick phlegm in his throat. "You want to do it right here, or go to into your mama's bedroom?"
Wow, subtle characterization there, huh? And yes, the boyfriend is named "Elvis Janks." Words fail me.
After this auspicious beginning (the prologue is printed in italics, and runs nine pages) we get the amazingly-inventive premise of... city folks moving to the country to live on a big farm with a creepy old man caretaker (grandfather, in this case, but same difference...). The mom is going to marry a small town guy she hardly knows, her teenaged daughter hates to leave the big city and hates the country, her younger daughter is excited about the horses, but through it all, mom keeps wondering if maybe they shouldn't be there, and if maybe they don't belong there, and if maybe she should honor the bad feelings she keeps having about all of this. Gee, I wonder?
My question about this is why Saul and other hack genre writers write like this. I suppose they might actually just be really weak writers who need all of these crutches, but to me it reads like they're lazy and just don't care, or don't see any point in working hard to make their work better. After all, lots of readers don't want the genre tweaked. They want their heroes, their villains, their innocent bystanders, and so on. Romance readers, for example, want their stereotypes and their happy endings. They want the female lead to be beautiful and in grave peril, they want her jealous rival to be bitchy and hateful, they want the heroic man to be handsome, brave, and flawed in some way that only the heroine can cure, making him a better man before they live happily ever after, and so on. Romance fiction novels have various permutations and patterns, but the readers want certain things in them, and even though they know what they'll be getting, that's okay.
I've read and enjoyed plenty of cheesy horror and fantasy, stuff that was very derivative and mediocre, but that satisfied some basic need in me.
As for my question though, could Saul do better, and does he realize how cheesy and mediocre and cliche his writing is, and just not care? Or does he think that's what the fans want and he's by-god going to churn it out, even though he knows it’s essentially crap? After all, if it sells and lots of people enjoy reading it, what's the harm? Those of us with more refined tastes can read other authors, right? And it's not like Saul started out writing brilliant, genre-shattering fiction and regressed to hackitude when his good stuff didn't sell,
Misery-style. At least I don't think so, but I'm hardly a John Saul expert.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Forget them nots...
I'm pretty good about not forgetting things (except for my pillow) when I fly somewhere, perhaps because I know I can't just come back home and get it later. So I think things out in advance and make a list and such. I didn't really do that before this trip, perhaps subliminally-influenced by the fact that I was driving. After all, if I was in a car how long a trip could it be? (About 7.5 hours, as it turned out.)
As a result of that, or just the continual mental deterioration I am suffering due to my increasing age, I forgot three things:
1) The pink slip to my car, I.E. the title document that I need to transfer ownership to my mom. I doubt a cop is going to pull her over and impound her car because her name doesn't match that on the DMV registration, but I should have brought it. This is the least important of the three, because I realized it quickly and had Malaya mail it Thursday, and with any luck it will arrive Saturday, or else Monday. If I'd actually read about it first I would have just left it up north, since both the buyer and seller need to sign it before the DMV will act upon it. And it might not get here until after I leave to drive back home. In which case mom might need to mail it back up there, so I can sign it, and then mail it back to her. Bleh.
2) Ethernet cable. Since I bought a 50 foot length of it when I was here just a month ago (and took it back home with me), you'd think I might have remembered that I needed it to get this laptop online from my bedroom. This isn't that big an inconvenience, since I've had time to get on the computer for about 2 hours out of the first 2 days I've been here, but it would still be nice to have. As it is I'm typing this entry on the laptop in my room, and once I'm done I'm going to carry the laptop into dad's office, unplug his computer from the router, plug the laptop in, and update the blog that way.
3) Cell phone cord. This is the only one that's more than annoying, since I have no way to recharge my cell phone, which is causing me to leave it off most of the time to make it last the 4 days. It's really sad because I usually bring the wall plug with me, but I intentionally didn't bring it this time since it's a pain to dig out of the power strip behind my computer, and I knew I wouldn't need it since I was driving and could just use the never-used one in my car. Except that in preparation for giving the car to mom, I cleaned it out completely, and took out everything but the manual and registration, and left them in a bag in the condo. Including the car cell phone charger that I never use. Well, I've still never used it!
In a just world, I would have someone to blame for these oversights. No wonder celebrities have personal assistants. Once you've got one of those you no longer have to remember anything, and when something does get forgotten, it's not your fault. Being at fault makes Flux unhappy.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Switching to a fresher horse...
I'm off to San Diego tomorrow morning, driving the whole 600ish miles in the last ride every for my Saturn. At least the last ride with me at the wheel. As I reported some weeks ago, my dad had back surgery, and found the seats in his sports car uncomfortable afterwards. He'd been thinking about getting a new car anyway (one is allowed to do that sort of thing when one has money, I'm told), and did so, last week. His previous car was a 2001 Toyota Celica GT-S, a very sporty little number with
superb handling and acceleration, and since I greatly enjoyed driving it while I was in San Diego during his surgery in June, he's kindly
giving selling it to me. Cheap.
Adding to the complications, my mom and stepdad have a car and a camper van, but since the car is old and has a ton of miles on it, and the camper van gets awful mileage and is mostly used for camping and long trips, they were quite interested in taking my 1997 Saturn off my hands when I offered to give it to them. Props to Malaya for thinking of the idea in the first place, since I probably wouldn't have.
So I'm driving south to San Diego in my old car, handing it off to my mom once I get there, staying several days, and then driving back up here in my dad's old car, which is going to be my new car. Not a bad exchange, even if it takes me 4 days and 1200 miles to make it.
I did consider selling his car (blue book for his model and mileage in excellent condition is around $14k) and buying something new and cheap, but decided not to. Dad's car only has 50k miles, and it's been maintained very well, but it needs high grade gas and the tires cost $170 each, and it goes through them pretty quickly with the sport suspension. So it's going to cost more to maintain, and my insurance will go up, but when I weighed that against the great joy driving it would bring me, the decision was easy. Also factored in was the largely-baseless and probably delusional self confidence that I'll sell a book in the next couple of years and therefore have the money to buy something new before dad's car gets up there in mileage and starts to break down, post-warranty.
I'll be in San Diego by tomorrow evening, highway patrol permitting, and will likely blog on a semi-regular basis while I'm there. (I might even have some time to write and get on the computer in the day... dad's yard can't have bounced back to its natural jungle-like state already, can it?) I return Monday, or at least that's the current plan, and you more than likely wouldn't have noticed any real difference in the blog if I hadn't told you all of this in advance.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Independence Day Thoughts
I'm two days late with this, but here are two ID-related thoughts. Quickly now, pending potential future elaboration.
1) What would the 4th of July US Independence Day celebrations be like if it were a different date? Say October 8th, or February 25th? Current traditions are for fireworks, BBQs, trips to the beach, and other summer-time fun. But if they'd signed the Declaration of Independence in January, that would be very different. I suppose we could still have fireworks, but how much fun would those be if you lived in a cold northern state and there was seven feet of snow on the ground, or temperatures to kill you in ten minutes without a parka on? If I.D. occured during the winter, would it now be commemorated like Washington/Lincoln's B-days, which are now conglomerated into a single "Presidents' Day Weekend" in February, and largely celebrated by appliance sales?
2) Which nation is responsible for the most Independence Days around the world? The US has England to thank for ours, but which Colonial Power held the most territories that eventually gained independence? France? England? Didn't the Netherlands (Dutch) once hold like half of Africa? Didn't Spain dominate damn near all of Central and South America?
I suppose the definition of "independence" is open to debate here too. Canada and NZ and Oz and Jamaica (and others) were all like the US and founded/ruled by England, but as far as I know, only the US had a successful armed rebellion; the others are still part of the Commonwealth, or at least never fought for their independence. They have Canada Day in Canada, but are we counting that as an Independence Day, or just a sort of national pride day? Also, how long does a country have to occupy another for an independence to count? Does all of Western Europe get one from Germany, dating back to the few years of WWII Nazi domination?
I'm just musing, but if you're more knowledgable about world history than I you might want to throw in your shiny copper pennies.
Random News Bits
Two news items that caught my eye, for different reasons. First off we've got this convicted sex crime murderer being released in Canada. She's got the whole country in an uproar, and has created much talk about vigilanties and justice. Read some of the articles if you want more details, but basically she and her husband raped, tortured, and murdered several women back in the 80s, she pled guilty and testified against him and said she was controlled and terrified of him, and then during the trial video tapes were found that showed she was an active and willing participant, and that she'd actually drugged her own sister so her boyfriend could rape her. (Worse yet, the sister died while drugged from choking on her own vomit.) Prosecutors couldn't give her life though, since she'd already made a deal, and now she's out and about the least popular thing in Canada since the NHL strike.
Here's the headline of the day, with a title that amused me:
Karla Homolka says she's not dangerous and doesn't want to be hunted down
MONTREAL (CP) - Convicted killer Karla Homolka had only just slipped out of her "prison of stone" Monday when she appeared on TV to profess penitence for her unspeakable past and to assure Canadians she's not the monster she's been made out to be.
Are they trying to get people to hunt her down or what? I mean really, who posts a headline like that? It's like hanging a "no spitting" sign somewhere... you know it'll just give people ideas.
Elsewhere, I thought this article had some pretty stupid comments by a pretty smart person:
Not All Kids With High BMIs Are Too Fat
Leading groups of family doctors and pediatricians endorse routine screening using the height-weight ratio of the body-mass index. But there's no evidence that all children with high BMIs need to lose weight to be healthy — and there's no evidence that pediatricians' weight counseling results in weight loss and better health, according to a report from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a non-governmental panel of researchers.
The report comes amid growing concern over how to stem the nation's rising obesity. Some 15 percent of U.S. schoolchildren are estimated to be obese, and 30 percent are believed to be overweight.
BMI can be fairly effective at identifying children who likely have weight problems, said task force member Dr. Virginia Moyer. But it can't determine if body mass is mostly fat or lean tissue, and not all children with high BMIs need to lose weight, said Moyer, a pediatrics professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
She recommended doctors investigate rapid increases in weight that are not accompanied by increases in height. "The weak link is we don't know what to do about it," she said in a telephone interview.
Okay, obviously not every single kid alive is necessarily obese, just because they've got a high BMI rating. But let's be realistic; how many children are blowing the scale due to their muscle mass, rather than because they're little fatties? One percent? Three percent? So prompted by that tiny minority, kids who anyone with any sense could see aren't fat, we get huge headlines that will provide psychological aid and comfort to the 50% of parents who are growing their own
xiao pangzi, and tell themselves, like Cartman's mom, that "he's just big-boned."
Monday, July 04, 2005
The Difference Between US and Canada?
While my home page is usually
the US version of Yahoo news, I occasionally click the links to view the Yahoo main pages from other countries. My survey is of limited use, since I speak neither German nor Italian nor Spanish nor French, but I can see the pictues and deciper some amount of the headlines, and I like to see the differences between what stories lead the news around the world, and how issues are covered from different vantage points. I've seen some differences in the past, but I don't recall ever seeing one quite like this before.
One of the main news items on the day in the US is an article about the increasing weight of the US population in general, and how it is impacting the US military. Lots of men and women are now too fat to be join up, while others are being kicked out when they can't maintain themselves in fighting condition. Not exactly earth-shaking news, but check out how they are presented in the US, and then in Canada.
Here's headline and lead paragraph for the US verison:
Military Concerned About Troops' Weight
AP - Sun Jul 3,10:32 PM ET
Sent 290 times
WATERTOWN, Wis. - With America at war and in need of a few good men, Jon Schoenherr expected a warm reception when he walked into an Army recruiting office in this Midwestern farm community, intending to enlist. But a sergeant gave the 17-year-old some surprising news.
Now here's the Canadian version of the same article:
GI fatsos too tubby to fight?
Canadian Press - Sun Jul 3, 9:03 PM ET
WATERTOWN, Wis. (AP) - Besides terrorists, germ warfare and nuclear weapons, U.S. military officers increasingly worry about a different kind of threat - troops too fat to fight.
Bit of a change in the headline, I think.
If you're wondering, the text in the two articles is virtually identical. They differ slightly in the first few paragraphs, but other than that most of the sentences are identical; just reordered a bit. So who slapped that headline on the Canadian version, and will they get complaints and be in trouble? Or is that sort of irreverance acceptable in Canada? It would probably get you sacked in the US, where news is expected to be dry and humorless, for some reason.
Things of the Day, Independence Day Edition.
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
--James Baldwin
Soul-Devouring Worry:Potential CHP interactions.
Answer of the Day:Because old things can be made pretty again.
Curse of the Day:May her backwards throwing night time aim fail to improve.
Books Lying Open:A Maiden's Grave, by Jeffrey Deaver
A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Fantastic Four, July 8th
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, July 15th
The Island, July 22th (maybe)
The Brothers Grimm, July 29th (maybe)
Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, now playing (Waiting for DVD?)
War of the WorldsBatman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
From the page to the screen...
In
my original review of Jeffrey Deaver's pretty good novel,
The Bone Collector, I talked about the book and wondered about the movie. I'd never seen the film at the time, and knew no more than what I'd read in some online reviews (Not good ones either;
it's at 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.) I'd also talked to Malaya about it, but since she hardly remembered her partial viewing of the film, so she couldn't answer many of my questions either. Imprecisely-informed as I was, I wondered how well the brilliant CSI-style crime scene analysis carried over into the movie, how they portrayed quadriplegic genius Lincoln Rhyme, how scary the lunatic killer was, and so on.
Happily, we tripped over
The Bone Collector on commercial TV a couple of weeks ago, and sat through the last hour of it mostly out of curiosity. That's "happily" in terms of following up on my initial review questions; not so happily in terms of entertainment value.
Basically, it's a pretty boring movie. I didn't see enough of it to add a film review, but there if I had there would be a lot of 4s and 5s involved. It plays like a mediocre episode of CSI, with most of the teamwork and virtually all of the crime scene detection that made the book work removed. Replacing the brilliant analysis and detective work from the books was a lot of shouting and watered down gore, along with a much-increased role for the annoying bureaucrat cop who does nothing but get in the way and shout a lot. They also ripped out all of the interesting character quirks; gone is Amelia's self-doubt, initial squeamishness and anger, and rheumatoid arthritis, and they turned Lincoln into a crippled saint without any harsh edges. He's really quite a prick in the books; prickly, grouchy, suicidal, cutting, arrogant, etc, and that makes him far more interesting than the very nice paralyzed guy Denzel Washington plays in the film.
While reading the book I'd often wondered how well it would work visually, since after all, one of the main characters is a quadriplegic who can only talk, move one finger, and shrug his shoulders. The answer? It doesn't work at all. Denzel Washington wasn't awful in the role, and I assume the boring character changes were in the script and not his fault, but he was just not the one for this role. He didn't look paralyzed, just very lazy, and more importantly, his face wasn't good for the part.
Much of the book is about Lincoln thinking and coming up with some brilliant deduction (which are usually unrealistic and always come just in time to save Amelia from some lurking murderer, but that's beside the point), and while that works in print with his internal monologue on the page, it did not work in the film. There were numerous long shots of Denzel sitting and looking off into space, but without a voice over narration or an actor with a more craggy and introspective face, it was pointless. I don't know who could have made the role work, but it definitely wasn't Denzel; there's not enough character to his largely wrinkle-free visage, and he had no trace of inner depths, whether rage or anger or curiosity. He was very bland, and while I think that was at least partially-intentional; that he was trying to underact so any slight change seemed dramatic, it made for a pretty damn boring movie.
So no on
The Bone Collector film. Read the book though, if you enjoy
Silence of the Lambs and/or
CSI on TV. It's not a masterpiece, but it's enjoyable enough, and your library is a good bet to have a copy in stock.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Movie Review: War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds was directed by Steven Spielberg, starred Tom Cruise, and featured lots of special effects. And make no mistake about it, the special effects and explosions are the real stars. Cruise chews up the scenery, Spielberg's requisite adorable moppet with big eyes and messy hair does the requisite big, teary-eyed, lower lip quivering in terror look a lot, and the other people act more or less how you'd like them to act. But Spielberg's no M. Night Shyamalan (for better and for worse), and
War of the Worlds is no
Signs;
WotW would not hold up without the destruction porn and explosions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since I found Signs
ultimately very disappointing, but if you're going to
WotW for the acting and human elements, you might want to stay home. Or at least wait for the DVD.
To the scores:
War of the Worlds, 2005
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 9
Humor: 4
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 5
Must See On The Bigscreen: 9
Replayability: 3
Overall: 5.5
This movie had some of the biggest swings between scoring extremes of any film I've ever reviewed. Furthermore, while I didn't like the overall result that well, I think Spielberg made just the movie he wanted to make, and I can't really say how I'd improve it without turning it into a completely different film.
Spielberg's intention was clearly to make an action movie with a human core, and while that's the case with almost every action film, in this case Spielberg went further in that direction than most.
WotW is basically
Jurassic Park with alien robots instead of dinosaurs, and once again we've got a man who's not a good father, yet is thrown into the protector role with two children depending on him for survival. I found the whiny kids (especially the girl) the most annoying thing in
Jurassic Park, and while the kids aren't as whiny in
WotW, the biggest change is the scope of the action. These gigantic Martian (or wherever) robots are stomping across the entire world and lasering millions or billions of people, and yet 90% of the film is character stuff about Cruise and his kids. Spielberg's intention was clearly to show this world invasion through the eyes of one family, and he did, but I was much more interested in seeing how things were going on the larger scale, and I didn't much care about Cruise and his kids. After all, they're just three people, and whether they live or die makes no difference in the larger scheme of things. Why should I care so much about them when the whole rest of the world is dying too?
If you get really involved with individual struggles and want to root for one family, then you'll probably enjoy the film a lot more than me. I was much more curious about the wider aspect of things, and would have enjoyed the film far more if it had still had the long stretches of Cruise and kids driving, or bickering, or hiding in a basement, while also throwing in some scenes of the worldwide alien resistance effort, maps of the world as it was being conquered, some political leaders doing what they could, scientists talking about the events, etc. I guess that would have turned it into every other disaster movie;
The Day After Tomorrow with robots, but much to my surprise,
I liked that movie better than
WotW.
I suppose that
WotW was a much more realistic film in terms of "what it would be like" for a family to live through something like this. They were scared and confused and clueless almost the entire time, they had an almost complete lack of knowledge about what was actually happening, and they had no real thought other than to get away or survive. Cruise's kid wanted to fight back, but that desire was just as clueless and confused as everything else in the film, since he had no weapons and no strategy beyond teeth-baring teenage defiance.
Some more comments on the scores.
Script/Story: 4There wasn't anything really awful about the writing or the story; the script wasn't a George Lucas-esque dialogue disaster or anything. And it actually moved along pretty well and made sense. It just wasn't ever really any good. I don't remember a single line in the film that made me laugh or cheer, and since I never really cared about any of the leads, I guess I've got to blame the story for that.
Acting/Casting: 5No one was awful, and they all did pretty much what I expected them to do. I did wonder why Spielberg put Cruise in this one, since, if the
early reports are true, Cruise got something like 10% of the film's gross. He wasn't bad, and was pretty good in a few scenes, but really, any adult male actor could have played the roll, and one with more gravitas and less pretty boy would probably have been better, while costing several hundred million dollars less.
The role worked for Cruise because the guy he's playing is sort of a cocky, grown up man-child. He lives like a teenager, he doesn't take responsibility at his job or in his personal life, and while his survival skills are more honed than those of most of the suburban sheep around him, he's far from a warrior or survivalist. So it's basically the Tom Cruise character, tempered by dependent children and honed by a tragedy that forces him to grow up. He handled that transition pretty well as an actor, and he seems more of an adult at the end than at the beginning, but really, it was nothing any half decent actor couldn't have done. And I can't believe the box office boost his name puts on a film (especially after his very public early-2005 mental breakdown) was worth what they were paying him; not with this sort of summer disaster pic film, and Spielberg's name on it as the director.
Action: 9Clearly the film's strong suit. There's actually not that much of it, with so much character stuff (mostly hiding and having earnest conversations while hiding), and lots of the action was completely silly and illogical and improbable (more on that below, in the spoilers section), but damn was it fun to watch and pretty on the eyes. In fact, the relative scarcity of the action probably improved it. With twenty minute lulls between terrifying shots of the alien tripods wreaking havoc, it was more of a jolt when the craziness began again.
Humor: 4Not really a score worth paying any attention to. The film was largely humorless, but you probably weren't expecting a lot of laughs anyway. It's definitely grimmer than usual for Spielberg though, and Cruise's character had none of Indiana Jones' sneer or swagger or wisecracks. Those would have helped lighten the mood, but I don't think Spielberg wanted it lightened. This movie is much more
Shindler's List than
Indiana Jones, in tone.
Horror: 4It wasn't trying to be a horror movie any more than a comedy, but while the comedy score was based on the lack of laughs, this one could have been higher. There was a lot of stuff that could have been scary, but it wasn't directed to be that way. Almost all of the humans who die are puffed instantly into smoke, and when people run they're just trying to get away from things almost as if a force of nature were pursuing them. It's not personal with the aliens; they're just here to kill us all (apparently; there's nothing ever said of their actual motives) and take over our world, which is why it's not scary.
WotW is the difference between running from a fire that burns at random, and running from an axe murderer who wants you personally.
Eye Candy: 8A score given entirely for the robot destruction and such. The special effects are glorious, and some of the sets of destroyed houses, a plane crash, etc were glorious. Overall though, it's a pretty ugly picture, set largely in the cement hell of New Jersey, or the cold, rainy, miserable autumnal woods of the East Coast. I thought the prettiest landscape, scenery, or long shot in the entire film was near the end, when the Martian red fungus vine stuff was growing and taking over the world, and they showed Cruise looking down a long hill and all the way to the horizon the ground was red-tinged and covered in creeping stuff.
Fun Factor: 5It's a grim and gloomy downer of a picture, filled with struggle and suffering and the boredom of waiting for likely death. The action pieces made it worth watching and were quite glorious in of themselves, but even when the aliens start losing some of the fights it's never a cheer-along-in-triumph sort of picture.
Replayability: 3It's purely useful as action porn. If I had this on DVD right now I'd re-watch the entire film in maybe 15 or 20 minutes, as I skimmed from robot battle to robot battle, but I'd skip all the rest. All the rest.
Must See On The Bigscreen: 9This is the highest score I've ever given in this category, since in my opinion the film really isn't worth watching except for the action and destruction stuff. And since that stuff looks far better on the huge movie screen...
Overall: 5.5Eh. I guess I'm glad I saw it, and I wasn't bored or miserable during it, but I would be very bored during a second viewing. It hardly had any suspense the first time through. The performances aren't bad, but the overall plot just isn't very compelling. Will asshole dad and his two kids survive? Who really cares, when the entire world is burning and they're not special or powerful people anyway?
Spoilers:As I often say, I don't have an "physical impossibilities" rating, but if I did this film would come in pretty high on it. It's not just physical stuff though, I mean the physics weren't so bad in this film, just the logic, especially the logic of the aliens. What did they want? Apparently to take over the world and kill off all of the humans, but if that was their goal why did they go about it so haphazardly? Do they want the buildings gone, or just the people? Why didn't they use some sort of poison gas to kill us all off instantly? Why attack such random locations; cities and countryside and such, rather than going for military bases or concentrating on major cities, where the population density is much greater?
The complete lack of focus by the aliens fits pretty well with the rest of the film, and in fact it sort of compliments the "run like an animal" strategy that most people were reduced to. Perhaps there was a brilliant over-arching plan by the invaders, but if so it wasn't one we could see from the ground level at which the film was presented. I never got much of a hint of one, and that's where multiple viewpoints would have come in handy, since if we'd had scenes with military guys talking about the aliens' attack strategy, and then cut to an individual attack while Cruise ran for his life, it would have made more sense and seemed part of a whole, rather than just one random scene after another.
I could fill a page with additional questions about the aliens. For example, why are they using tripod walkers, when their legs are inherently unstable (why not 4 or 5 or 10 legs, if they're going to use feet and not hovercraft, or wheels, or tank treads, or whatever)? Why do the humans never attack their feet, or try to trip the robots, or blow up the ground in front of them, or try EMP attacks at them? Or have foot soldiers run under them and blow up inside their shields? Roadside bombs like they're using to such effect in Iraq? Why don't the aliens use their EMP attacks again, to disable the human machines as they did during their first landing? Isn't it a colossal waste of energy to fire out those giant plasma bolts and just hit one or two people with each one? Why isn't their mothership(s?) providing more support, after launching all of those little pilot pods down into the ground?
The biggest question of all, of course, is why the aliens sent their invading guys down without survival suits, or safe food and water. Perhaps back in the 1930s, when the original story was written, it seemed reasonable that some invaders with more advanced technology would come along and attack us before being undone by their lack of immunity to earth viruses. Now however, knowing as much as we do about disease and bacteria, it's just absurd. The aliens stashed hundreds of impractical robots beneath the surface of the earth thousands of years ago, but they didn't take any water or air samples? They didn't send down a small crew first to see if they lived before beginning their whole invasion? It's just so incredibly dumb of them. Imagine if Neil Armstrong had leapt out of the lunar lander in shorts and sandals?
I've heard conflicting reports on the potential for a sequel or two, but if they did one, it might actually be a far more interesting movie. I'd dump Tom Cruise from it, first thing. There has to be an alien mothership or ten floating around up there, and there have to be lots more alien craft underground. Was this just phase one of their offensive, with the really big weapons to come next? Will they learn from their mistakes and not drink leaking sewer water and breathe dirty air next time? Will humans get ahold of their disabled tripods and modify their weapons to use against them? If so, a sequel could really be a great film, building on the overly-personal and small scale introductary film. Not that I'm holding my breath, mind you.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Is This Ever Not On? Part 2
While I was just channel-surfing a bit and eating a sandwich and trying to get some energy back after the gym and before some one-on-one Kali with Malaya, I had to laugh at the "Is this ever not on?" moment.
Check this post if you've forgotten the scenario, but of the three or four channels that we often view, Spike was showing
Silence of the Lambs and FX had
Commando on. A movie was just starting on TNT too, and it's a good thing I don't bet, since I would have laid even money that
Godfather or
Pulp Fiction was about to begin.
They found something new and unpopular instead though, and ran with the Mel Gibson war movie,
When We Were Soldiers, a film Malaya denied all knowledge of. I'd heard of it, but only remembered it when they showed Vietnam-type footage and Mel Gibson in a chopper. Adding to the confusion, USA (I think) had just been showing
Air America a few minutes earlier, another film staring Mel Gibson and Vietnam and helicopters, which I probably would have guessed for the second Mel film, except that even I didn't think competing networks would show the same movie at overlapping times.
Vampire book news
The Historian is a new novel that's getting a
ton of publicity, largely due to the bidding war that resulted in an unheard of $2m bonus, for the first-time author, Elizabeth Kostova. I'd read a few articles about it, and the last EW magazine had a review (they gave it a B, as I recall) and when we were killing some time yesterday at CostCo while my car got new tires installed (at the Discount Tire down the block, since they were much cheaper than CostCo) I read the first few chapters.
The novel, as every review/article says, is about a modern day search for Dracula. I thought the reviews were sort of spoilery, but having read the start of the novel I now understand. You get the entire set up and premise in the first 20 pages; it's not one of those books where the scenario slowly unfolds over hundreds of pages and shocks you when you finally realize what it's about.
So yes, it's about Dracula. The historical figure Vlad the Impaler, but also apparently a vampire, one who survives to this day, protected by some sort of conspiracy in his Eastern European homeland. The book's protagonist is a woman in her 50s who apparently hunts for his tomb by unraveling mysteries hidden in ancient artwork, researching old maps, hunting through ancient texts in libraries, etc. It's been called "The DaVinci Code for smart people," if that gives you any idea about things.
I can't comment on any of that, just based on the 30 or so pages I read, but it had a very interesting beginning, was well-written, and I wanted to read more. Not enough to buy it right then and there at CostCo, but only because I'm poor, and I can wait for it at the local library. In fact, I'm going to pop over there and get on the list for it this very day. I'll write more about it if/when I get to read it. There's a short excerpt viewable on the Amazon.com page, if you want a taste of it. Or you can just browse in the bookstore, as I did. I can't really recommend it having not read more than a few chapters, but I enjoyed that much and wanted more, so check it out if you get a chance.
Not the smartest criminal ever
I realize that most child molesting-mass murderers aren't exactly known for their smarts or impulse control, but really... dining in a Denny's, at 2am, with the girl you kidnapped after murdering her entire family less than two months before, in the same town, where there are missing person pictures of her on every telephone pole?
Not too bright.
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - More than six weeks after she disappeared from a home where family members were bludgeoned to death, an 8-year-old girl was found safe Saturday, sharing a meal with a registered sex offender at a Denny's restaurant in her hometown.
Shasta was spotted by a waitress early Saturday just miles from the home where her mother, older brother and mother's boyfriend were discovered bound and bludgeoned to death on May 16.
Amber Deahn, 24, said she thought she recognized the girl eating onion rings, cheese sticks and chicken strips with an older man. Shasta's picture has been posted around town and shown in the media.
"It clicked in my brain that she looks familiar," she said. Deahn tried to keep the pair at the restaurant longer by giving the girl crayons, coloring paper and a mask from the movie Madagascar, and offering the girl dessert. "I was trying to figure out a way to keep them there so the officers would have time to get there," she said.
Knowing Denny's, my first thought was to wonder if her manager will make her pay for the slice of pie she gave the girl to slow her departure.
All is not happy in the case though, since aside from her dead mother, older brother, and mom's boyfriend, the girls' young brother was kidnapped as well, and since the kidnapper has a past history of molesting young boys... well, let's just assume he's dead, which is apparently what the kidnapper told the cops. Sometimes it's best not to let your imagination run free.
I wonder what was going on with the girl though. For all we know the guy only has his twisted fetish for young boys, and has always wanted a cute little daughter. So he took one. He might have been a perfect surrogate father to her, aside from being a bit too lax about diet and bedtime. I'm not suggesting that it's likely, but quite often serial killers completely compartmentalize their lives, and have a wife and children who love them and can't believe that daddy/hubby has been out butchering whores on the nights he said he had to work late.
I also wonder when the penalties for child molestation are going to be vastly increased, given the saturation media coverage these types of cases get, and the way they make white people feel threatened. We've got prisons overflowing with people driven there by various easily-treatable drug addictions, (especially for stealing/robbing to get money to feed their addiction) and yet this guy is left to roam free, virtually unmonitored?
Duncan was convicted in 1980 of raping a 14-year-old boy in Washington state when he was 16.
Last July, he was accused of molesting a 6-year-old boy at a school playground in Minnesota. He had been released by Becker County, Minn., authorities in April on $15,000 bond and ordered to stay in touch with a probation agent. In May, authorities said they were seeking Duncan on a warrant after he failed to do so.
I'm sure that a mandatory 20 year prison sentence for any child molestation conviction would be met with an outcry from some quarters, but that's the problem with being a pedophile; a few bad apples ruin it for everyone.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Things of the Day: Friday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
--John Morley (Rousseau)
Soul-Devouring Worry:The inexorable deterioration of vulcanized rubber.
Answer of the Day:Because everyone loves a road trip.
Curse of the Day:May the weather disappoint.
Books Lying Open:A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Fantastic Four, July 8th
Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, now playing (Waiting for DVD?)
War of the Worlds, (Review to come.)
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
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