Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Kali Staff Seminar
Since I seem to be in a blogging mood, and not in a fiction mood, and since I'm trying not to surf or play any games while Malaya is toiling away on a work project at her desk to my immediate right, I might as well talk about the weekend staff seminar while the metaphorical iron is hot. Hey, (one of)
you asked for it.
Staff in Kali (As always, when I say "Kali" I mean the particular type of the martial art modified and invented by the Master of our school, so there may not be many/any similarities to other forms of Kali around the world.) is quite different from staff in most other martial arts. We use long staves, 6-7 feet (+/-2 meters), ideally of bamboo, since they're not much thicker than broomsticks, but are strong and durable. (A dowel or curtain rod or the like you get from a hardware store will break or shatter if you hit it hard.)
In form, our staff is actually pretty similar to spear, with a lot of stabbing and poking, and very, very fine control required to do it properly. Needless to say, no one at the seminar other than our Tuhan and Gura was good enough with a staff to use it in full speed sparring. The rest of us did some sparring, of course, but only in controlled fashion, after we'd worked on basic forms and techniques and such for a couple of hours. It was a blast too, with the person attacking taking big long swings, and the other person countering that with a sweep, then landing a few hits of their own, as the first person stepped through, then turned and launched another attack.
In our practice we were doing all large swings, but you'd hardly do any of those in a fight, since they're just too slow and too big. No matter how hard you swing, if the arc of your swing is as wide as if you were swinging a dead cat overhead by the tail, any competent opponent is simply going to duck it, step back from it, or more likely step in, block it, and nail you in the face. Their weapon will be inside yours, after all, and likely pointing pretty much straight at you. A fight between two experts with staff would therefore be much like a fencing match, with lots of stabs, thrusts, and parries. You can block such stabs of course, but it's very, very hard to do so without super reflexes and long reach. You can't move your body to the side as quickly as someone can stab a staff at you, nor can you tell exactly where their stab is aiming quickly enough to dodge appropriately. You can swing a stick to block it, but your reach with the stick isn't anywhere near as long as the staff's.
Staff vs. staff blocking is
easier possible since you can reach your staff out four or five feet, and if you just slightly redirect their stick at that distance, it will move a foot or more to the side by the time it reaches your body, and miss you. And then you can thrust in your return strike while they're defenseless. Reachingg out is the key to blocking most types of jabbing or thrusting attacks, by the way. Starting to redirect them as far from your body as you can. It's why we often leave one hand out after punching, since that hand can then quite easily redirect the opponent's return punch by pushing their arm in one direction or the other. Trying to catch a punch in front of your face is very hard; steering it away by pushing into their forearm is less hard.
As for the most basic staff stuff, it's very much a two-handed weapon. Obviously, I mean you can't control a two meter stick with one hand, (Gandalf's fight double in LotR:RotK aside.) but it's all about the physics of the thing. By pulling the back of the stick in towards your side while pushing the front out with your other hand, you're basically doubling the speed of your attack, since both hands are moving at once. The fulcrum is then the mid-point of the stick between your hands, rather than being at your back hand, if you only moved it by thrusting with the front hand. You've therefore shortened the stick, in effect, since you're only moving the first 3 feet of it, rather than the 4 or 5 feet you would be moving if you'd simply swung with your front hand.
Stabs are two handed also, with the rear hand thrusting and the front hand going to a looser grip and controlling the aim. It's basically like shooting a pool cue, and you let your front hand slide when you swing as well; starting off with a very wide grip, and turning your hips as you swing while sliding your front hand up the staff a foot or two. It can be hard to control the aim like that, but when you do it correctly you can feel how much more speed you've got, and the whistle of the stick through the air is damn satisfying. Currently I find that much easier to do right handed (with the right hand in front) than left handed, but it's just a matter of practice.
And yes, we swing from both sides constantly, switching our grip (in terms of which hand is in front) appropriately. We do a lot of thrusting backhand too, with the same form. With an expert you really can't tell which end of the stick is the front or back, since they're completely ambidexterous and can swing from either side, and with either end at any moment. (That sounded strangely sexual, didn't it?)
The staff is the king of the weapons (well, perhaps the spear is more so, but we're far from the control required to use that) and it just owns sticks, swords, or double sticks in combat. You might survive with a sword if you were very good and the staff guy wasn't, and if you could chop through the staff you'd likely have the fight won, but with other weapons you're just screwed. The staff has too much of a reach advantage, and it's extremely difficult to dodge a fast stab, and since the staff guy can keep poking at you forever, while never giving you an opening to get in on a missed stab (he can back up while pulling the staff back for another stab just as quickly as you can try to advance after dodging one), good luck. Imagine missing a stab to the right of your target. You simply need to pull your arms back and turn to the left a bit for a second stab, and you can do that a lot faster than they can smack your first stab aside and leap forwards within reach of you with their much shorter weapon.
I've gotten good enough with double stick to control a single weapon; I can just hit them in the hand or parry the weapon as soon as they try to swing it from either side, but I was almost helpless against even the mercifully slow thrusts Malaya was using when we tried some staff stuff Sunday evening. Stabs are the hardest things to counter when I'm doing double stick against single stick or broadsword, since the point of the weapon comes out before the hand is within reach, but with those the weapon is slow enough that I can usually slap it aside or down, and then press my advantage from arm's reach. The staff stabs so much faster than a single stick, and has so much more range that it's just terrifying. You just can't reach their hand, much less their body, if they have any idea what they're doing with the weapon.
Double stick, or sword, is very cool against the staff though, since you can win if they play nice and throw wide swings, rather than stabs. The block is very cool too; you form an X from your weapons, catch the staff in them, and force it to the ground to your right or left. You'll then have one stick above and one stick below their staff, and you hold it down with the top one while pulling the bottom one free and swinging it at them. You've got to be quick, of course, and that'll never work against a good staff wielder, (who wouldn't have given you the big wide swing to block in the first place) but it's fun for sparring.
Also great fun was the staff vs. staff sparring we were doing, since once you block the first hit you've got just a world of possibilities. You can swing your stick back and smack them, you can block and stab, you can step in and stab with the butt of your staff, you can sweep their legs with the butt end, you can swing the butt into their head or body, and so on. It's possible to land 3 or 4 hits in like 1 second, since you strike with one end, switch to the other, hit them right and then left with it, stab again, etc.
Hitting twice with the same end quickly was hard, and the staff felt very heavy to try and circle, stop, then swing again. Tuhan could of course do it easily, and he could move the staff faster than you could see and hit you in both shoulders in a blink. It's just physics; you move your hand an inch and the tip of the staff five feet away moves that much further. You move both hands two inches, or just turn your rear hand like you're using a screwdriver, and the tip of the stick moves a foot or more. Plenty to draw back and strike again, and all you did was basically flick your wrist. Doing that with control and speed and power is of course quite another thing, but that's why he's the master, and we're not.
Try it yourself with a broomstick or something, if you're curious. Hold it loosely in your front hand, and just roll your back hand up and out, like you're using a screwdriver. Then hold the staff a foot or so above something you're not worried about breaking (a rock wall wouldn't be a bad idea) and smack it down. First use just your front hand to move it, then try to use both hands, pulling the back one towards your body while the front one moves away. Then try that with the back hand wrist twist thing, and you will be amazed at how hard you can hit from so close to the target. Far, far harder than you could with a normal stick. Malaya and I compared, me hitting a stick she held, and I had to do almost a full power strike with a stick, swinging from the shoulder and using a hip turn, to equal the force of a hit with the staff from about two feet away.
I doubt we'll do staff any time soon in class, mostly since there's not really room indoors for anything other than drills and form practice, but I've been playing around with mine outside every day since the workshop, and I can feel tremendous improvement in my control. I'm still not any good, but just handing the weapon regularly, swinging it from both sides, practicing stabbing at a tree leaf or a spot on the wall, etc, is a great way to gain control and finesse. And with dedication, in ten or twenty years I might approach actual competency! I'll let you know how it turns out.
Weekend after weekend
I suppose that since I don't currently work (other than on writing at home), it could be seen as ironic that I was so damned busy last weekend, and will be even busier this weekend. I blogged
in advance of last weekend, and covered the basics.
Saturday: Kali stick seminar in the morning, bridal shower in the afternoon, dad visiting and dinner that evening.
Sunday: Up early, drove up to Sonoma with dad, did some wine tasting, drove over to Bodega Bay on the coast, drove back with a lot of traffic, had a pre-Bday dinner for dad that night.
Monday: Up early, drove over to Mt. Diablo with dad and did some very light hiking, then had lunch at Sweet Tomatoes and hit a few stores and other errands before returning home in the evening so he could get to Oakland for his flight out at 7.
It sounds rather vacation-y, and it was for dad, I guess, but I was hella tired the whole time and hardly had any computer time at all, as the lack of blog posts attested. I didn't get any fiction done at all either, other than some quick proof reading at night. The biggest source of fatigue though, was my body's inability to adjust to the different schedule. I'm always a night owl, happiest waking around noon, screwing around and going to the gym and such in the afternoon, then working once it gets dark and keeping at it all night, until bedtime around dawn. This is my usual cycle, and I have a great deal of trouble breaking it by going to bed earlier, no matter how tired I am.
So when I got up Friday morning at 10, after going to bed at 7ish, in hopes that I'd be tired Friday night and get some sleep before the early morning Kali on Saturday, I had dim hopes it would work. And it didn't; I wasn't at all tired Friday night, and didn't get into bed until around 4. I didn't go to sleep even then, tossing and turning and dozing until maybe 5:30, when I finally fell asleep... for two hours, since the alarm went off at 7:15 and we were out the door before 8, with a 45 minute drive south to Union City and the park wherein the seminar was being held. (We needed an outdoor location for the staff workshop, since that sort of thing requires a lot of space, especially overhead.)
After 2 or 3 hours of sleep I had to be tired Saturday night, right? I was getting up by 8 or so to drive over to dad's hotel and then head up to Sonoma, after all. Guess again. I got to sleep by midnight just fine, and then woke up at 4, laid in bed until 5, gave up, got up, and worked (incoherently) on the computer until 8, by which time I was feeling really sleepy again. Once Malaya got up and left for her Sunday morning Kali class I set the kitchen timer for 45 minutes and went back to bed, and slept like a log until the buzzer woke me at 9. I was out the door heading for dad's hotel 10 minutes later, thanks to not needing to eat any breakfast, since I had eaten during my early morning non-sleeping time.
Sunday night was more of the same, with no sleep until nearly 5am, and a 8am wake up time, and the oddest thing was that I got right back onto my usual schedule Monday. I was up that night until 6am Tuesday, but then I slept for a good 7 hours, and did the same Tuesday night. I seem to be more locked into my "sleep only in the daytime" cycle than I used to be, since I could flip it around by staying up for 24 hours, or by getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep one night, and then going to bed early the next day. Now my body sticks to the schedule no matter what, apparently. I think you can safely expect to see my signings in the afternoon and evening, when future hypothetical book tour time comes.
The fun will continue this weekend, since we're leaving Friday afternoon to drive down to Long Beach with our kali Gura and her fiancee. She's doing a couple of demos at the Pacific Media Expo, and Malaya and I may be assisting in some way. We're all getting into the event for free, at least, but we're sharing a big hotel room with two beds, and since I can't sleep at night, and I can't sleep in hotels, it looks pretty unlikely that I'll be sleeping at all. Oh well, it'll be fun to attend the event and see some martial arts demos and check out all the cos players and maybe buy some anime DVDs. We'll be there Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, and then drive back Monday. I can catch up on sleep then!
Other than the convention, I dunno what we're doing in Long Beach. Maybe looking up some martial arts stores, or site-seeing a bit, but we don't have any real firm plans, that I know of. If I could just count on being able to actually sleep some while we're there, I'd be pretty damn excited about the whole thing.
Harry Potter Gay Fan Fiction
It seems an outrageous title for a post, but since it's exactly what
this popular UK Yahoo news article is about, I can hardly be faulted for repeating it. Besides, it's a good read:
As Harry Potter fans speculate what still lies in store for the world's favourite boy wizard, few envisage him leaving Hogwarts and settling into a committed gay relationship with arch foe Draco Malfoy.
But some do.
"Draco's breath is warm against his neck, his body gradually relaxing as Harry holds him, refusing to let go, and Harry discovers this is the most comfortable he's ever been in his entire life."
According to the article, there are numerous fan fiction sites out there, lots of them entirely devoted to stories set in the Harry Potter world. The biggest ones don't allow erotica or porn... but others do:
"I don't feel its my job or anybody else's to say what their kick should be. As long as it's well written, I'll post it," said Vikki Dolenga who set up the adult-themed Potter fanfic site, Restrictedsection.org, in 2002.
Dolenga, 34, a client support specialist for a health care data company in Chicago, insists the stories on her site, which gets close to 200,000 hits a day, are examples of "erotica" rather than pornography. A large number of submissions to the site fall into the category of "slash" fanfic -- so called because it explores homosexual pairings of traditionally straight characters, such as Harry/Draco.
Slash has it origins in fanfics written in the mid-1970s that imagined breathless couplings between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock from the iconic "Star Trek" series. With content ranging from unfulfilled homoerotic yearnings to the sexually explicit, slash writing is, perhaps surprisingly, dominated by straight women writers.
"I find it extremely liberating," said Lauren, 28, an advertising copywriter in New York. "I'm not sure why I prefer slash to het (heterosexual) ... maybe I just find it easier to write smut from a distance."
There's even a quote from perennially-delusional sourpuss Anne Rice, who, I must admit, was smart enough to pull up stakes and
get the hell out of New Orleans several months before it became the southern-most cove in Lake Pontchartrain.
The growing, Internet-generated popularity of fanfic has attracted mixed reactions from the original authors of the works being co-opted.
"I do not allow fan fiction," Vampire Chronicles novelist Anne Rice wrote in a statement on her official website in 2000. "The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters," Rice said.
Potter creator JK Rowling and her publishers have adopted a more conciliatory approach, objecting only to fanfic that is sexually explicit, violent or profane.
Websites like Restrictdsection.org have received cease-and-desist orders, but can usually remain up and running by simply adding registration and password procedures that deter people under 18 years of age. "It's 2005 and we're still here," Dolenga said. "Though I don't think we'll be winning one of (Rowling's) best website awards."
Like everything else (including hurricane-generated flooding) I'm sure this is all much funnier from a distance, and when it's my story and my characters some hack is throwing into bed together, I'll find it all far less amusing. Feel free to point out what a goddamned hypocrite I am then. Kthx.
Word Verification in Comments
Blogger has added a new "word verification" feature to the comments options, and since it seems a useful way to fight the gradual encroachement of comment spam and isn't a pain to use, I've enabled it. Click any post to comment and see what it looks like; you've likely seen something similar in signing up for various forums or emails or other such things online.
I also turned on the "allow profile images in comments" option, so we'll see how that goes too. That option allows people who have a custom icon on their Blogger account to display it beside any posts they make. I don't recall ever seeing that option on my Blogger profile, but since I spent time setting up this blog rather than screwing around with my account display options, that's not a real surprise. I generally dislike images showing in forums; especially when a forum is comprised of numerous short posts by people with huge, distracting, animated images attached in their signatures. Hopefully those of you who comment and have Bloggger accounts haven't gotten carried away with your profile images. And if you have, well then you'll understand when profile images are no longer allowed to display in BlackChampagne.com comments.
Ahh, fortune cookie!
I enjoy the
fortune cookie "in bed" game as much as anyone, but I swear they're making it too easy now. We at Chinese food with my dad on Sunday night, and here are the fortunes Malaya and I received:
You will be thankful for the pleasures of the coming months.
Soon you will encounter a whole new world of opportunity.
These aren't even vague. Seriously, are they writing these things now with awareness of the "in bed" game and just teasing us all, or what?
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Movies to see... at home.
It's sort of pointless that I keep a list of upcoming movies to see, when we've got an ever-growing stack of DVDs lying here we have already paid for, but have never gotten around to watching. Today we picked up Constantine, Team America, and Elektra at a 3/$25 sale at Blockbuster. We've been waiting for Constantine since it was released and we passed up paying $20 for it. Was waiting 3 weeks worth saving $11? Would we even have found time to watch it yet if we'd paid for it then?
We already had recent used purchases of The Transporter and Howard Stern's Private Parts, and a friend sent me a DVD rip of Saw, and three concert videos, two of NIN and one of Tool. There's also Kiki's Delivery Service, which Malaya got me for my b-day way back in June, we've had Galaxy Quest borrowed from a friend for like 6 months, Dog Soldiers which we bought for $3 on VHS and never watched, The King and I of which we watched one dance scene and nothing else, A Fish Called Wanda and Time Bandits, two movies I've loved for years but Malaya refuses to see. More recently we got National Treasure and Malaya never watched it, but since we saw it in the theaters and I took it to San Diego in June and watched it then with my dad, at least we've gotten some use out of it.
Of all these purchases, the only one I feel a need to defend is Elektra. We never saw it in theaters, mostly since the
amazingly-low 7% RT score scared us away. It's got martial arts (well, the watered-down movie version of them) in it though, and Malaya has lately hatched a burning desire to use Sais, the
trident-shaped pokey things Elektra uses. Tuhan says she can get some if she wants and he'll work some training on them into her classes, and while we're perfectly aware that Elektra is going to be dreadful, at least we can skip around to the fight scenes and avoid the "JGa attempting to emote with her granite-like face" sections. On top of that, the Blockbuster sale was 3/$25, and we really wanted Team America and Constantine, and as always when we're trying for that sort of sale, we could not find a 3rd movie we wanted, even for free. And since picking out something depressing that's of actual quality (Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Sideways, etc) seems beyond us... it was cheesy action movie time. Damn the sais being right on the box cover!
Stand in the way... get flattened.
I blogged
a few weeks ago about Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, the Principle Assistant Responsible for Contracting in the US Army Corps of Engineers. As the article I linked to in that update stated, she was one of the few objecting to the multi-billion dollar contracts being awarded to Halliburton (and others) in Iraq, with no accountability and very little oversight.
It was a truly depressing story, clearly documenting the pork and backscratching and war profiteering US defense contractors engage in at every opportunity. And it's gotten
even more depressing:
Three congressional Democrats asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday to investigate the demotion of a senior civilian Army official who publicly criticized the awarding of a no-bid contract to Halliburton Co. for oil-related work in Iraq.
Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, who had been the Army Corps of Engineers' top procurement official since 1997, was removed effective Saturday for what the Corps of Engineers called a poor job performance. Her lawyer said her demotion constitutes "blatant discrimination" and violates an earlier agreement with the Army to suspend her demotion until a "sufficient record" pertaining to her allegations of wrongdoing is complete.
In the letter to Rumsfeld, the lawmakers said the demotion "appears to be retaliation" for her June 27 testimony before Congress in which she detailed her objections to the award of contracts for Iraq projects. "Retaliation against employees for providing information to Congress is illegal and entirely unacceptable," the letter said.
I'm sure past Presidential Administrations have been even more country cluby and old boy networky than Dubya's, but it's kind of hard to imagine how. It's like one of those corrupt communist bureaucracies where you can't get a job without connections, and if you've got friends you get everything and are entirely above retaliation for virtually anything.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Now they tell me...
Almost like some form of karmic retribution for my comments about the imminent swamping of New Orleans,
here comes this news as I'm nursing a forehead, nose, and neck sunburn from Saturday morning's Kali workshop.
WASHINGTON - Redheads sunburn easily, but that may not be the only reason they are at high risk of skin cancer. New research suggests the pigment that colors their skin may set them up for cancer-spurring sun damage even if they do not burn.
More than 1 million Americans develop some form of skin cancer each year. Among those most at risk are people with light skin, hair and eyes, a combination frequent in redheads. They are particularly prone to sunburns, a risk factor for anyone, especially if the burns occur in childhood.
Scientists long have wondered if something else plays a role in redheads' high risk. One theory focuses on melanin, the skin pigment that darkens with sun exposure to provide either a tan or freckles. People with red hair have a chemically different type of melanin than people with dark hair.
Duke University researchers on Sunday reported the first direct evidence that those melanin differences indeed may be a culprit. It turns out that redheads' melanin is more vulnerable to a type of DNA-damaging stress from the sun's ultraviolet rays.
As a kid I had reddish blonde hair, and in some summertime photos it's completely blonde, since the sun would actually leech the red out over a long summer of regular sun exposure. I actually used to go to the beach at least once a week, skateboard for hours every day, play non hat-based sports (soccer), all the time, etc. All of which was probably enough to ensure eventual malignant skin tumors, no mattr how much of my time I now spend indoors, guarding my precious, away from the sun, which burnses us.
At times it certainly does seem that humans are uniquely unsuited to live on this planet. It's almost enough to make you believe in something other than evolution, though the alternative based on the evidence of human fraility is that we were designed by an exceedingly stupid god. Perhaps one of those blind idiot ones the pipers are always playing to in Lovecraft's stories, what with all of our tooth decay, appendixes, easily-broken bones, high female mortality rate during childbirth, skinny and vulnerable necks, poor range of vision, lack of claws or teeth or poison for defense and hunting, and so on.
I've always thought that the more you know about the human body (I know little, but even my knowledge is sufficient for some conclusions.) the more obvious it becomes that we evolved from lower species, and that we're clearly an amazing distance from perfected now. We just lucked into big brains, in comparison to all of the other stupid animals on this planet, and those were enough to let us overcome our endless other physical deficiencies.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Learn to swim/I'll see you down in/Mississippi Bay
The possibility of New Orleans being entirely flooded
has long been discussed, since since the city was built on silt and sediment deposited by the Mississippi, and has been steadily sinking for centuries, thanks to the weight of people, buildings, cars, etc. Much of the city is now about three meters below sea level, and with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Lake Poncakaka on the other, all we need is a direct hit from a hurricane-generated storm surge of more than 10 feet for the sea-sized Gulf of Mexico to basically wash over the levees and dykes and fill the city like a bathtub.
It's hard to imagine, but
thanks to Katrina, which may soon become only the fourth Category 5 hurricane to ever hit the US mainland, we may finally be rid of the filthy, drunk-infested, vomit-scented hole that is New Orleans.
The hurricane's landfall could still come in Mississippi and affect Alabama and Florida, but it looked likely to come ashore Monday morning on the southeastern Louisiana coast, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That put New Orleans squarely in the crosshairs.
"If it came ashore with the intensity it has now and went to the New Orleans area, it would be the strongest we've had in recorded history there," Rappaport said in a telephone interview Sunday morning. "We're hoping of course there'll be a slight tapering off at least of the winds, but we can't plan on that. So whichever area gets hit, this is going to be a once in a lifetime event for them."
At 8 a.m., Katrina's center was about 250 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the hurricane center said. It was moving west-northwest at about 12 mph and a gradual turn toward the north-northwest was expected. Hurricane force-wind of at least 74 mph extended up to 85 miles from the center.
The storm had the potential for storm surge flooding of up to 25 feet, topped with even higher waves, as much as 15 inches of rain, and tornadoes.
A disaster of this sort would of course be absolutely horrible, and all joking aside, I would give almost anything to see it in my lifetime. I mean I certainly hope it never happens. Never. Not one bit.
By the way, if you didn't get the title of this post, you really need to listen to more Tool. Start with this song, it's got about
the best lyrics ever, and ones you can't help but agree with, at least on some level, if you've ever been to LA. Especially via LAX, since flying over the sprawling hellhole that is the LA Basin can not fail to instill a sense of disgust at man's invention.
Update: There are lots more articles about the impending doom of New Orleans, and
I liked this one for the background info.
"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said Sunday afternoon.
The center's latest computer simulations indicate that by Tuesday, vast swaths of New Orleans could be under water up to 30 feet deep. In the French Quarter, the water could reach 20 feet, easily submerging the district's iconic cast-iron balconies and bars.
Estimates predict that 60 percent to 80 percent of the city's houses will be destroyed by wind. With the flood damage, most of the people who live in and around New Orleans could be homeless.
"We're talking about in essence having — in the continental United States — having a refugee camp of a million people," van Heerden said.
...
Experts have warned about New Orleans' vulnerability for years, chiefly because Louisiana has lost more than a million acres of coastal wetlands in the past seven decades. The vast patchwork of swamps and bayous south of the city serves as a buffer, partially absorbing the surge of water that a hurricane pushes ashore.
Experts have also warned that the ring of high levees around New Orleans, designed to protect the city from floodwaters coming down the Mississippi, will only make things worse in a powerful hurricane. Katrina is expected to push a 28-foot storm surge against the levees. Even if they hold, water will pour over their tops and begin filling the city as if it were a sinking canoe.
After the storm passes, the water will have nowhere to go.
In a few days, van Heerden predicts, emergency management officials are going to be wondering how to handle a giant stagnant pond contaminated with building debris, coffins, sewage and other hazardous materials.
"We're talking about an incredible environmental disaster," van Heerden said.
He puts much of the blame for New Orleans' dire situation on the very levee system that is designed to protect southern Louisiana from Mississippi River floods. Before the levees were built, the river would top its banks during floods and wash through a maze of bayous and swamps, dropping fine-grained silt that nourished plants and kept the land just above sea level.
The levees "have literally starved our wetlands to death" by directing all of that precious silt out into the Gulf of Mexico, van Heerden said.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Things of the Day: Weekend Edition (Just like on NPR?)
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
--Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
Soul-Devouring Worry:Early to bed and early to rise.
Answer of the Day:Because after you have a turkey dog for lunch, dinner is guaranteed to be an improvement.
Curse of the Day:May you find it difficult to adapt to variably-sized sticks.
Books Lying Open:Poisons, by Peter MacInnis
Depraved, the shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Fiend, the shocking trues story of America's youngest serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Harry Fricking Potter 6, by the richest woman on earth
Movies to see list:The Aristocrats,
Waiting for the DVD.
Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, October 5 (Oh yeah.)
Busy Weekend
I'm awake hours earlier than usual, after dragging (with Malaya's wakeup assistance) myself out of bed hours earlier than usual. Unfortunately I did not go to bed any earlier than usual, so my eyes have that (holes burned into my face) feeling so many of you are no-doubt familiar with from your real lives and real jobs. "Sucks, dunnit?" you're probably saying right about now, with nearly as much sympathy as I feel for this lady
who ran herself over. And you'd be right to do it.
I got up "early" (for me) because I have to get up by 8 Saturday, and then not much later than that on Sunday and again Monday. The ordeal! Since I usually write at night, and seldom get into bed before 6am... ugh.
Anyway, Saturday morning is this month's Kali workshop. We're doing it outdoors in a park down south, rather than at Tuhan's house, since this time it's staff, and you need a lot of room for 10 or 15 people to be swinging two meter lenghts of wood around. We've done some stuff with staff now and then in Kali in the past, but we're always limited in space, and people don't ordinarily bring such long weapons with them to class. My new stick is seven feet long, but it actually fits into my car pretty easily, once I fold down the backseat and stick it from the trunk alongside the passenger seat.
Malaya and I got our sticks on Monday, since we wanted to get in some practice before the workshop. We have no idea what we'll be doing then, but Tuhan almost always starts off with some footwork, then does a few form-learning exercises, and eventually we get to watch him fight with the weapon of choice for that workshop, and then see other students spar in various ways. Workshops are about 2/3 learn with a new thing, and 1/3 watch other people show off their Kali skills. Quite often, the most fun is in watching advanced students and teachers spar, and those always provide a needed reality check for the younger students who have been starting to think they actually know something about the art.
Saturday afternoon is the bridal shower for the upcoming wedding of our friends, and since it's a "Jack and Jill" affair, I've
got to get to go. It should actually be pretty fun, since it's at the bride-to-be's parent's house, which is big and roomy, and there's going to be tons of good food (always at any Filipino gathering) and company. The event begins in the afternoon, and will likely go all evening as such gatherings usually do. There will be a huge buffet-style table of homemade cooking, lots of gaming outside (mah jong, texas hold 'em, etc) and so on.
I can't stay that late though, because my dad's in town for a quick visit, and is going to be driving down from Davis Saturday evening. I'll see him for dinner that night, and then Sunday we're driving up to Sonoma for more
wine tasting and photo shooting. He's staying overnight then, and come Monday we'll do something in the morning before he flies back to San Diego in the early afternoon. Malaya's so busy with the wedding planning stuff and getting stuff done for work on Monday that she's hardly going to see dad at all; just dinner on Sunday when we get back from Sonoma, in theory.
As always when outside events impact on my usual idle-filled schedule, my thoughts are about how I'll get any writing done. Of course when I have pretty much all day to do that most of the time, I seldom manage to get started before 2am, once Malaya's asleep and I've got no remaining distractions; well, none other than the oh-so-succulent Internet and all of its unearthly delights. So I'm going to try and do some writing in the daytime, or perhaps start it earlier in the evening than usual, etc. I've been doing at least 2-3000 words a day for the past couple of weeks, and while I'd like to spend 12 hours a day and do 8000 words and finish the novel(s) in a month, I try to be happy that I'm at least making steady, if unspectacular, progress.
As the above probably hints at, blog posting may be sporadic to nonexistant this weekend. Adjust your lifestyle accordingly. Luckily, just like the past few weeks, there aren't any movies we're interested in seeing this weekend. I'd been hoping that
Brothers Grimm might be watchable, but most of the reviews say it's visionary imagery
in search of a plot. That and the CGI trees look like rubbery shit in the trailer and TV commercials.
The Cave boasts the laziest and least-interesting title of the year, and appears to be of
about the quality you'd expect of a horror movie being dumped in the late-August dregs. And thanks to the new titles listing on Rotten Tomatoes and its eye-catching 00% approval rating, I now know about
Undiscovered, which seems largely designed to make the rest of us hate the aspiring celebrities of LA even more than we do already. You'll probably have more fun reading the reviews than watching any of those; my most memorable movie experience of the past week was following Aahz's recommendation and reading
Ebert's zero-star review of
Deuce Bigalow 2, which starts off snarky, turns cruel, and ends with some ruthless and entirely justified character assassination of Rob Schneider. Two quotes:
"Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.
...Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.
You get the idea.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Movie Trailers
This first one is not a movie trailer, it's a short animated film. However I can guarantee you'll enjoy watching it more than anything else linked in this update, providing you have a sense of humor. It's called Le Building, and I know nothing more about it than that. It may take a bit to DL, since it's a large and very high quality quicktime file, but I liked it a lot. It's completely safe for work, though there is loud singing and then crashing sound effects, so maybe you should turn down your speakers first.
I everyone made fun of the dreadful teaser trailer for Doom the Movie some weeks ago. Well, they've got a full trailer out now, and while it doesn't look any good either, they did try something inovative. There are scenes in the film that will invariably be called the "FPS Cam." They basically look like a real life version of the game, with a camera view identical to the view you get while playing a shooter. There's even a gun sticking out in front of you, a gun that's held up when a new clip is slapped in, a scene with a chainsaw against a fake-looking hellhound demon thing, and so on. I'll give them points for making this movie more like the game it's based on than anyone has done before, but um... games are fun because you're controlling them. Who wants to buy a ticket to watch someone else play? Even if you're watching slightly higher quality graphics than home computers can yet offer?
There's a new international trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter movie, and it's... another Harry Potter movie. The scenes with Harry the merboy look pretty plastic-y, the dragon looks okay, Mad Eye Moody's mad eye looks kind of Borgish, and um... yeah. Nothing awful here, but after the first 2 HP movies were boring and by the book and the 3rd one was more lively but wouldn't have made any sense if you hadn't read the book, my hopes aren't high. Even though all of the news about the movie, including the feature I just read in EW magazine, says this 4th one is the most unlike the book, with the whole "Hermoine tries to free the house elves." subplot jettisoned. We may go see it on a matinee, if we get bored one day. We still have the damn HP6 book sitting here on the desk, and the fact that we bought it the day after it came out, and neither Malaya nor I have yet so much as opened it is probably a fair sign of our general enthusiasm for all things Harry Potter, though.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
A Streetcar Named Disaster
I wrote 95% of this post a couple of months ago, just before I headed down to San Diego for my dad's back surgery. For some reason it's been ignored halfway down my notes page since then, but since I just looked at it for the umpteenth time and wondered why I hadn't posted it, I'm doing so now. You may need to update the figures slightly to add in recent accidents, but anyway:
I first heard of the dangerous Houston Light Rail in various columns by The Sports Guy, back in early 2004 when he was in Houston
covering the Superbowl. I'd link to them, but unfortunately ESPN.com has now locked all of his old archives away behind their $40 a year Insider wall, so you'll have to take my word for it. His jokes were all to the effect of how "insanely-easy it is to walk/drive in front of" the new monorail, and I thought it was just a comedic, "find something lame about the city hosting the event and joke about it relentlessly" effort.
Turns out it wasn't; the Houston Light Rail really is a car-eating monster, with an accident rate running something like 2500% higher than the national average. It's so bad that the design of the trains has become a running joke, and the people of Houston have given their monorail two excellent nick names. It's known as both the "Wham-Bam-Tram," and the "Streetcar Named Disaster."
Amused enough by those names to look for more info, I found a lot of sites talking/joking about it, but very few making any actual effort to explain the problem. As best I can tell, the trains run right alongside major roads, all through downtown Houston, and since cars must cross the tracks every block, the chances for a collision are extremely high. This is compounded by inadequate warning signs, lights, and guardrails, and the possibility that Houston drivers are really, really reckless. But certainly not wreck-less. Improvements galore have been made, mostly in terms of adding additional warning lights and guardrails, but there are still tons of accidents happening.
One of the first Google returns on my search
was this one, and it's worth a read for the amusement, largely for a few lines like this one:
It should be noted that when Houston's MetroRail supporters were trying to generate public support for the vote on light rail, they told voters that it would take automobiles off the road. They just didn't mention that it would do it one car at a time.
The oddest thing about my search results? Like 75% of the first page of Google returns were Libertarian sites, a fact that generally became clear when I checked out other links on their pages. I guess it's logical Libertarians would compile pages about the Wham Bam Tram; their political ideology opposes basically any sort of public spending (since those things require taxes or bonds to pay for them) and few things are more expensive than major public transportation systems. So when one comes along that's expensive, dangerous, and impractical, like Houston's, their eyes must light up like a pinball machine. Or like mine do when a new fantasy novel comes out that's famous, popular, and written like shit.
Political biases aside, I think we can all agree that the Houston system is a bad one, with a poor design, and we can all try to learn from it. While laughing at the astonishing amount of accidents they've had already, in less than 1.5 years.
I'm probably biased on this issue, since I now live in the Bay Area where we're blessed with the excellent BART system, and a geography that makes a mass transit system extremely viable. I should look up some info about San Diego though, since they were just getting their trolley system going full bore when I moved away from there, two years ago, and while I was amazed at the amount of trolley stops and the engineering they did to build them (clearing out an entire hillside along 8-East, just to get the trolley out from downtown to SDSU), I have no idea if it's helped traffic congestion, if it's worth the tax dollars spent on it, etc. The new trolley stop to the stadium was hugely popular for baseball and football games, during the last couple of years I worked there, but that's a special case with tens of thousands of people heading to a location with far too little parking, for a relatively short time. I have no idea if any of those same people actually rode it to work on weekdays, though the trolley parking lot near my condo in La Mesa (east of San Diego) was very full every weekday I drove past it.
More Wal-Mart Violence
When I first saw the news that someone had blown away two Wal-Mart employees I suspected an outraged customer, or perhaps a petty shoplifter showing solidarity with the guy Wal-Martians
sat on and killed last week, but
news today says he's just nuts. A contention his mug shot would seem to support.
GLENDALE, Ariz. - The man accused of killing two workers in a Wal-Mart store parking lot appears to be mentally disturbed, according to court records released Wednesday.
Ed Lui, 53, was arrested Tuesday after allegedly driving into a Wal-Mart parking lot in this Phoenix suburb and shooting two cart collectors.
The documents released after his initial court appearance early Wednesday alleged that after shooting the workers, Lui reloaded his .40-caliber handgun and then shot them several more times while they lay on the ground.
The court documents indicated that he appeared mentally disturbed but gave no details.
Glendale police previously said it didn't appear Lui knew the victims or had a vendetta against them or Wal-Mart.
Perhaps he was just outraged by continually seeing hundreds of shopping carts strewn all around the parking lot? I'm occasionally tempted to plug a few of the cart collector guys at CostCo, except that there aren't any. And as we all know, murder is
never a solution.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Cartoon Recommendation
It's the laziest type of blogging to simply toss in a link and say, "This is good; go look at it." but I think the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon so perfectly summarizes the state of mind of Americans who still support the Iraqi occupation that I can't resist. So here I go.
This cartoon is good; go look at it.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Celebrities I Can't Tell Apart: #01
For today's installment, I bring you
Catherine Zeta-Jones and
Salma Hayek. Both beautiful, exotic-looking brunettes, Salma is 38 and was born in Mexico; Catherine is 35 and was born in Wales. I've never been able to tell these two apart, but compounding my current confusion is an upcoming movie role for Catherine. She's starring in a
new Zorro movie (why?) with
Antonio Banderas. They made another Zorro movie seven years ago, and if you'd put a gun to my head yesterday I would have sworn that film starred... Salma Hayek. See because Zorro is set in Mexico, and Salma is Mexican, while Catherine is English, or something very much like it. Adding to my dilemma, I saw the last two Desperado movies, which were Western-style films set in Mexico that starred Antonio Banderas... and Salma Hayek. So really, if they made a 4th Desperado film with Antonio and Catherine, and a 3rd Zorro with Antonio and Salma... who would notice?
Here are a few pictures of the ladies just to illustrate my point. I'd say which was which, but hell, I don't know. Isn't that the whole point of this post?
Lawrence Phillips Back in the News
It's always nice to see when an ex-pro athlete
hits rock bottom.
Former National Football League running back Lawrence Phillips was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder Sunday after he allegedly drove a stolen car into a throng of boys with whom he had just played pickup football at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, police said.
Phillips, who has a decade-long history of arrests for violence and traffic violations, apparently was angered when he couldn't find his belongings minutes after the game ended and accused the youths of stealing from him, according to the mother of one of the victims.
None of the victims' injuries were life-threatening, police said.
Of course the car was stolen, and he was wanted on felony charges in San Diego for beating yet another "girlfriend." The article helpfully provides a capsule timeline of his distinguished career. (Whether that's a career in football or in beating up women is open to debate.)
Phillips, who spent his teens in a West Covina group home, first attracted national attention for violent behavior when he was a star player at Nebraska. In 1995, he was charged with trespassing and assault for an attack on a college girlfriend, who said he threatened to shoot her in the kneecaps and elbows. The university provided her with 24-hour protection. Phillips pleaded no contest and was sentenced to a year of probation.
Before Sunday's incident, Phillips' most recent run-in with authorities came when San Diego police said that he had choked a 28-year-old girlfriend Aug. 2 at her home in the Mission Valley area. A second attack allegedly took place 11 days later when Phillips confronted the woman at a party.
...
Despite his troubles with the law, Phillips received many opportunities over the years to start fresh. After pleading no contest in the attack on his college girlfriend, he was drafted the following year by the St. Louis Rams as a first-round pick and No. 6 overall. That same year, he was arrested for drunk driving, a parole violation that carried a 23-day jail sentence.
The Rams released Phillips in 1997 for insubordination. He was signed briefly by the Miami Dolphins, but was dumped again after a woman claimed that he struck her after she refused to dance with him at a nightclub. Phillips pleaded guilty to battery and was placed on six months' probation.
After being signed and then cut by the San Francisco 49ers, Phillips was charged in May 2000 with attacking a girlfriend in Beverly Hills. That December, he was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading no contest to felony charges of beating the woman and making a terrorist threat. He also was given three years' probation and ordered to take anger-management training.
Phillips briefly found football success in Canada — where he had to get special permission to work because of his criminal record in the U.S. — but was dropped by two teams for behavioral problems, despite agreeing to additional anger-management counseling, according to news accounts.
In late 2003, Phillips was back in criminal court, charged in Quebec with sexual assault, assault, and uttering threats, apparently against another girlfriend.
It's really sort of sad that this guy who might be in the prime of his multi-million dollar NFL career, is reduced to cruising aimlessly around LA in a stolen car and playing pick up football with a bunch of 14 year olds. That after a lifetime of arrests, and misery, all stemming from emotional scars he received growing up a ward of the state.
On the other hand, he's a complete bitch who has beaten dozens of women (If 5 or 6 actually pressed charges, imagine how many others did not bother?) but never seems to pick on anyone his own size. (Note how he simply gave up when the cops were on his tail in LA.) I sure hope they like him in prison.
Saddest of all, this surely isn't rock bottom yet. He'll likely get no more than 5 to 10 for the current charges; no way attempted murder will stick for a moment of road rage that left no serious injuries, even with his long criminal record, and he'll be out by 2010 and free to work on bigger and better arrests. I'm predicting cocaine charges by then, assuming that drug is still a big deal in 5 years, after he gets hooked on it in prison and gets taken in by some real criminals for his brief post-prison career.
Mega M&Ms?
On the same theme as the last candy-eating post, Malaya and I have lately been idly wondering just how big those new giant M&Ms are, based on seeing perhaps 5000 commercials for them over the past week of the ad blitz. They never show the actual product in the commercials (just huge fake ones the size of a hubcap), and there aren't even any photos of them on the M&Ms website. So I searched on the subject, and found success with the second return, a
business article from the NYTimes. If you haven't done so before, you'll need to register to read it, or use bugmenot.com for a password, but I found it interesting. It answered my most basic question, and then gave me far, far more.
FIRST there were regular-size M&M's, then tinier ones. Now, the Masterfoods USA division of Mars is bringing out a supersize version, called Mega, with each milk chocolate or peanut piece about 55 percent larger than the equivalent standard-size M&M's.
...Mega M&M's will be aimed at adults rather than children. Although the animated M&M's characters appear on the packages, they are absent from the ads. And the colors of Mega M&M's are meant to appeal to more mature audiences; the regular hues like red, green, yellow and blue are being supplanted by shades like maroon, gold, beige and teal.
"Adults have said they like a bigger bite-sized product with bigger bite-sized taste," said Martyn Wilks, president for the Masterfoods USA snack-food division. "This is definitely for a subset of our target market."
...Mega M&M's will mostly be sold in packages that are intended to be passed around, like 12.6-ounce and 19.6-ounce bags, rather than in single-serving bags.
I like how they've got the colors all thought out and the product designed scientifically. I'm not likely to eat them since we're not fat and we therefore avoid candy when possible, and because the big
Shrek M&Ms clogged up our M&Ms dispenser. Plus they were bigger, but like 75% of that was the crappy M&M chocolate, with tiny little peanuts floating deep within, like the poison gas center of a golf ball.
Wondering about the market trends of larger-sized candy and junk food, what that means for Americans in general, and the market risks of overextending an existing product line? Read the whole article. Here's a little chocolate-y taste:
Mega M&M's joins a lengthy list of variations on the M&M's theme that include, in addition to regular M&M's and Minis, crispy M&M's, almond M&M's, M&M's filled with peanut butter, dark chocolate M&M's and pieces for baking. The strategy is a common one in consumer marketing, known as line extensions, by which new versions of a best-selling brand are brought out continually to capitalize on the popularity of the parent.
Marketers often deem it safer and cheaper to introduce a line extension of a tried-and-true product like M&M's - a Top 10 candy brand with estimated annual sales of almost $1 billion - than to develop a new brand that consumers may ignore or not like. A problem with line extensions, however, is that they run the risk of diluting a brand's image.
..."It just sows confusion, and confusion is the enemy of effective marketing," Mr. Trout said, adding: "People stare at the shelf and don't know what to buy anymore. It's bewildering. And you see it in every category: 'This Bud's for you.' Which Bud do you have in mind? Bud? Bud Light? Bud Select?"
How about people buy the kind they like the best, while not buying the kinds they don't like, much the way they don't buy brands they don't like? Still, perhaps Mr. Marketing Consultant has a point, though I don't see various different types of chocolate in a candy shell, or types of weak American beer in a can, as being different enough to confuse consumers. Companies get into trouble with that when they diversify overly, and start making clothing and toothpaste and food and dish soap and other unrelated things all under the same product name. Read
Matt Haig's excellent book,
Brand Failures, for more information about that issue.
A Confession
Honey, I couldn't help myself. I ate a box of your mini-cereal 30 variety pack. Since I saw that there were
Froot Loops in there a few days ago, and told you that story about when I was 8 and flying unaccompanied and had a big bag of Froot Loops and just wanted to eat them and read my book and kept having to shake my head when the damned flight attendants kept coming by to ask me if I wanted any food or something to drink, I've been thinking about Froot Loops. So I ate some.
They were staring at me.
I hadn't tasted the things in maybe 20 years, and of course they weren't as good as I remembered, and I didn't have them with milk since I don't really drink it anymore. Then again, I didn't have any milk when I was eating them on the plane either, all those years ago, so perhaps that just added to the nostalgia. I think they have more colors now than they used to; I don't remember neon green and aqua colors back then, just grape, orange, red, and lemon. I was pleased to see that they were still like M&Ms though, in that all the hues tasted exactly the same. I can still remember when I was a kid and used to separate them into piles by color, and then eat them separately while trying to notice if they tasted different. I was an analytical little shit too; and I'd sometimes do a blind taste test to see if I could tell red from orange, or lemon. I even remember arguing about them with some kids in school, when one other kid insisted they tasted different, and that he didn't like the yellow ones.
Anyway Malaya, that's why one box is missing from the cereal assortment. I was going to try an blame Dusty, but since he only eats non-food items (even more non-food than artificially flavored, Skittles-colored puffed corn rings) I didn't think that one would fly.
Love,
Fluxor
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Fiction and Martial Arts
After my last
Kali-related post, Lanth made a comment that I liked enough to save and answer in separate post. I didn't mean to wait 3 weeks to do so, but like all good questions, this one is timeless. Or something like that.:
Do you find with your experience in Kali that it's changed your book-writing ('the fantasy novel') at all? Have you introduced characters who are experts at particular styles you use, or changed some of the characters slightly now that you've experienced it more (ie someone who only ever used staves becoming someone who uses staves and daggers and swords when forced to)? Are the general fights now more thought-out to be realistic rather than appearing and sounding cool on paper (although I know it's hard to write realistically and describe it without losing the audience).
And following from that last patenthesised interlude, have you found that your writing in these blogs about kali all the time has helped you in your ability to describe battles/fights, now that you've had plenty of practice at struggling to convey your actual real-life experiences on 'paper' for so long?:
I haven't mentioned the fantasy novel lately, but it's going well. I'm definitely more than half finished, and I've recently figured out how the conclusion is going to come about. I've known the conclusion (and the brief, surprising, sequel-setting epilogue) for like 3 years, since the early days of my plot planning, but I also had a long list (and it kept getting longer) of interesting scenes and character revelations and plot twists that had to fit somewhere in the last third of the novel. I just wasn't sure quite where they would all fit, or how they would all fit together. I have them all mapped out now, and while they aren't 100% set, they're at least 90% there.
I'd end up making changes from the 100% version anyway, if I had one. I always do as I write it and get better/new ideas for how to arrange things.
That aside, the questions were about, 1) how Kali has influenced my writing about combat, and 2) how my blog writing about Kali has helped (or not) my writing about combat.
As for #1, I've stolen a great amount of stuff directly from Kali and stuck it into the combat in my novel, to the point that if I don't stick my Kali teacher into the acknowledgements, she'd have as good a case at suing me for royalties as Tolkien's estate would have had with
Terry Brooks bestselling fan fic. Not every character does Kali, and it's never called Kali, and no one character's fighting is entirely in the Kali style, but the influence will be very clear to anyone who knows them both and reads the novel. Hell, anyone whose read a few of my blog posts on Kali and then read the novel would see it.
It's not a huge change from what I'd intended to do with combat in the novel, oddly enough. I'd always planned on the old Necromancer character being a sort of martial arts master, in terms of moving sinuously, dodging and turning aside hits rather than hacking away like a knight in shining armor, using guile and technique rather than brute strength, etc. If I hadn't started doing Kali (almost a year ago) I would have had to just be creative and invent his style as I wrote it, and it's actually damn convenient that I'm now practicing a style myself that's very much like what I envisioned Quinoss using long before I'd ever even heard of Kali.
As for #2... sort of. I've always known that combat is very difficult to write about in the blow by blow style. Physical choreography is just hard to describe, whether you're writing about wrestling, boxing, sword fighting, sexual positioning, dancing, or anything else. A common lexicon is a great help, but you can't assume people have that with martial arts or any type of combat, though that depends largely on your audience.
I can write in detail about exact moves and counters and techniques and footwork about Kali, and have it perfectly understood... by other Kali students. For a while I was trading long emails about class with a fellow student, and she understood just what I was saying, since she had shared the experience regularly. Yet that same email posted here, or sent to my mom, would have been greeted with incomprehension. It's the same in sports writing; anyone with a level of knowledge about baseball, or basketball, or whatever, can understand a quick game summary, or a description of a great move. Imagine trying to write about a crossover dribble move with a 360 spin that ended in an alleyoop dunk and have it be understood by someone who doesn't know anything about basketball, though?
That's pretty much were I'm writing from with my novel.
I can assume people know what swinging a sword means, and an uppercut, or a downward slash, or a stab, or a block with a shield, etc. But if I want to describe detailed movements, say a slash thats pulled through high, then swung around over the attacker's head to a leg cut on the opponent, which bounces over to the other side of the neck for the kill... I've already lost most of you. And I didn't even describe the hip and shoulder turns of the attacker to give his hits speed and power, his hand position on the sword to turn the blade from side to side, or anything about how the defender was positioned, how he blocked the first hit, why he was too slow to block the second, and so on.
So I don't bother with that style of writing, much though I might like to do so. I envision every fight scene in the novel in detail, act it out sometimes standing up and moving around the room to do so, playing both parts in the battle, etc. I've even had Malaya stand still or hold an arm up or something from time to time, so I could see just how the other character would react or move or dodge. Unfortunately, very little of that makes it into words. Doing so would make every fight scene painfully long on the page (and take so long to read that the excitement and speed of it was lost), would confuse most readers unless they read it several times, and would give them far more than they needed or wanted to know.
I have far more interest in that sort of thing than most people, based on my ongoing martial arts training and sparring, and I try to keep that in mind as I write, so I don't get carried away. It's not an article for a martial arts magazine; it's a fantasy novel, and while I put in enough of the move-by-move details to let the reader know what's happening, and to give them an idea why one guy is winning and the other guy/girl is losing, I try not to go overboard. That's the theory, anyway. How well it works will be judged by others. Malaya's enjoyed the fight scenes so far, but she likes fight scenes, and she knows as much or more than I do about Kali, so she would get it even if I had far less detail. I'm curious to see what my mom thinks (she and Malaya are the only 2 reading the novel as I write it) since she doesn't have any kali experience. Will mom be able to follow the action and movement and style? Will it interest her, or will she wonder why I'm once again writing about how one character is learning to move sideways and backwards and to cut rather than slapping with her sword?
That reminds me; this is more about question 1 than 2, but the way I'm putting in most of the Kali stuff is from the POV of the character who is learning it and seeing how useful it is. So she's basically standing in for the reader, describing what she's being taught and giving her opinion of it. In this way I'm able to write more about the theory and style, rather than just having some guys fight and writing how one of them moves, which would involve a lot of physical detail of the type I said I'm not using, for reasons elucidated above.
So my short answer to #2 would be that writing about Kali on the blog has had little effect on how I write about combat in the novel, and if anything the blogging has reminded me of why I don't do much play by play style fight discussion. Now when it comes time to work on the screenplay... that will be full of physical action and movement descriptions. All of which will be ruined by some eventual rewrite, long after I've taken the money and washed my hands of the entire thing due to their insistence that the entire thing be set in 2206 on Mars, and feature at least three cyborg laser battles. But hey,
I'll be in good company, at least.
Things of the Day: Forgetful Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day."
--Jim Rohn
Soul-Devouring Worry:Things of the Day amnesia.
Answer of the Day:Because if they didn't constantly state the obvious they'd never fill three hours of non-stop football non-action.
Curse of the Day:May you either speak too much or too little.
Books Lying Open:Poisons, by Peter MacInnis
Depraved, the shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Fiend, the shocking trues story of America's youngest serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Harry Fricking Potter 6, by the richest woman on earth
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Savage Pastimes, by Harold SchechterMovies to probably-not-see list: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.)
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Props to Bob Costas
I've always thought Bob Costas was pretty much a dildo. Prematurely smug, George Willian, and destined for bow ties. He's probably a nice guy, and he knows a great deal about sports and seems sincere and all, but he's just unlistenable. It's half his voice, which is guaranteed to drive me to the mute button whenever they let him talk during a baseball game, but mostly just his mannerisms, which are very nerdy, in the most unendearing way.
That being said, I've got to hand it to the guy for having some decency and integrity. Apparently he's been guest hosting the Larry King Show this summer, and when the producers insisted on doing a show on Natalee Holloway, he said he was not going to drag his career through the muck, and they had to find
a guest guesthost for that night.
NEW YORK - While some cable TV hosts are making their living off the Natalee Holloway case this summer, Bob Costas is having none of it.
Costas, hired by CNN as an occasional fill-in on "Larry King Live," refused to anchor Thursday's show because it was primarily about the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba. Chris Pixley filled in at the last minute.
"I didn't think the subject matter of Thursday's show was the kind of broadcast I should be doing," Costas said in a statement. "I suggested some alternatives but the producers preferred the topics they had chosen. I was fine with that, and respectfully declined to participate."
...
There were no hard feelings at all," Costas said. "It's not a big deal. I'm sure there are countless topics that will be mutually acceptable in the future."
Wendy Walker, senior executive producer of "Larry King Live," described it as a mutual decision for Costas not to do the show because he was uncomfortable with the subject matter.
"We love having Bob... and since `Larry King Live' covers an extremely extensive palate of subjects, there will always be shows that he will enjoy hosting," she said.
Natalee Holloway, if you're like me and had long since forgotten, was the mildly-attractive blonde female college student who was murdered and dumped down a dry well or buried in a garbage heap somewhere, while on vacation in Aruba some months ago. I can't really imagine why she's still news in some quarters, and I haven't seen a mention of her on TV or any of the blogs I read in months, but apparently someone's keeping the non-story alive. The media does love their young white females in jeopardy.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Aeon Flux Trailer
Since I previously complained about the Aeon Flux trailer only being visible through some crappy Mtv viewer, I suppose I must point out that
it's since been added to the Quicktime Trailer Page, in a format we can all enjoy. As for the trailer... eh. It starts off looking like the Trinity movie, with a raven-haired woman in a black bodysuit leaping off buildings and carrying guns. They then get a bit more into the plot, which has numerous bits taken directly from the original Aeon Flux series. The weirdly anarchaic futurism of the movie seems to be gone, replaced by some sort of of faceless totalitarianism, in which Aeon is the ultimate assassin. Basically it's her running around some futuristic city and killing people with futuristic weapons... but for a noble cause!
I'm not putting it on my "to see" list just yet, but it's definitely got potential to not suck.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Book Review: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
For my latest overlong review, here's one about the best selling book in the country. I liked it overall, while thinking most of the parts could have been improved. There are no spoilers in this review, at least no more than you'll see in any short review.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This hugely-hyped debut novel received a ton of attention and numerous fawning advance reviews, got press for the author's record $2m book advance, and even knocked
The DaVinci Code off of the bestseller list, while being relentlessly compared to it. Are those comparisons accurate? Is it a good enough vampire story to wade through 650 pages of very formal prose? No and
yes sort of.
First, the scores:
The Historian
Plot: 5
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 5
Horror: 4
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6.5
I actually like the whole more than the parts. There were lots of good things in the novel, and I liked the idea of the plot and the way it was told. In the end though, the novel doesn't quite work. It's not quite an exciting mystery, it's not quite an interesting character study, and it's not quite clever enough to work just as a stylistic exercise in storytelling. I didn't dislike it, but I only had a couple of "Wow, that was a great plot twist/revelation." moments while reading it, and I never felt nervous about the danger the characters were in, or joyful for their successes, or sorrow for their losses.
Kostova's writing skill is in arranging flashbacks and other plot elements, working in historical details, and describing physical details. All good traits. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing an exciting scene, or crafting fascinating characters, or fashioning believable dialogue, she's not in her strong suit.
Checking out
the scores on Amazon.com, I see that it's got a 3.5/5 average out of 400 reviews, and that quite a few (13 out of the top 20, currently) of the most-recommended reader reviews are 1 or 2 star scores. I didn't score it that poorly myself, but I can see why other people would, since there's really no excitement or climax, and you don't really care about the characters. You either enjoy it for the complete package, including the historical info, the globe-trotting setting, the intricate use of flashbacks within flashbacks, etc, or you find it a lackluster, un-exciting, failed thriller, and wonder why anyone else enjoys it.
I also wonder about the
DaVinci Code comparisons (some have called
The Historian, "The Dracula Code") since the books really have very little in common. True, they're both historical mysteries with clues to an ancient mystery found in the present day, through art and literature, but the focus is so different that they really have nothing in common. They are very similar if you've only read the quick paragraph-long blurb about each novel. If you've actually read them, not so much.
I don't have
a real high opinion of Dan Brown's writing or his most famous book (the story was better when he called it
Angels and Demons, before he thought to shoehorn in a Christ-angle for the publicity), but he can at least craft a thriller. His writing is puff, but it's entertaining puff, and it moves quickly and keeps you turning the pages. Judging her by this one book, the author of
The Historian does neither.
The DaVinci Code has a real mystery, and it's a thriller; a race against the clock to save some lives, but with vastly higher stakes than that, as the entire Vatican faces certain destruction (Or possibly not; there's really no way to keep the plots of
Angels and Demons and
The DaVinci Code straight in your memory.). In
The Historian an old college professor vanished and was maybe killed. That's pretty much it for the impetus to investigate, and there's no real time pressure at all. Furthermore, the mystery in
The DaVinci Code is an exciting race against the clock, and it's solved by the characters while we watch, with clues found in very famous works of art that still exist today. In
The Historian we see hardly any investigation, almost all of the info comes already assembled in impossibly-detailed letters from one main character to another, and the ancient books and manuscripts they're getting the info from aren't real; they were just invented by the author to advance her plot.
Here are some more specific comments about the scores.
Plot: 5The concept is brilliant, so this middling score reflects how it was actually executed. It's a very complicated story, told in multiple levels of flashback. The main character is a scholar's daughter, who goes after him after he goes missing. While she's pursuing him across Europe, she's reading letters he wrote decades ago, when he went searching for Dracula's tomb, and he is in turn sometimes reading letters written by his advisor, 20 years earlier, about his search for Dracula's tomb. So we've got a girl in 1970 hunting for her missing father, who wrote about his own search in 1950 for Dracula's Tomb, a search much aided by letters from his advisor, who did the same search in 1930. And these tales are all told at once, in overlapping style. So as the girl is on a train from Paris to some other place, we get the flashback letter from her father, written in the same area, when he was on his desperate hunt to find Dracula's tomb and try to rescue his missing father-figure.
Got all of that?
The plot also relies on a ridiculous number of implausible coincidences, and has quite a few holes in the behavior of the main characters, the absurd ways they only meet people who can aid them on their quests, and especially in the physical reality of Dracula and vampires in general. What the vampires can and can not do didn't seem to be thought out very well at all, and while I played along during the book and kept hoping it would all be explained or make sense in the end -- it never was.
Concept: 8Great idea, mediocre execution. I'm also deducting potential points for the conclusion, which was incredibly weak. Kostova also thought out the middle very well, but apparently couldn’t think how to end the novel, since it ended with a confusing muddle of a whimper.
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6She's not a bad writer, but would probably be better doing non-fiction. Her descriptions of cities in Europe and retelling of ancient fictional-history were great. She just can't write action or suspense or characters or dialogue.
Characters: 5This one was a high score halfway through, until I realized that every single character spoke and wrote with the same voice, and pretty much thought with the same mind. It reminded me of Lovecraft a bit, in that everyone is polite, scholarly, erudite, shy, modest, etc. Even when characters do something because they're supposed to be madly in love, it seems calculated, almost as if some "how to write characters who are madly in love" guide was being referenced, with heavy highlighting in the "how often characters should do something impulsive and rash" section.
Horror: 2This was a real failing of the novel; there was supposed to be fear and terror, and we know for a fact that Dracula or some other vampires are out there, stalking and disappearing characters, but we never worry about it happening to any of the principles, and they never seem to worry about it themselves. So they blithely walk down into dark, dank crypts, face the prospect of killing vampires with no more than a silver dagger, and sleep in lightless French farmhouses without seeming to harbor a worry in their heads. This one had the ingredients to be a thriller, and a horror novel, but shied away from both possibilities.
Humor: NANot a laugh to be found; at least not that I remember.
Fun Factor: 3Nope. Not a joyless read, but there aren't any big payoff money scenes. Even at the conclusion.
Page Turner: 4Nope. I often went a day or two between reads, and took a couple of weeks to get through the whole thing. I did read the last 150 pages or so in a go, but that was simply because I was sick of the book lying around unfinished and I wanted to get on to something else.
Re-readability: 4I can't see why you'd want to. It's not even one of those books where you learn some amazing revelations at the end, and then suddenly realize why character X was acting the way he did the whole time.
Overall: 6.5This is really a very generous score, given largely on the concept, the potential, and the skill with which Kostova organized all of the flashbacks and made them work together, more or less. If this story had been told in as many pages, without the intricate structure and interesting pseudo-historical info, my score would be closer to a 4.
It's easy to generalize and think that the author is just like the girl in the story. Raised in an international style, knowledgeable about the world, but only from books and reading, not from actual living in it, and a product of an earlier, more stately an formal age. I knew nothing about her when I read the book, but after going through
a few online interviews, I see that my preconceptions was pretty much right on the money.
I don't know how the woman reached 40 in this day and age without being more reflective of the modern world and popular culture, but she should get out more, or if she does she needs to let her getting out reflect more into her writing. Every character in
The Historian is like an upper-crust white Englishman from an old Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot mystery, and while they're not stupid or completely oblivious, there's just a sameness to the characters and the writing that began to bore me. There's a difference between writing characters who accurately reflect the time in which they lived (most of the book is set in the 50s and then in the 70s, in the two long flashback narratives) and writing a bunch of bland people who all act the same.
Overall, you'll enjoy this if you love reading and history and especially works written in classic literary style (I.E. long and slow).
Live off the Land, Die off the Land
I may have to reconsider my whole, "I only want to play computer games that take a few minutes for quick break now and then." theory. It works at times, when I'm really into my writing and just want a 10 or 15 minute break every couple of hours. But at other times, when the creative juices aren't really flowing and I'd like to completely distract myself for an hour, a longer, more intense game session can be useful.
I speculate on this since Malaya played some Diablo II a couple of days ago, as a reward to herself for finishing most of her writing projects. At first I was surfing and blogging some, but as she ran around Act One with her new Assassin and tried to remember what the the skills did (she hadn't played the game at all in months), I finally admitted to myself that I would enjoy playing a new character as well. I didn't want to do a big one though, one that would last forever and that I'd feel a need to set up with great equipment from my other characters, etc. So I did my first "live off the land" character. Hardcore, of course.
Rules for playing a LotL character vary in purity, but the basic concept is that you make a brand new level 1 character, and play them while using only what you find in the game, and without ever going to town for healing, to buy equipment, to repair your items, to sell anything, etc. Some people allow trips to town to identify items with Cain, and some allow potions to be bought, but I did neither. I could only use what I found, I could not repair it or buy any other equipment, and I never went to town other than to click on the NPCs required to advance in the quests.
For my first try I picked a Paladin, and found it pretty easy. Going on "Players 8" for the first half of Act One, I was lvl 15 or so before I even entered the Barracks, and from there I went on "players 2" and quickly got down to Andariel's lair. I did her on "Players 1" and had little trouble tanking her. I even kept my quest reward rogue alive for the entire act, and leveled her up decently in the process. I had no close calls with death, and my only differing play style was to put a few more points into vitality than I usually would have.
Act Two wasn't much harder, though I had a hell of a time in the Arcane Sanctuary. It wasn't hard to kill things, but there I realized that I'd been getting most of my potions (red and blue, since I didn't have any leech I had to keep drinking a lot of both to keep using Zeal and Smite) from barrels and chests, rather than monster drops. And since there aren't any chests in the Arcane, except for at the three tips of the branches that do not have the Summoner on them, I was soon going very slowly, letting my rogue merc get the kills from a distance, and standing around with Warmth on all the time, to try and heal up a bit.
My first big mistake was being careless and letting the merc die in the temple on the way to Duriel. I had endless skeletons and greater mummies there, and I kept running into rooms to lure the skeletons away so I could kill them out of resurrection range. That worked fine until I ran around one very large room, and my merc followed me in and got hung up somewhere and never made it out after me. Since I was playing LotL I couldn't just go to town and get her resurrected, anymore than I could have hired one of the superior Act Two mercs in the first place. (Even having a merc at all is sort of dubious in the LotL rules, since talking to Kashya to get one as a gift isn't strictly required to advance through act one.) So she was gone forever, and I was alone... alone... alone...
My second mistake was more costly, in that I found the entrance to Duriel's Lair at about 6:25pm, Tuesday evening. Kali is at 7, and I usually leave around 6:15 since it's a fair drive and there's traffic, but I didn't want to fight through the whole damn tomb again later on, and I had a fair stock of healing potions, so I figured I could either do Duriel now, or not at all. As it turned out it was not at all, since I went down and started beating on him, and I wasn't taking that much damage, but I wasn't hurting him that much either. I went toe to toe and had him about 1/3 dead, but all of my healing potions were gone, I was low on blue potions, and after trying it for a bit, I realized I didn't have the patience to run around him in circles with Warmth on as I tried to heal up organically. I also needed to leave for class, and I didn't want to be pussy and exit that game, so I just stood still and hit him until he killed me off. RIP Forager_I, lvl 23 Paladin.
It was fun to play the guy though, and he gave me what I wanted going in; some distraction, some fun, but nothing too involving or long term. In retrospect I should have leveled up to 25 or so, filled my entire inventory and cube with red potions, and found some sort of weapon with crushing blow, or at least socketed something with a sapphire to slow Duriel down. Keeping my merc alive wouldn't have hurt either, since the best weapon I found in the entire game was a rare bow, and she was using it with excellent effect.
I found some funny things while playing that way too. Besides the discovery that most of the potions fall from chests, rather than monsters, my most desired commodity in Act One was... ID scrolls. Through out the entire act I had ten things in my inventory that I wanted to ID, but couldn't. Eventually I stopped picking up jewels at all, since I didn't have the space (can't use the stash in town) and didn't think I'd ever find enough ID scrolls. None of the ones I ID'ed were useful anyway, and overall there are far fewer ID scrolls dropped than magical items in act one.
This changes in act two, when you have a few decent items and are therefore no longer picking up every magical cap, sash, leather gloves, etc. Then I ran into the opposite problem, when I began to develop a huge backup of ID scrolls, and had 9 or 10 of them clogging my inventory. Eventually I went back and hunted through the Jail in act one until I found one of those rooms with a bookshelf, and got an identify book just for the space savings. I died with about 15 charges in it too, lot of good those did me.
Invigorated by that two day experience, and the solid amount of writing I got down between play sessions, I started Forager_II off last night. She's an Amazon, one I'm going bow with, though I'm using Jab with a rare spear for nastier creatures in close. I considered doing Jab only, since that's a very effective technique early in the game, but realized it wouldn't be viable simply because so few spears drop. Not being able to repair the good items you find really changes your strategy, and my Paladin must have broken 15 or 20 weapons even during his brief two acts of life. Using a bow is more sensible, since it won't break and I just have to find arrows, but since far fewer bows drop, getting a decent one, much less two so my rogue merc can help, is going to be a challenge. I also don't see how I'll beat Duriel, unless I can find some damn nice spear to dice him up with, but at least I won't make the mistake of going in without being fully prepared. I can't see leveling all the way to 30 in Act 2, which would give me a Valkyrie to use as a tank, but I can make it to 24 and use Decoys, if I need to stand back and shoot him with arrows for a bit.
Best of all, I wrote for two hours last night, played the new Amazon for an hour, then wrote for another solid hour, before playing her a bit more just before bedtime. I often write a bit, then head off to play a quick game, and next thing I know it's two hours later and I've been surfing half the Internet. I suppose that's the danger of browser-based gaming; it's so easy to take interesting detours. I have no idea how long I'll be entertained by starting up new characters and marching them along until they die, but I'm just going to try and enjoy it while it lasts. They're certainly more fun than playing any of my lvl 90ish v1.10 characters, who have no fun other than boring Baal runs to try and find one of the very few super high level items I might actually have some use for.
...Where the Pronghorns and the Cheetahs Play?
Concept
that seems outright wacky at first, but then gradually grows on you. Some "scientists" are looking to transplant various wild African animal species into the vast American interior. And they're not talking about birds or mice or something no one would really notice. They're talking lions and herdbeasts and such.
The idea of transplanting African wildlife to this continent is being greeted with gasps and groans from other scientists and conservationists who recall previous efforts to relocate foreign species halfway around the world, often with disastrous results.
But the proposal's supporters say it could help save some species from extinction in Africa, where protection is spotty and habitats are vanishing. They say the relocated animals could also restore the biodiversity in North America to a condition closer to what it was before humans overran the landscape more than 10,000 years ago.
Most modern African species never lived on the American prairie, the scientists acknowledge. But some of their biological cousins like mastodons, camels and saber-toothed cats, roamed for more than 1 million years alongside antelope and herds of bison until Ice Age glaciers retreated and humans started arriving.
The rapid extinction of dozens of large mammal species in North America — perhaps due to a combination of climate change and overhunting — triggered a landslide of changes to the environmental landscape. Relocating large animals to vast ecological parks and private reserves would begin to repair the damage, proponents say, while offering new ecotourism opportunities to a withering region.
...
The scientists' discussion expanded to consider long-extinct Pleistocene species that have modern counterparts elsewhere in the world.
For example, a larger American cheetah once stalked pronghorn on these lands, with both species evolving special features that enabled them to accelerate to 60 mph. Today, pronghorns rarely are chased, except by the occasional pickup truck.
In Africa, modern cheetahs are being exterminated as vermin, with fewer than 2,000 remaining in some countries. Relocation could help both species retain important traits, the plan's proponents say.
Whlie it's just never going to happen with lions in the wild, given that they, you know, eat people, I could see them living in some sort of game park with high fences and such. Poaching would be a problem, with every redneck in the state wanting to come and take a few pot shots from the back of their pickup, roaming free in some park in Utah or New Mexico would certainly be an upgrade from the "pacing behind bars" life lions suffer in the hands of so many private collectors and small zoos. And the idea of cheetahs roaming the wild and running down antelope or perhaps jack rabbits is certainly attractive.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Luckier than Christopher Reeve
When I got online this afternoon my Yahoo news homepage opened up and for a brief moment, the top news headline filled me with almost indescribable joy.
Madonna Breaks Bones While Riding a Horse! And then I realized she'd just taken a tumble and hurt her arm or something, and that this wasn't Christopher Reeve part 2. Alas.
Still, it's nice that one aspect of her "pretend I'm an English lady in the countryside" adopted existence finally rose up and bit her in the ass. And I'm sure the glue factory appreciated the donation.
Tort Reform Deformed by Media
One of the major goals of the modern Republican Party is to legislate "tort reform," as they call it. What they mean by "tort reform" is the passage of laws to limit the constitutional and legal rights of Americans to use the legal system to get back at people, doctors, corporations, or the government when said entities are at fault in a case that resulted in injury or death to an individual. The Republican Party is all for tort reform since they are at this point wholly owned by large business interests (I have no idea who owns the Democratic Party, but whoever it is should demand a refund, given the incompetence they've displayed in recent decades.) and large business interests (and doctors, and municipalities, and rich people in general) don't like paying money when juries find them at fault in various instances.
It's an uphill struggle to enact tort reform, simply by the odds. After all, there are far more of us, little people who might have to sue, than there are big companies who want to avoid lawsuits, and the loyalties of the big companies and doctors and others are suspect anyway, since while no one wants to be sued, everyone wants the right to sue others. Since sentiment isn't a valueable tool, their main tactic for shifting public support for tort reform is to emphasize the few blockbuster cases and act like they are a trend, and to spread the word that lawsuits are out of control, and juries are reckless and out to get big business.
Not surprisingly, actual examination of the evidence argues against this is
pretty much bullshit:
When a jury sticks it to a huge corporation, it's always big news. A crushing verdict of $4.9 billion against General Motors Corp. in Los Angeles drew massive media coverage, as did a $5-billion award in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case and a $144.8-billion thrashing of the tobacco industry in a Florida class action.
Mega-verdicts such as these have helped fuel legislative campaigns to overhaul the legal system by limiting lawsuits and jury awards. Driving the crusade for what business groups call tort reform is the notion that frivolous suits and jackpot judgments are strangling the economy.
While acknowledging that excesses no doubt occur, many legal observers say there is no evidence that people are filing more lawsuits or that juries are getting more generous -- indeed, there is some data to the contrary. And mammoth verdicts, in the rare cases in which they occur, almost always are tossed out or sharply reduced later.
...
The popular view that there are more lawsuits and bigger damage awards than ever before is not supported by available evidence.
A 35-state survey by the National Center for State Courts found that the number of tort filings declined 4% from 1993 through 2002 despite population growth. And in the nation's 75 largest counties, the median award to victorious plaintiffs was $37,000 in 2001 — much less than the inflation-adjusted median of $63,000 in 1992, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.
...
A 1999 survey by Rand Corp.'s Institute for Civil Justice found auto liability cases were 12 times more likely to draw news coverage when plaintiffs won than when defendants did, a difference the study called "very stark." In its review of 351 trials conducted during the 1980s and '90s, the institute found that 38 of 92 plaintiff verdicts, or 41%, were featured in news reports, versus 9 of 259 verdicts for the defense — or about 3%.
The article argues that this isn't some inherent deceptive bias by the media, but just a natural "follow the money" inclination in reporting. And they have a point; after all, which are you going to read, an article about a $500m lawsuit win, or one about a case against a defective seat belt manufacturer being thrown out of court? And by the same token, which gets more coverage; a big lawsuit win against cigarette makers, or gun makers, or liquor makers, or news about some corporation winning permanent legal immunity against lawsuits, no matter how dangerous their product is?
Case in point.
Update: Someone in comments mentioned malpractice insurance in Florida. Premiums have indeed skyrocketed, but
not because of malpractice lawsuits, contrary to what the insurance companies say.
Today comes word of yet another study showing that the rise in medical malpractice premiums has almost nothing to do with an actual increase in malpractice payouts. The study looks at the 15 biggest malpractice insurance companies and concludes that over the past five years payouts have gone up only slightly while premiums have skyrocketed. As a result:
Net payouts as a percentage of net premiums has declined from 69% to 33%.
Gross payouts as a percentage of gross premiums has declined from 68% to 32%.
Projected future payouts as a percentage of earned premiums has declined from 68% to 51%.
So has anything gone up? Of course. Since premiums have risen far faster than both payouts and projected payouts, cash surpluses have increased by a third and stock prices of the public companies have doubled. Life is sweet!
You can read lots of other posts with links to studies and such in the Political Animal archives; here's at least
8 100% hits from a Google search: I link there since they're authoratative on it, contrarian to the conventional wisdom that blames crazy juries and greedy lawyers, and they've posted about it frequently.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Fun, Free, Quick Online Games: #03
Here's another one I just found and played for bit. It's called 3D Bombsweeper, and it's pretty much what it sounds like; a 3D version of the MineSweeper game that comes with Windows. I found it quite easy and enjoyable, but then again I like those 3D spatial relations type problems on the SAT and I still do my old Rubik's Cube every now and then just for fun. So YMMV.
The game is a bit hard to figure at first, unless you read Japanese. It's one of those odd Japanese games where the menus are in English, and when you click "how to play" or "options" you get a page of Japanese characters. You don't need the instructions, though you'll probably want to go into options to turn off the godawful music. It's the top option there, fortunately. The others are custmization stuff; they change the background, cube transparency, size, number size, etc. Get in the middle of a round and fiddle with them; they're self-explanatory.
As for the instructions: click and drag your mouse to rotate the object in every direction, point and click on a face to eliminate it, and
press the space bar and you'll get a little bomb marker to mark a space you're sure is a bomb. (Took me a while and some experimentation to figure out what key did that; language barrier.) Only adjacent faces count; corners touching do not, and all faces are in no way created equal; some will touch just 2 or 3 other sides, some will touch more.
There are 10 levels and the only way to advance is to complete them in order. The last one looks like a soccer ball, and is actually pretty easy; I got it on my second try after a misclick on the first. Oddly, the round-ish shapes are easier, since more of the sides touch; the plus sign and ring and some others were more of a pain for me since few sides touch, and I kept solving about half of it and then having to guess and try to start from scratch on the other side.
It's fun though, and it plays quite quickly. I just wish there were more levels; I was hoping for weirdly-shaped asteroidal things, or huge globes with 100 planes; that sort of thing.
Incidentally, does anyone know of any online games that take the Minesweeper game concept and use differently-shaped tiles? If so please let me know; I've always wanted to do that game with hexagons, or triangles, or rectangles, or squares/octagons, etc... It would seem quite easy to program one, sinc it's such a simple game, but since I'm not a programmer, I really have no idea.
Don't Shoplift from Wal-Mart
Guy
allegedly stole some cheap plastic crap from a Wal-Mart, got chashed down in the parking lot by a pack of employees, knocked to the blistering blacktop on a 96 degree day, knelt upon, choked, and then left to die on his face, in handcuffs, when he went into cardiac arrest. They even refused to call 911 until it was too late. All for, at most, a BB gun, some BBs, diapers, and a pair of sunglasses.
A man suspected of shoplifting goods from an Atascocita Wal-Mart -- including diapers and a BB gun -- had begged employees to let him up from the blistering pavement in the store's parking lot where he was held, shirtless, before he died Sunday, a witness said.
An autopsy for the man, identified as Stacy Clay Driver, 30, of Cleveland, was scheduled for Monday, but officials said results probably would be delayed by a wait for toxicology tests.
Driver's family, as well as one emergency worker, are questioning company procedure, including whether Wal-Mart workers administered CPR after they realized he needed medical attention.
I guess they've got rent-a-cops and such at Wal-Mart, but I'm frankly amazed any employees would care about theft. You're making pennies above minimum wage while working in a horrible job for a company that clears $8b profit per year, and you're risking your ass chasing some thief out into the parking lot? Hell no. Of course knowing Wal-Mart, it's probably company policy to dock the pay of their workers double the amount of any theft, unless the workers are actually murdered during the pursuit, which might explain these guys' motivation. Either that or they were ready to do anything to get out of the store for a few minutes.
I won't be surprised if they find out he wasn't stealing anything; even in this one article it's very unclear what he's alleged to have done. At first they say he stole some items and ran for it, and then they say, "Store employees told investigators Driver entered the store with an item marked with a sticker indicating it had been paid for, then switched the sticker to a more expensive item and tried to leave with it." But if he had multiple items, did he buy some and try to steal one? Or did they go after the wrong thief, or just screw up completely?
Sunday, August 14, 2005
The Beginning of the End
Thus far I've enjoyed the comments option on this site in its new (is 160 posts still new?) format. I get slightly less email now than I used to, but far more overall feedback, and I think the readers enjoy throwing in their two cents or seeing what others say. And I can add my thoughts to a post after it's gone online, or reply immediately to reader comments. Surprisingly, no flame wars have erupted, and I've never had to delete any posts for excessive profanity or hatred or whatever, towards me or anyone else.
Tragically, I just discovered (courtesy of the Blogger feature that mails me every comment as it's made) that the plague has reached our shores. Yes, the first comment spam has appeared, like a painful red dot on your genetalia. You can see it as the
5th comment on this week-old post; nonsense key words that link to some sort of real estate scam site. Since the Blogger-provided tools for controlling spam and other comment problems are extremely limited, I'm basically limited to 1) not allowing comments at all, 2) deleting individual ones when I see them, and 3) crossing my fingers and hoping that spam bots don't start ruining every post with endless piles of their steaming offal in the comments section.
I'm going with option #3 for now, with #2 held in reserve.
Labels: painful d2 email
Saturday Shopping and Dinner
Saturday began with cleaning. We'd been putting it off for a while, and the condo was looking a bit filthy, so starting around noon we got right to it. Malaya does the vacuuming since it makes me sneeze and the cats hide, I shake out the throw rugs, and then she does the bathroom while I do the kitchen. The kitchen is larger with more stuff to clean, but very little of it involves mildew, hard water stains, or poo, so I think I get the bargain there. So while she was spraying bleach and wearing gloves I mopped the floor, wiped down all of the cabinets, cleaned out the oven and put in new aluminum foil, washed under the burners, moved stuff around so I could scrub the counter tops, wiped off the top of the refrigerator door, cleaned out the toaster and toaster oven, and so on. Fun was had by all.
After that we decided we'd worked hard enough to deserve a reward, so we headed out to the mall and Todai for lunch. Except that I've been wanting some new shirts and shoes, so we went by a sporting good store, where the shoes were not what I wanted. They didn't have any shirts I wanted (at a price I was willing to pay) either, but they did have some decent basketball style shorts at 2/$20, so I got a couple of them. I've been unhappy with my workout shorts for a while, and finally got a pair of Nike bball shorts at TJ Maxx ($14 I paid, retail $45.) They're very silky (polyester) material, mesh with a couple of reinforcing layers beneath them, drawstring elastic waist, etc. I wasn't sure I'd like them, but after one trip to the gym I am so sold. The material breathes, they lay very loose, they feel very light and slid over my thighs so I don't feel like I'm lifting them along with my legs, and they don't get all sweaty at the waistband. So I got two more.
I want to get some more of the dry weave type shirts, since I have one t-shirt like that and 2 long sleeve shirts for colder weather (One of which is the tight elastic
UnderArmour/manporn style I keep meaning to blog about since I wonder if that stuff is in style in any other countries, or it's just a US jock thing.) and they are so great to work out in. Cotton is fine for walking around in, but when you're sweating and standing in it, it gets all cold on your back if you sit down, it's wet and takes forever to dry, etc. It's not so bad at the gym, but in Kali class cotton T's are death, since we exert in flurries, then stand for a while, then work hard and sweat, then stand, etc, and it's very blech to my skin and to others who have to touch me.
The problem is that those shirts are all $20 each, at least, in sporting stores. More like $30 or $35 usually, so I'll have to keep checking the discount leftover stuff that shows up at TJ Maxx and Ross and hope I get lucky. They have some, sometimes, but usually just in huge sizes or horrible designs.
The shorts were 2/$20, and with tax my bill was... $21.65. Get used to that number.
After that store we headed to the mall, and split up. Malaya was after red thongs *cough* and I wanted to look for sneakers, and maybe some workout shirts. I found lots of shoes but none I liked for a reasonable price. I did get on some shirts though, with the 5/$20 sale at Champs, and another store right across the concourse from it. I mostly just wear solid color t's, in a variety of colors, and since most of mine are looking faded I picked up 5 in the first store, for... $21.65. (I'd list the colors, but you don't care and they're in my closet in the bedroom where Malaya is sleeping so I can't go check. Dark blue, dark red, dark green, gun metal, and white. Something like that.) I then walked across the way to the second store which had the exact same price offer (minus a penny), and picked out 4 more, then couldn't find a 5th in a color I wanted, and realized that they had tank tops and wife beaters for the same price, if I wanted to mix and match. So I put a green shirt back and got a white and a black tank top. I haven't owned a sleeveless shirt since I was like 9, but I often want cooler shirts for the gym, and they were on sale. If you're wondering, yes, you can factor in that information, cross-reference it with the skintight long-sleeved workout jersey I got last week, and safely deduct tht I'm feeling pretty okay about the results of my weight lifting and exercise regime. And no, no pictures today. Maybe some other day, because I'm a goddamned himbo, and himbos aren't paid to think.
With all of that shopping done, we met back on the top level and headed to Todai's, a glorious Japanese/Asian buffet place. Malaya likes it for the sushi, and she pretty well massacred
the saba (That is not our meal or our photo blog.), eventually sending me back up to get the last three on the platter after she began to feel guilty about wiping it out twice. The ironic part is that I don't dislike all sushi, but I can't stand saba; it's raw mackerel and it's so fishy-tasting I just gag.
I had one piece of sushi; shrimp over rice, since I mostly gorged myself on miso soup, vanilla shrimp, teriyaki chicken, fried rice, fried noodles, tempura, and more. I'm fortunate in that I don't have a lot of stomach capacity and that I get full quickly, since it helps keep me from being a fat little piggy. But sometimes, usually at buffets, I really wish I could go all
Kobayashi and take in about three days worth of calories in one enormous meal. As it was I hardly got to taste the sushi, dessert, fresh fruit, crab legs, etc.
All during the meal I was distracted though, and not just because the 40ish mom at the next table had a very low cut cleavage top on that plunged at least four inches further than anyone wanted it to. Malaya said she could see nipple from her sideways view, while I just did all I could to avoid looking in that direction. The fact that she was leaning over the table and sitting right beside her 7 or 8 y/o son didn't help things either. Doesn't she have a mirror in her house, or what?
No, my distraction was due to the fact that Champs Sports had exactly the shoes I wanted, but they were $80, which was more than I had intended to pay. I can afford it, and I buy new shoes about once a year, so it's not like I won't get wear out of them, but it just seems exorbitant. No one had shoes like I wanted for cheap though; just plain sneakers, and I really like the Nike Shox style, where there's no shoe right below your heel; just compression plastic things to the sides. I've had a pair sort of like that since my birthday back in June, and they are so great for wearing to Kali, where we're standing on cement for 2+ hours. The ones at Champs were even dark blue and silver, just like I'd been wanting (for no particular reason).
I told Malaya about the shoes and the price, and when she insisted that we go back down there after dinner, I didn't argue with her. Unfortunately, when we got there I spotted another pair that were even more what I wanted (also Nike Shox, but with a better design) and they had no price tag on them. Korean salesboy with his dyed red hair said he thought they were $99, but might be on sale for $79, which is how much the first pair I'd spotted cost. I couldn't help myself, and asked him to bring out a pair of each in size 9.5.
That's a topic worth a digression, since I used to wear a size 10, and often found my shoes too tight. I'd sometimes have to go to 10.5, or trim my toenails daily and wear thin socks until new shoes stretched out a bit. Yet over the past week when I've been trying shoes and not buying them, I was usually haunting the clearance section, and trying ones not in my exact size, and by trial and error I found that 9.5s and even 9s fit me perfectly, while 10s seemed a bit large. I was trying them from all different brands too, so either the 9 y/o Indonesian girls Nike and Adidas and Reebok fill their sweatshops with are getting lazy with the quality control, or every sneaker manufacturer recently increased their shoe sizes slightly, or my feet are shrinking. I don't want to think about it anymore.
Shoe boy returns with 2 boxes; they had both in my size (damn), the second pair were not on sale and would cost $99 (damn again), the more expensive ones felt better (damn thrice), and Malaya agreed that the more expensive ones looked much cooler (damn fourth). Adding to my "those cost too much" damn-lemma, Malaya out of the blue said she'd pay for half of my shoes if I wanted the $99 pair. I told her not to, she insisted, she mentioned her recent raise, and I promptly rolled over like a good himbo and said, "Okay." So now I've got shiny new shoes that cost me $50, and I'm pretty happy with them. We got them home and I wore them for a bit of sunset Kali, then came inside and cut down some new shoe inserts to fit, and they're just about spring air perfection.
I can't find an exact pair online, but these are
the same shoe type, if you're curious. Mine are dark blue where those are black, and mine have a white highlight around the swoosh, but other than that... Trust me, they're far sexier in person, plus they match the blue and black gym shorts I got today, and very nicely match the electric blue piping on the gray bball shorts I got last week. Not that I would ever pay an instant of attention to that sort of thing, being a
himbo man.
The red g-string is quite nice too, I must add in closing. Doesn't really accessorize with my shoes, but since I wasn't the one modeling it, that's not a big problem.
Also, my complaints about not eating my weight in the buffet were made, but it's now nearly 3am, more than 9 hours after we had dinner, and I'm still not hungry. I went in on an empty stomach too, with maybe 1/3 of a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of water all day before Todai. I can't eat as much as I used to, but I stay fuller for longer after I do, which is probably a pretty good trade off given that I no longer have the "never gain weight" metabolism I possessed when I was 18. I may not eat again today, honestly.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Gay Child Checklist
Everyone else has already blogged about this creepy "Is your son at risk of becoming gay?" checklist, and they're all making great sport of it. I just shook my head when I first saw it, and was surprised that it was news; haven't the Fundie Christian groups been pushing this sort of crap for decades? Apparently this particular list is new though, and since making jokes about it is like shooting fish in a barrel with an AK-47, I wasn't going to bother posting about it. I decided to anyway, since I had some thoughts I hadn't seen elsewhere.
The list most people are enjoying is this one:
Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?. It's got seven points to check, including gems such as:
1. A strong feeling that they are "different" from other boys.
2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.
6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even "think" effeminately.
I do wonder where they get the idea that all gays grow up artsy types? Just how many Rupert Everett movies have they seen anyway? I've personally known more gay guys who were jocks or biker dude types, but that's an issue for another day. I'd also like to figure out why they put "different" and "think" in quotes; I don't see any need for special emphasis on those words.
That bullshit aside, I'd like to see some gay website run a survey of their readers to see how many hit on the 7 tendencies listed in this article. Any gay readers here can feel free to chime in in the comments, anonymously if you wish, of course.
Of course if the ultimate horror comes true, and you, a good Christian parent, suspect your son might be a future bone-smuggler, they've got advice that will turn that genetic destiny right on its head.
How to Prevent Homosexuality! Surprisingly, it's pretty limp advice. So to speak. There are seven points (Why 7 again?), but all of them pretty much boil down to having the boy spend time around his macho father, (Including seeing his huge, naked penis in the shower.
No, really, search for "Dad has a penis" on that page.) or any other macho man the mother might enlist to cure her "prehomosexual" child. I love that term, by the way. So are other kids "preheterosexual" and just as easily-swayed to the dark side, if nefarious gays like those who infest the
Boy and Girl Scouts get to them at an early age?)
Anyway, I'm drifting off on this bizarre topic, but I wanted to post this primarily since it's funny, but also to highlight the absurd way some ultra-conservative Christians think boys grow up to become gay.
You Must Be Young and Wealthy to Read This
So says
this PCWorld article.
...compared to the average Internet user, visitors to Web logs, or blogs, tend to be younger and to belong to a wealthier household, a study has found. Blog visitors are also more likely to shop online and to connect to the Internet using a broadband connection, according to the study "Behaviors of the Blogosphere" conducted by comScore Networks. Unsurprisingly, blog visitors are also more active online, visiting almost twice as many Web pages as the average Internet user.
ComScore defines blogs as "mostly amateur online diaries." In terms of unique visitors, FreeRepublic.com ranked first in the first quarter, followed by DrudgeReport.com, Fleshbot.com, Gawker.com, and Fark.com. By visits, DrudgeReport came in first, followed by Fark.com, FreeRepublic.com, Gawker.com, and Slashdot.org.
That's all well and good, and I'm sure those sites are all quite busy. Unfortunately, going by the article's own definition of a "blog," none of those sites qualifies, with the possible exception of Free Republic, a right wing group political blog. They're basically defining an online journal there, not a blog, since lots of blogs cover politics, or sex, or the media, or sports, or whatever, without ever having any online diary aspects to them.
Drudge is a news site with millions of links, Fleshbot is a news site that skews towards sex, Gawker is a celeb news blog, SlashDot is a geek news and weird stuff site, and Fark is the same as SlashDot, minus the content and intellect. There's not an online diary among them.
The article goes on to talk about average income, age, how many sites viewed, and so on, but I'm not real confident in their conclusions, since I'm not confident in their methodology.
The most popular type of blog is the political one, according to the study, which was sponsored by blogging software and service vendor Six Apart and by blog publisher Gawker Media.
So Gawker and blog software site readers read blogs and Gawker. What a surprise!
I don't know of a site that lists top online journals, though I'd think Dooce.com would be #1 on that, given that she seems to be on Good Morning America or in the NY Times every other week, as they continue to run articles about bloggers who lost their jobs for blogging about them, as Dooce did like 5 years ago. The Truth Laid Bear hosts a supposedly-accurate
top blog listing, with traffic numbers and such, though I couldn't tell you why half the top posts on their main page are from self-loathing hack Michelle Malkin. Interestingly, Daily Kos dominates the top spot on their list, with more than double the traffic of any other blog, and that list includes several listed on top in the PCWorld article. They don't categorize Drudge Report as a blog either, since it's not listed at all, though the Drudge Retort, a left wing answer to the right wing Drudge Report is listed, in 34th place, currently. And no, this site isn't on their list. Not even close. (Although, perhaps you have to sign up with them or something, since I searched for several blogs that I know are quite busy, and none of them came up either.)
Friday, August 12, 2005
Painful D2 Emails: Part 04
I make jokes about and quote the dumb ones, but they're not all like that. In fact, most of the mails are okay, or better than that; complimentary or helpful or packing useful news tips, etc. Here's a nice one that came in tonight, for example:
Magic Find Guide
I just want you to know, I really enjoyed your guide. Best I have ever seen. Very Good Job.....
I'd put in a link to my old MF guide, but since I don't want to go look, it's 2 versions of the game old now, and if you care you've probably already seen it, I'm not going to. On the other hand, this was the next email in, and well... just look at it.
plz read cd key has been diabled
hey my cd key ahs been disabled i dunno y it doesnt mean i hav no money and i cant afford another cd u hav to disable it :( my dad is very angry and tryign very hard to raise the money for me plz can u send me a cd key plz i beg u y me out of all people my name is paul thank you end to sexy_xr8_02c@-------.com the cd key plz thanx alot bye.
Whatever could have happened to the poor lad's CD Key? I refer you to
a news post I made some hours before his email came in, in which I quote a post on the Blizzard website:
We have just closed more than 36,000 accounts for cheating on Battle.net. More than 28,000 CD keys tied to these accounts have been disabled from Realm play on Battle.net for one month, and more than 3,000 CD keys have been permanently disabled from Realm play due to repeat offenses.
In other words, Paul here cheated badly enough to get caught, got his CD Key banned, and is now begging for another one. Because after all, why should he suffer any consequences for his actions? That's not fair. It should go without saying that we run a D2 fansite, we are not Blizzard, and I don't have any CD Keys other than the one that came on my version of the game, which I purchased back in 2001.
I blocked out the domain name of his email address, but it's one of two surprises about his mail. 1) His email isn't @aol.com, and 2) he's not American! The email sender is John (his dad, I assume) and his ISP is Australian.
It's often remarked upon that English has become the world's language, to an extent no other single language has ever been. I'd like to point out that the l33t, largely-illiterate version of it has truly become the Internet's underaged troll language, and that you can't hardly tell emails from begging 14 y/o idiots apart, whether said idiots reside in Norway, Oz, France, Korea, or Texas. (Emails from older kids or adults in those disparate areas are different though; the ones from non-native English speakers, especially non-US ones, are usually far better written.)
Labels: painful d2 email
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Must they talk?
Watching some of the preseason game between SD and Green Bay right now, and I'd forgotten just how insipid football play by play guys are. I don't even know the names of the guys doing this game, but they've used the word "consistent" at least a dozen times in half an hour, and never with its actual meaning. They apparently mean "play well" when they use it, but as they say, "He needs to become more consistent." or "Their offensive line play has been very inconsistent." it sounds sort of ridiculous.
Green Bay's pass defense was consistent last year... consistently shitty. So by saying they need to become more consistent... at what, exactly? Being burned for huge gains? Missing tackles? They need to "improve," kids. That's something different.
The announcers have also trotted out every hoary cliche half a dozen times so far. San Diego was horrible in 2002 and 2003, and their quarterback, Brees, was a large reason for that. They improved greatly last year, winning 12 games before laying an egg in the playoffs, and a large reason for that was Brees, who played very well almost all season. Did he improve his consistency? No! He went from sucking to playing well.
The announcers keep bringing it up though, (as they did every single time I saw a SD game last year) because they want to talk about how Brees came into camp after the disastrous 2003 season, and talked to the coaches and said he would be better, and talked to the players and said he was going to lead them, and so on and so forth. It's a good story because SD turned around and had one of the best records in the league, but what if they'd gone 5-11 instead of 12-4? Would one announcer have trotted out the anecdote about Brees' newfound resolve and leadership and confidence even in the face of
sucking adversity? Of course not, and I'm sure dozens of players make similar statements every year, only to continue sucking in obscurity. Yet the announcers repeat the story about Brees saying it as though it's some sort of revealed truth from scripture.
The other beauty of the announcers is that once they've decided upon their narrative line, nothing will sway them from it. Since Brees improved and is now a good QB, anything he does must be a sign of his incipient brilliance. Even bad things. If he misses a pass downfield it's because he now has the confidence to throw it there. If he takes a sack it's because his wisdom in reading the field told him nothing was open and he was wise to go down rather than throwing an interception. Just now the Chargers had a 3rd down and 5. Brees looked left, looked right, and then dumped it off to the running back, (the easiest play for a QB, and one every QB does when he can't find anything better to do with the pass) which led the announcers to rhapsodize over how wisely he'd read the field and how he never would have made that pass two years ago. If Brees had struggled last year and the Chargers had lost, the announcers would have been all over him for settling for a short little dump off pass on 3rd and 5, when he should have found someone open downfield and not settled for the safety route, etc.
This sort of thing reminds me vividly of why I generally prefer reading
intelligent writing
about football to watching it. Or at least watching it live, when I can't FF over all of the insipid announcer time-filling bullshit. And I like football! It's the only sport I'll watch on TV even when one of my very few favored teams aren't playing.
Movie Trailer Fun
Movie Trailers!
The teaser trailer for Domino didn't do much for me, and I thought the whole "fashion model girl turned bounty hunter" was a bit ridiculous, inspired by true events or not, but I have to admit that I really enjoyed this new full length one. It starts off slowly, with lots of annoying voice over by a very English-sounding Kiera Knightley, but once they get into the plot complications and show some action, it starts rocking in a very quirky sort of way. I'm usually one to criticize trailers for giving away far too much of the plot (See Island, The.) but this one strikes a nice balance; telling us enough to get us interested without spilling all the beans.
Elsewhere, there's allegedly a full Aeon Flux trailer online, at last, but it's on some godawful Mtv player thing that I can't get to work, even after I turn off my pop up blocker. I guess it's inevitable with corporate partnerships, but the overcomplcation of movie trailer delivery is an increasing scourge upon the Internet. About every month there's a new one on AOL's Moviefone that's simply unwatchable; you've got to DL some proprietory AOL software, you've got to allow invasive cookies, and even if you do all of that it plays in a tiny window and looks like shit. Eventually those show up on the official movie website in decent quality, but it sucks to wait; in fact I have a cable modem expressely so I do not have to wait.
That aside, I'd also like to recommend the Lord of War trailer, though I doubt I'll see the movie myself. It's about Nicholas Cage as an international gun dealer, but there's really no way to judge the tone of the film. The trailer plays it as a sort or screwball comedy, with him jetting into one dangerous tyrant's regime after another and selling lots of bullets and guns without a shred of morality about his actions. That's contrasted with a pleasant American suburban homelife with a wife who knows nothing of his real job. Yes, just like every spy movie made in the last decade. It's inevitable that Cage's worlds will collide, and I suppose it could be fun when they do, but I rather suspect there will be lots of faux sincerity as he's motivated by his wife to suddenly discover a conscience. Maybe he'll even give away a plane load of guns to some noble freedom fighters somewhere, to counter act his sales to the evil oppressor. But I sure hope not. (I must admit that I have no idea how I'd wrap up the script to this one either. It's a cute set up, but where do you go with it from there?)
I had some hopes for The Transporter II, since the early teaser was cute and lively, but it's looking more and more mediocre with every film clip and international trailer they release.
Nightwatch still looks interesting, and the image quality of the trailers has increased immeasurably since the first one that came streaming from some Russian site, but since I've been hearing about it for over a year I'm getting sort of sick of the concept, and I'm very sick of the endless delays US movie fans seem to suffer with every imported film. The damn thing came out last summer in Russia; how long does it take to thorw in some fricking subtitles anyway?
Lastly, I've got to rave a bit about the new Tony Jaa movie. Ong Bak was a cheesy film with colossal fight scenes (I gave it a 7.), and this one looks to be about the same. In fact the only sneak review I've seen online says as much, but whatever; the new trailer is the absolute shit if you enjoy martial arts. Sure, I can see holes in a lot of the moves, and it's frequently obvious (especially in slow motion) that the guy about to be hit is waiting for it; but it's still got a lot of fun stuff. And I'm sure that we'll all enjoy it, when some film studio gets around to releasing it in the US in fall 2007 or so.
Golf Ain't Easy
The fourth and final "major" tournament of the season is just beginning in golf, and before it started there were nothing but articles about how Tiger Woods was almost sure to win, how he'd finished 1st, 2nd, and 1st in the three majors so far this year, how his game was once again by far the best in the world, and so on and so forth. So how did he do in his first round? He shot a 5 over par 75, and is sitting pretty
in 112th place. That 50/50 field bet against Tiger is looking pretty good now, eh?
Book Reviews: The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
This is an extremely long blog post, but since it's all going to be one page in the reviews section once I set it up there, and since all of the reviews are based on each other, and since I didn't want to break it up into six different posts, oh well. You know where your page down key is if you need it, right?
Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series (initially a trilogy, now up to six books) is a classic of fantasy and a series (at least the initial trilogy) that every fantasy fan should read. You can do it quickly too; the first four books are no more than 180 pages each, though they aren't exactly a quick read, and the sixth one isn't much longer.
LeGuin's world of
Earthsea is somewhat thematically similar to Tolkien's
LotR, in that they both feel very real and authentic, and are tinged with sorrow and loss and sacrifice. If you want slam/bang action fantasy where the good guys triumph with super spells and swords, and the bad guys are evil and scheming and get theirs in the end, you will find Earthsea a great change of pace, and you will probably not enjoy it very much. LeGuin's series is much more about the smaller details, and the journey, and the hardships and sacrifices a man (or woman, in the later books) must make to be great and to do good for his people. Her stories are more about personal growth or redemption through great acts, rather than about the acts themselves, and the heroic deeds are usually being done out of necessity, when there is no other choice. Young heroes eager for glory and power bring evil ends upon themselves, and rash actions are usually punished just as they are in real life.
LeGuin is kind of a big bang writer, (I explain that
style of fantasy here.) except that her bangs aren't that big, and she doesn't really try to make them big. In her books you get pages and pages of documentary-style coverage of people living in the middle ages, making food, sailing a boat, walking around a mountain in the rain, etc, before there's finally some action and excitement. If you get into the stories and the world and the characters, it's satisfying to read about their every act, and you care more when they finally face some danger and do something heroic. If you don't, you get bored and skim a lot and wonder why anyone likes this material.
For example, here's a recent review of
the first book in the series, from an Amazon.com reviewer.
A Poor Man's Harry Potter, July 17, 2005
I tried to get through this first book but just couldn't manage it. I was bored to tears. I presume Rowling was familiar with the basic idea of a young man going to wizard school and finding out who he really was, but Rowling did it brilliantly while Le Guin was just plain awful. I presume it was so popular when written because there just wasn't a lot of fantasy for fans of the genre. I'm amazed that it's still in print.
Now this 1 star review is not finding much agreement, with just 1 out of 14 people finding it useful, but while I disagree with him, I can definitely see his point. Harry Potter is a modern children's book, with a much-simplified morality. All of the humans and main characters are either good or evil, and they act very consistently. There's virtually no introspection, nothing troubling for the reader to think over, and good guys to root for with all of your heart (unless you want to be post modern and dislike Harry just because he's such a square little goodie goodie).
Earthsea is a much more adult (and therefore old fashioned) series, (the first trilogy was written around 1970) with tons of ambiguity, characters full of doubt and failings, realistic characters with both good and bad aspects to them, and a distinct lack of splashy, special-effect type spells. Magic in the land of Earthsea is much more about personal will and research and knowledge; a mage needs to know the words of the enchantments, but how well the spell works is much more about how the individual mage ties the words together, and how his own power and will forms the magical act. The magic in this world is not fun and games, it's dark and dangerous and must be performed only when necessary, and even then worked with great care. There is much philosophical talk about the balance of magic, and the plot of the third book involves everyone in the world slowly losing their mind due to a mad wizard tampering with the boundaries between life and death.
In short, you don't read these novels for the fun times and magical showdowns and battles between good and evil. Most of the battles take place within the hearts of individuals, and no one is truly good or evil; everyone has elements of both in them, and they must constantly work to see that the good triumphs. It's very much like real life, and that is precisely what so many modern readers don't seem to like about
Earthsea. People want fun escapism, they want kings and lords and ladies, they want epic battles where good triumphs, and they want magic that solves problems instead of creating new ones.
I can vouch for that myself; I first read the original trilogy when I was in grade school, and while I liked it, I was also confused and depressed and bored by a lot of it, and mostly just wanted the dragon battles and mage battles and such to go on. I would have gone insane for the Harry Potter series at that age, (if it had existed back then) since I didn't have the patience or the maturity to really enjoy the intelligence and adult themes behind the simple actions in Earthsea.
I also had very different reactions to the characters and events, based on my age. I can remember reading book one back then, and being as bored as Sparrowhawk was on the mountain with Ogion. I didn't want to learn what he was teaching (peace, harmony, introspection), I wanted to go to Roke and learn real magic and kick ass. Once at Roke, I was 100% with Sparrowhawk as he picked a rivalry with and grew to hate Jasper, learned faster than he should have, and then nearly killed himself by overreaching with an enormous enchantment. Reading it now, I see Sparrowhawk as a fevered little knucklehead who has no idea of his place and needs to be taken down several notches, Jasper as a snarky asshole, but one who speaks a lot of truth when he constantly deflates Sparrowhawk's vastly-inflated ego, and Sparrowhawk's tragic near-death as a very necessary event, one that probably kept him from going as mad as the evil mage in book 3, and possibly destroying the world with his ambition and lack of common sense.
And who knows; when I'm 50 or 60 and read them again, I might get an entirely different meaning based on my life experience up to that point.
Here follow my short reviews of each book in the series. I highly recommend reading the first three, in order of course. Your local library will have them or can order them, if you don't want to hunt them down in a used paperback store. Whether you read the rest of the series is up to you, depending on how much you enjoy the first three. If you don't love them, stop there, because it's not getting any better after that.
Book 4 is very divisive, and it's discussed in detail below. Books 5 and 6 aren't bad, though they're sort of rewarmed versions of books 1-3, with more "kitchen sink drama" and far less action and excitement and magic.
Important! The following scores are all relative to each other. All of these scores and reviews were written at the same time, in August 2005, after I had just read books 5 and 6, and skimmed over the first 4 to refresh my memory. I give several of these books mediocre or even low scores, but that is only in comparison to the other books in the series. The 4.5 I give Tehanu here doesn't mean it's necessarily worse than other unrelated books that I've given 5s and 6s to, though.
These reviews contain
minor spoilers about the plot set ups for each book, and reading about the plot of book 3 (for example) will tell you something about what happens in book 2. I don't see anyway to avoid that without making these reviews completely superficial, though.
To the individual scores, in order of publication.
Book 1: A Wizard of Earthsea
Plot: 7
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Horror: 5
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 8
Overall: 8
The first book in the series is
A Wizard of Earthsea. This one introduces us to the main character (at least of the first three books), Sparrowhawk, AKA Ged. He's a young boy when the book begins, born to a blacksmith father and a dying mother, and born with an intrinsic talent for magic. He first shows his talent at a young age, nearly killing himself with a spell far beyond his abilities, briefly apprentices with a very quiet and peaceful mage, then heads on to the mage school on Roke. There he is driven by pride and a lust for knowledge, gains in skill faster than any mage ever has, and nearly kills himself by working a mighty enchantment that backfires.
Maimed and slowed by the injuries, he eventually gains his wizard's staff and heads out into the world, where he hopes to avoid the shadow creature that entered the world when he cast his ill-advised spell, and eventually, after several narrow escapes, realizes that he must hunt down the shadow being, rather than running from it.
The book is basically about accepting responsibility for your own actions, growing to be a man, behaving wisely and not rashly, making sacrifices for those you care about, and so on. It's an enjoyable book, and a great introduction to the series, setting up a fascinating character, and interesting world, and introducing us to LeGuin's take on dragons (they are awesomely-portrayed in
Earthsea).
This book also includes one of my biggest complaints about LeGuins's writing; the mercilessly-overt foreshadowing. She's not that bad about doing it all through the story, as some authors are, but on page one of the first book in the series she says this is a story about Sparrowhawk, from before he became great and renowned and did X and Y and Z. Right then and there, on page 1 of the first book, she not only tells you that Sparrowhawk is going to survive the challenges he faces in that book, and that he'll surmount them completely and become famous and powerful and wonderful. She basically gives away the conclusion of the first two books in one sentence! I'm not repeating what that line says here, since it would be infinitely spoiler, but I'm not sure why I'm bothering not to when the author herself did it right off the bat.
Book 2: The Tombs of Atuan
Plot: 5
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Horror: 3
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6
Book two takes place a few years after book one ends, and while it is largely about Ged's quest to find the other half of an ancient ring that's been broken and lost for over 800 years, he's not the main character in the story. For most of the book he's not even onscreen, as we spend time with Tenar, a young priestess in the Hardic lands, islands occupied by a different culture than the dominant people in Earthsea. On her large island Tenar lives as a Dalai Lama-esque reincarnated princess, one who is held in great regard but who has little actual power. As she finds out during the course of the novel.
Ged doesn't actually appear until nearly a third of the way through the book, and the first 50+ pages are instead about Arha and her life as she serves the dark and powerful Nameless Ones, who are sort of earth spirits that inhabit an ancient labyrinth beneath her temples. When Ged eventually appears she sees him in the dark tombs below the surface, and locks him into the maze, where he will surely die. He is a curiosity to Arha though, and she can't help feeding him enough to keep him alive while speaking with him to learn of other lands and other cultures and philosophies.
Eventually he tells her of his quest, and his presence precipitates a schism between Arha and the high priestess who actually holds most of the power, while supposedly serving the young girl/reincarnated goddess. Arha finds herself identifying more and more with Ged and questioning the religion and philosophy she's been raised in, and eventually must make a choice between staying there and letting the foreign mage die, or giving him the ring and fleeing with him to a strange and distant land.
This novel has by far the least action or adventure of the first three books, and is actually quite similar to book 4, in terms of nothing really happening until the conclusion. It's all talk and thought and introspection, rather than action or fighting or dragons. It's still a good book, and more thought provoking the more you think about it (Once you have the maturity to enjoy it for that; I disliked it when I was a kid.), but I can see an impatient reader skimming pages by the dozen, just wanting to find out if Ged escapes the damn labyrinth with the ring or not.
Book 3: The Farthest Shore
Plot: 7
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Horror: 4
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7.5
Book three takes place more than a decade after the events in book two. Arha is nowhere to be seen in this novel, and Ged is now Archmage. He's done numerous great deeds since recovering the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, but unfortunately those are not detailed in this book or any of them. We just hear about them when other people think why he's so great.
A new crisis faces the islands of Earthsea though, as reports continually trickle into Roke of magic no longer working on distant islands, of people losing their minds and running mad through the streets, of singers forgetting the words to ritual songs, and so on. A young prince has come bearing such tales from his own powerful island, and Ged immediately sees something in him that no one else does, and elects to take the lad with him when he sets forth, alone, to try and discover what is happening to Earthsea.
They sail off, over the objections of most of the other senior mages, and go through various adventures (none of which are especially exciting). The book is pretty depressing, really, as it depicts one miserable and hopeless person and island after another, as Ged and Arren travel aimlessly around the world, steadily losing hope as the sickness that is poisoning the minds of every living man begins to work on them. It's very tricky to write from the perspective of a depressed and hopeless person without making the reader depressed and hopeless themselves. In this book, LeGuin does a very good job of letting us know just how morose Prince Arren feels... perhaps too good a job.
The plot eventually picks up when a dragon seeks out Ged and Arren, bringing news of their enemy and where he might be found. A grand confrontation beckons... until when it finally occurs, there's far less to it than the reader might have expected. Imagine if in Harry Potter 7, when Harry finally faces Voldemort... they talk for a while and Harry convinces Voldemort that he's been misguided in his evil all these years, and that he should just lie down and die and he'd be happier then. And Voldemort agrees, leaving Harry alone to try and fix the hole in the world that's sucking everyone into madness and despair.
The book has somewhat of a surprise ending, when Arren turns out to be far more than he appeared to be, and all of Ged's cryptic musings on how he'll be remembered more for discovering Arren than for his own deeds are explained in heroic fashion.
Book 4: Tehanu
Plot: 4
Concept: 5
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/5
Characters: 4
Fun Factor: 2
Page Turner: 3
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 4.5
Tehanu is the real turning point in the series. I first reviewed it long before reading books 5 and 6, and wrote a full review of it with scores somewhat different from these. My opinion of it hasn't changed since then, but I did redo the scores to make them relative to the other books in the series.
This novel was written 1991, nearly two decades after the 3rd book in the series, and when I first read it I was heartbroken. I had long loved the first three novels, despite all of their slowness and introspection and lack of action, but this one took that to a new level. There is perhaps one page of action and excitement in this entire novel, it comes at the very end, and it's hardly there at all; with the crucial action climax to the entire very, very slowly developing plot basically taking place off screen.
That's intentional though, as LeGuin set out to write a very different book, one without a plot or structure or tension, as such things are usually described. The first three books in the series, #2 especially, spend a great deal of time detailing the sort of events that aren't mentioned in normal fantasy adventures, and often feature the sorts of characters you never see in those books either. Peasants, housewives, powerless sisters of powerful mages, and so on. They're seldom even integral to the plots; they're just there for background or realism, or to give a PoV not usually encountered in such books.
This is taken to an extreme in Tehanu, where almost the entire book is about a widowed peasant woman and the fire-scarred orphan girl she takes in. They are dispossessed from her late husband's home when her layabout son returns, they walk across the mountains with some weird, lurking guys subtly menacing them, and they settle in the home of the old, dead wizard where they scratch out a living with a few goats, some chickens, and a peach tree. Eventually Ged returns, an event that shows us this novel is set just hours after book 3 ended, but he's now broken and powerless, having spent his might to heal the rift in the fabric of the world in the end of book three.
And he's not there to rest and return stronger than ever; he really has lost his power, and frankly it's damn depressing to watch him moping around a goat pasture, unknown and unloved by the local villagers, with his entire life behind him and years yet to live. Some of the Amazon.com reviewers have said it's heartbreaking to see a beloved character like Ged reduced and weakened; almost like watching a parent die. You can take that comment two ways: 1) It's realistic and brilliant writing to make people feel so strongly about a character, and interesting to see one in a way you never do in other novels. 2) Readers don't read fantasy novels to suffer and feel miserable when the characters they love are crushed and humiliated without hope of salvation. Which philosophy you agree with will largely define how you feel about this book.
As I said, I hated this story when I first read it, back in the 90s, but have since come to appreciate it, though I can't say I actually like it. The first three novels in this series were written by a younger LeGuin, one who was putting her own stamp on the fantasy world, but who was essentially Tolkien-esque in having everything of importance be done by men, and skewing her tales around the great deeds of men. By the time she wrote
Tehanu she was a "born-again feminist" and had a very different philosophy about life, and wrote Tehanu almost as an experiment, to see if she could construct a full novel without a single thing that your average reader expects in a fantasy novel. No kings, no wizards, no battles, no romances, etc. It's just old, poor peasants scratching out their life on the far, far side of their former glory.
All the novels in Earthsea are quite solemn, with great responsibility and importance heaped upon every event, and I like that approach, so long as there is enough other interesting stuff to offset the very slow pace and very introspective style. It's not really a style I search out, but a good writer can make it work, and LeGuin does. Tehanu could have done that as well, but LeGuin seems too committed to proving she can write a novel in which nothing important happens. She's written it, but whether that's a good thing or not is very open to debate.
Her approach has, as you might expect, divided her fans. As I discuss in
my old Tehanu review, the Amazon.com reviews are all over the place, with more 1 star than 5 star reviews among the most popular, and reviewers denouncing it as passionately as others defend it. You may want to read Tehanu just to see what all the fuss is about, but there's a dualism there as well.
1) People who have never read any of the series might enjoy this one to start off with, since it doesn't require any previous knowledge of the characters, and it wouldn't bother you seeing Ged so weak and old. On the other hand, if you didn't know anything about the world or the characters, why would you trudge through 200 pages of this kitchen sink drama that's sadly lacking in drama?
2) People who have read the first trilogy will enjoy this to see what's become of the old characters, and it's interesting to see LeGuin's new take on her own world. On the other hand, you'll know what you're missing when there's no plot or action or conflict in this one, and you'll find it impossible to keep from comparing this one to the first three, which you will most likely think much superior.
Book 5: Tales from Earthsea
Plot: 5
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 5
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5
Books 5 and 6 were written a decade after book 4, and that's definitely to their good. LeGuin's feminism isn't gone, but it's been tempered by reality and life experience, and she's not out to prove a point this time. Book 5 is a collection of short (and not so short) stories set at various times and places in the Earthsea world, and while none of them are especially good or exciting, none sink as deeply into mundanity as book 4 did.
There are stories about dragons, about the founding of the wizard school on Roke, about how and why women are no longer permitted to learn the higher forms of magic, and even one with a scene from earlier in Ged's life, though it's unfortunately not a scene of one of his great deeds. Nothing about this book really sucks, but nothing about it is very good either. It's more consistent with the tone of the first three books though, while still dealing in a more realistic and balanced fashion with the male/female interaction. Women aren't all the main characters this time, but they aren't entirely pushed away to the irrelevant side as they were in books 1-3, and they aren't living an utterly boring and simple life, like they were in book 4.
I don't think this one would be of much interest to someone who hadn't read the whole series though, and you will at least enjoy it far more if you've read the rest, and know what holes in the narrative and history it's plugging.
Book 6: The Other Wind
Plot: 6
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5
The sixth and final (for now) novel in the Earthsea Cycle is similar to the third book, in structure. Something is fundamentally wrong with the world, but this time it's affecting the dragons, and the dead, rather than the living humans. Dragons are returning to the lands of the east, raiding and burning crops and houses, as they try to drive the people away (rather than simply eating or burning them). In addition, the dead seem restless, and the more sensitive and wise people suspect there is a great sickness lying over the world.
If book 4 was about feminism coming into a patriarchal society, book 6 is about ideas of reincarnation coming into a heaven/hell view of the afterlife. Lebannen, the first king over the lands in more than 800 years, needs to marry. The conqueror king of the Hardic lands has sent his daughter for Lebannen to marry. Lebannen is incensed by this, feeling trapped into a marriage with a woman who does not speak his language or know his customs, and who is the daughter of a much less powerful king, one he could crush or ignore, if he so choose.
The meat of the plot has Lebannen and a few advisors, including his would-be queen, riding around and making parley with dragons, while they worry about the larger issue of the unrest in the land of the dead, a physical place in the world of Earthsea. As the plot unfolds, progress is made in dealing with the angry dragons, and Lebannen grows warmer towards the mysterious veiled girl he may have to marry while she begins to learn his language and makes efforts to make him like her. Aiding greatly in everything is Tehanu, the fire-scarred young girl of the 4th book, who... turned into a dragon at the end of it. Yes, turned into a dragon.
It seemed absurd at the time, but as the mythology of Earthsea developed more over books 5 and 6, stories came about that humans and dragons were initially one creature with the ability to change between the forms. Dragons had nothing and were free, humans were greedy and enslaved by their greed, and over time humans grew more and more separate from dragons, until all memory of their common origin was lost. (I can easily see a reader finding this just too ridiculous to accept, and not being able to get into the story at all because of it.) One or two people every generation are still born with the ability to transform though. Funny, you'd think word of that would have gotten around a bit more.
Furthermore, the humans of the archipelago, the main characters in the Earthsea books, believe in an afterlife where there is nothing but a dry, dead land, filled with the aimless and emotionless dead. It's a horrible place, where lovers pass on the street without recognizing each other, and nothing ever changes. Sort of like the waiting room at the DMV. The Hardic people though, including Tenar, who came along with the ring in book 2, and the princess/future-queen in book 6, believe in reincarnation, and think dying with the beliefs of the archipelago people is a horrible fate, since they will never be reborn (and apparently they're right, as far as the book goes in resolving this choose-your-own-destiny theological quandary).
The climax of the book involves the king's party working to end the locked state of their afterlife land of the dead, and finding a way to become one with the other people, and discovering why no dragons ever fly through the land of the dead. It's a largely philosophical problem, but at least this book has a plot of sorts, and a love story, though it's rather uninvolving. Lebannen and his queen to be hardly interact, and they are indifferent towards each other throughout, until suddenly when the plot requires it they are completely devoted to each other and ready to die for their love.
I do have to give LeGuin props for thinking up a major world-threatening plot that wasn't just based on an evil wizard (again) or attacking dragons, or attacking Kargs, or other common things. It's damn hard to threaten your world and all of the people in it again and again without repeating yourself or your villains, and she mostly managed it, with a healthy dose of theology and philosophy thrown in. My mediocre score isn't based on that; it's more due to the events during the book being pretty boring, as they lead up to the enormously important but still not very exciting climax.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
German Gangster Rap?
Interesting
NY Times article (that you'll probably need to register to read) about the growing popularity of German rap artists, especially the newly-popular gangster rappers, who are succeeding despite (because of?) their albums often being put on restricted lists that keep them from being advertised or sold to anyone under 18. The whole thing is a good read, with the odd fact that lots of the neo-Nazi skinheads are turning into gangster rap fans, despite the fact that the biggest rappers are the children of immigrants; people the skinheads would probably stomp with their jackboots, in any ordinary situation.
I'm going to quote from a bit about the language barrier though, since that was my first thought when I heard "German rappers." I don't know much about the German language, but I do know that it's full of outrageously long compound words that would seem virtually impossible to work into a rap.
German rap has traditionally ceded ground to imports from across the Atlantic. Though some German hip-hop groups found success in the 1990's, German, unlike French and English, is not a language that accommodates the genre, say some artists.
The language features many combination words with an avalanche of syllables that don't rhyme well together, Bushido said. That impairs a rapper's ability to let loose a smooth and creative flow. That, combined with inferior production quality and beats, kept young people listening to rap imports, said Eric Remberg, the head of label Aggro Berlin, who prefers to go by the monicker Specter.
German rap's newfound success is partly a result of improved production quality and better lyrics, and partly a realization that Germany has its own problem neighborhoods, where failed integration and social hardship are part of the daily struggle, Specter said.
Where there's a will there's a way, I suppose, and perhaps they can work in proper nouns to rhyme, since those aren't changed in German and can be shorter and easier? Gotterdammerung with Mao Tze Tung, for instance.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Painful D2 Emails: Part 03
I wasn't going to post about this, since I've seen and heard it a million times during the years I've been working on the D2 site. Malaya loved the story though, and it's fairly representative of a lot of larger issues, so here goes. Here's the mail that came in today, to the
Warnings section of the D2 site.
Hello
My sons have been playing for the last few weeks and are taking a liking to the game. being 11 years old (twins) he came into my room crying. stating that someone just made his mouse freeze and depleting his inverntory of all equipment. What lazy bastered would do such a thing and Is there anything I can do for him.
I dont know if I should just tell him just to unistall the game and dont buy anything from Blizzard again. or if there is anyway of tracking the greedy basterd
Leaving aside the question of dad's questionable literacy (How do you misspell "bastard" twice in the same short email, and differently each time?), here's what I replied with.
Try and teach your kids not to download any 3rd party programs. Diablo 2 itself is completely safe; it's other stuff players download (almost always with the promise of cheating in some way) that screws them.
There are rip offs of that kind with every online game, and really; better your kids learn from losing a few D2 items than after unwittingly putting a trojan horse on your computer that steals your credit card when you order something on amazon.com.
Flux
Diabloii.net
So am I being mean or non-sympathetic or what? I guess I am, sorta, it's just after 5 or 6 years of dumb people falling for the same few scams over and over and over again, always led to it by their cheating greed, I don't have much patience with it. I suppose I also reacted a bit to dad's "It must be someone else's fault, since my 11 y/o's couldn't possibly be to blame for their own problems." Plus I figure he's probably pretty computer illiterate and maybe this sort of no-nonsense email will shock some sense into him before he loses something that actually matters, due to poor computer security and common sense.
Update: The dad replied to me the next day:
I understand.
I see what has happened. He did not specify to me that he actually went to a website to try and get a cheat. I apologize for being fast to react. I hope this
teaches my son a valuable lesson. Cheating doesn't make sense. I am kind of glad this happened. Now he has to start all over again.
Thanks for your response
So props to dad for seeing the situation clearly, once he had information in hand to do so. And they'll all live happily ever after now... except for little Bobby and Tommy, of course.
Labels: painful d2 email
Stoic, Noble, and it Makes an Ideal Pair of Boots
So on Saturday, Malaya and me were walking out of a bridal supply store (No, I haven't popped any questions; Malaya's serving as the bride's maid for a friend's wedding in October.) when directly across the street we saw a reptile store. "Ooh! Ooh!" I said, and since she was game we merrily jay-walked and perused their selection.
It wasn't a very big store, and their snake selection was pretty sad. They had some neat lizards though, crowned by a huge breeding pair of
black tegus. I'd heard of
that type of lizard before, but never really paid them much mind. (I owned a
Savannah and
Nile Monitor years ago, neither of which lived for very long.) However when they got one of the tegus out of the cage and put it down on the floor, and it began plodding along in stoic fashion, Malaya was enchanted.
The picture here is a red tegu, but the body type is about the same as the ones in the store. Pudgy and stumpy. The one we saw was about three feet long, with a stumpy and very fat tail, short claws, and an extremely mellow temperment. It just walked, in the hip-twisting snaking fashion longer lizards have, and was oblivious to all the petting it received as it went. What did perk it up was when the pet store guy picked a mouse out of the feeder cage and tossed it down in front of the tegu. The mouse had hardly landed when the lizard lunged forward and chomped it, then held it in a crushing grip for a minute before flipping it around and gobbling it down head first.
It wasn't the most efficient eater ever; I saw a guy with a five foot, dog-tame Nile Monitor bring it into a pet store on a leash once, announce he'd pay for anything it ate, and when the pet store owner started tossing feeder mice and a few baby hamsters down, that lizard went through them like popcorn. I'm talking without even pausing to chew: gulp, gulp, gulp.
So now we've gone from no plans for future lizard ownership to great eagerness to get a couple/few tegus, once we've got a house with space for their big cages and money to afford them and their food. I've always enjoyed lizards, and wanted big ones when I was younger and didn't have to be realistic about just how much space they required. Tegus seem a very good option in the large lizard department, since they're not that fast, they don't grow the huge scythe whipping tails, they aren't climbing tree lizards, and they have a very mellow temperment. All features the larger monitors and iguanas lack, in one way or another. Plus their names are just fun to say. Tegu! Tegu! Tegu!
...and Then They Suck You Back In.
So for months and months there was a ridiculous celebrity trial going on, one I did my best to avoid reading or hearing about. It finally ended, news coverage of its aftermath was mercifully lacking, and I had hopes that it would never be mentioned again... until this afternoon, when I opened up my Yahoo news front page, and it was right on top as the most popular highlight, with pictures and everything!
Two Jackson Jurors Regret Acquittal
LOS ANGELES - Two of the jurors who voted to acquit singer Michael Jackson of child molestation and other charges say they regret their decisions.
Jurors Ray Hultman and Eleanor Cook, who both have pending book deals, planned to appear Monday night on the new MSNBC show "Rita Cosby: Live and Direct."
In a preview shown Monday on NBC's "Today," Cosby asked Cook if the other jurors will be angry with her.
"They can be as angry as they want to. They ought to be ashamed. They're the ones that let a pedophile go," responded Cook, 79.
Hultman, 62, told Cosby he was upset with the way other jurors approached the case: "The thing that really got me the most was the fact that people just wouldn't take those blinders off long enough to really look at all the evidence that was there."
Cook told Cosby: "The air reeked of hatred and people were angry and I had never been in an atmosphere like that before."
The worst part is that there's absolutely nothing to the article, if you read the rest of it. These two have book deals and are working to promote them, and their angle seems to be "I thought he was guilty but everyone else on the jury was stupid and thought he was innocent and they were mean and I was afraid to stand strong against them."
Okay, that's fine, but when you can wrap up their entire plot in one sentence, how in the hell do we need not one but two books on it? And why the hell is the media wasting their time reporting on what these idiots say, and reporting on it where I have to see it? Bad media! No donut!
Sunday, August 07, 2005
War Profiteering in Iraq
Truly depressing article about one woman doing her best to curb the billions being squandered in Iraq and stolen by US companies (mostly Halliburton) handling government contracts there.
Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse is the Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting ("PARC" in the alphabet soup of military acronyms) in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Lest the title fool, she is responsible for awarding billions upon billions in taxpayers' money to private companies hired to resurrect war-torn Iraq and to feed, clothe, shelter and do the laundry of American troops stationed there.
She has rained a mighty storm upon herself for standing up, before members of Congress and live on C-SPAN to proclaim things are just not right in this staggeringly profitable business.
She has asked many questions: Why is Halliburton — a giant Texas firm that holds more than 50 percent of all rebuilding efforts in Iraq — getting billions in contracts without competitive bidding? Do the durations of those contracts make sense? Have there been violations of federal laws regulating how the government can spend its money?
...
Her needling of contracts awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) predated the war in Iraq, beginning with costs she said were spiraling "out of control" from a 2000 Bosnia contract to service U.S. troops. From 1995 to 2000, Halliburton's CEO was Dick Cheney, who left to run for vice president. He maintains his former company has not received preferential treatment from the government.
Since then, she had questioned both the amounts and the reasons for giving KBR tremendous contracts in the buildup to invading Iraq. At first she was ignored, she said. Then she was cut out of the decision-making process.
...
Her husband watches what is happening to her and tries to bite his lip.
"Bunny has a lot of faith. She really believes that someone will stand up and say, 'This is wrong.' But I don't think a person exists like that in the Department of Defense."
Sad to say her husband is likely correct. It's simply laughable to pretend that a company helmed by the current vice president, one
he managed horribly while paying himself hundreds of millions of dollars, isn't getting preferential treatment as they belly up to the trough and basically name their price to run contracts in Iraq; contracts that no other companies are allowed to bid on or compete for.
Oh well, it's not as if there were any possible better uses for billions and billions of our tax dollars. And it's all been worth it, what with Iraq transformed into a beacon of peace, freedom, and democracy, at virtually no cost in human life.
Fun, Quick, Free, Online Street Fighter II Game
Since
I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago, I suppose I'm honor-bound to post the link to a new one I've been enjoying. The other day, while blogging about two random and pointless dreams I woke up with, I mentioned and linked to Street Fighter II, the arcade classic that consumed so many hours (days? weeks?) of my late teens and early twenties. When I
Googled for it, the useful link I included was the third result. I'm linking to the first one today, which is, to quote Google, Street Fighter II Flash Games.
The game is here, and it's what it says it is; a flash browser version of Street Fighter II. It's exact; they've ripped the artwork and animations and such, and it certainly gave me some fun nostalgia just to see the title screen and such. It's even pretty playable, though you can only control Ryu, and the only fight is a best of five round death match against Sagat. It plays somewhat differently than the arcade game, and it's strange to use the four arrow keys instead of a joystick, and much of the skill is gone since you do not lose health for blocking power moves, and you can not throw to defeat turtling (not that this is a problem against the always-attacking Sagat). The power moves are still there though, and they're simplified so you can do them on the keypad: Down + 2 punch buttons for a flying uppercut, back + 2 punch buttons for a fireball, and down + 2 kick buttons for a helicopter kick. You can even do combos, breaking off most of your standing punches short to string them to power moves; a fierce to helicopter kick is a guaranteed 6 hit huge damage combo, though I like the standing strong to short flying uppercut best, personally.
I initially thought it was hard since Sagat can cheat and juggle you endlessly with any air hit, like those cheesy X-men vs. Street Fighter games that came out around the time I stopped playing arcade games. Let him lift you up with a triple-hit uppercut in your corner and you may well lose 50 or 75% of your health before you ever come back down. It didn't take long to see that he needed that advantage to overcome his idiotic AI though, and I'm enjoying it now, trying new techniques out and figuring out his AI and such.
My approximate fun curve:
Games 1-3: I don't like this, it looks like SF2 but it plays weird; why don't my powerballs cancel out his tiger shots, it's so unfair he can triple hit and juggle.
Games 4-8: This is getting easy, I can just turtle and only be hit by one of his standing kicks, his slower tiger shots are so easy to get hits against with my fast fireballs, all I have to do is wait for him to miss a triple uppercut and nail him with a combo when he lands.
Games 9+: I've got a get a SF2 (or maybe go up to CE or Turbo, since they had more characters and moves) someday and play the other characters, or Ryu for real, but this is fun. It's too slow and easy if I just turtle and beat him with fireball trades or tee off on him when he does a stupid uppercut; I've got to figure the holes in his AI so I can time leap in combos. I just wish I got more than 15 FPS consistently; maybe it would help if I had an actual working 3D card?
Since a full game takes 5-10 minutes, it's fun, and it's free, I'm obviously recommending this one.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Stay out of Russian Submarines!
I have little to add to
this new tale of potential rescue and woe, other than the obvious admonition to stay the hell out of Russian submarines.
Russian crews labored late Saturday to drag up a mini-submarine snarled in a seabed antenna deep in the Pacific, hoping to get the seven trapped crewmen close enough to the surface to escape before their air supply ran out.
American and British rescue teams equipped with robotic submersible vehicles were hurrying to the site. Authorities hoped those vessels could cut the mini-sub free if two Russian ships were unable to lift the heavy entanglement with a cable they looped under it.
Official estimates varied on how much oxygen remained in the trapped vessel some 625 feet below the surface 10 miles off the Kamchatka Peninsula, but an admiral said the supply should last until the end of the rescue.
Rear Adm. Vladimir Pepelyayev, deputy head of the navy's general staff, said their air would likely last to the end of Saturday and possibly through Sunday. Fyodorov gave a similar estimate, but he later was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying there was enough to last until Monday.
So while his comments about the available air are pretty damn fishy, at least Russia admitted the sub was stuck and asked for help this time, rather than just letting the crew die like they did a few years ago. That's progress of a sort, even if it only came about thanks to international shaming and internal outrage. And I'm sure the men spending their weekend slowly suffocating in 40 degree temperatures appreciate it.
I've got to wonder about sub design though; apparently this one
snagged some old fishing nets and they're all snarled around its propeller. Why isn't there a way to emergency disconnect the propeller and then float to the surface, or make it there by smaller propellers they use for steering or stability or something? It seems an insane design flaw, given how easily a small sub could be snared by fishing line or undersea cables that it wouldn't have the power to break free of.
Aussie Slang
I've posted in the past about the enjoyably odd slang the British use, and since today's Yahoo has
an article about the Australian equivalent, I had to mention it.
SYDNEY, (AFP) - If a larrikin bashed a tall poppy from the big end of town and his mate dobbed him in, he might tell the police the identity was a shonky operator. The identity, no doubt, would try to hose it down as a furphy.
A historian recently lamented the fading of Australia's unique slang, but a newcomer to the land of Oz might find the language used in the country's newspapers as startling as some of its bizarre fauna.
No worries, fossicking about in The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary or on an education department website will provide the good oil. But be prepared for a bit more confusion.
So there you are. I do enjoy the cutesy abbreviations for so many things, "bikie gangs," "surfies," "fishos," and more. Elly (an English co-worker) has long amused me by calling lipstick or chapstick, "lippie."
The article today is full of further examples, and while I don't find them quite as charming as the English slang, it beats the crap we've got in America by a long site.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Things of the Day, Friday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant."
--Plato
Soul-Devouring Worry:Pink meat.
Answer of the Day:Because today's pool porn is wearing boxer shorts.
Curse of the Day:May you squander multiple golden opportunities.
Books Lying Open:The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
Harry Fricking Potter, by the richest woman on earth
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
The Other Wind, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuinMovies to probably-not-see list: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.)
Turkey Dogs!
It's probably a bad sign when neither of
our cats will even consider eating a little bite of a turkey dog, despite the fact that they are: 1) inveterate beggars, 2) perpetually hungry, and 3) carnivores. Right? The joke is that hot dogs are just "lips and assholes," and since turkeys have no lips... yeah.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Movie Review: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
For today's review of a film no one has or ever will see, I've got a Buddhist Korean film with virtually no dialogue and a long series of unhappy endings. Enjoy!
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring, is a very unusual film. It's from Korea, and has subtitles, but you'll hardly notice since the characters often go ten or fifteen minutes without speaking a word. It's basically about the Buddhist philosophy, and learning to be in harmony with the universe, however you do it. The film is thoughtful and meditative, and you need to watch it in that mood, or you'll be very bored. There are long stretches with no dialogue or human interaction, and you need to find meaning in watching a man explore the forest, or wash and clean a wooden temple, or prepare food.
The film details perhaps fifty years in the life of a pair of monks in an isolated island monastery. It's just the two of them there, and in the beginning one is a young boy and the other an old man. We see the young man when he is (about) 5, 18, 25, and 60, and see how his life is changing over time, how he is interacting with the world, and so on. He's not Jesus, or Buddha, though. He's not a great man or a teacher, he's just a man, full of fault and sin and confusion, and we witness a life largely filled with solitude and tragedy; but sadness of a kind he (and the viewer) can learn from. It's a very peaceful film, very contemplative, with long stretches of no dialogue at all.
To the scores, with more comments after them.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: NA
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 2
Replayability: 5
Overall: 5
Looking
at the scores on Rotten Tomatoes, I was shocked to see that this one got positive reviews from 85 out of 90 critics. It's at
85% approval rating on Metacritic too. My question though is, "Did they actually like it, or did they say they liked it since admitting to disliking it would mark them as shallow and stupid?"
This film is a bit like your kid's Holiday Play at elementary school. Of course it's not actually any good; no performance involving dozens of disinterested six year olds could ever be; but since it's your kid out there wandering around in a poorly-fitting costume and forgetting his lines, you can't dislike it, or apply the usual critical standards to it.
Spring... isn't a children's pageant, but it's so sweet, simple, honest, open, and moving that while it's frequently boring and could clearly be condensed into a five minute short without losing a bit of the plot, you can't admit that without sounding shallow and branding yourself as a short attention span Philistine.
This is the kind of film where there's no dialogue for 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch, while we simply watch a young Buddhist monk wash down a wooden porch, or play with a cat, or throw rocks into a river, or pick flowers from a riverside. It's a visual meditation, and while there is a plot and things that happen, there is always a great deal of downtime in between the plot elements, where the watcher either has a sense of peace and contentedness in watching nature, or you get very bored and want a car chase to begin. There are no car chases.
The plot, such as it is, shows a young boy living with an elderly Buddhist monk on a small pagoda out in the middle of a pond. The valley around their small house is gorgeous and completely wild, and it starts out in the spring, with the young boy exploring the area, learning his few duties and doing the sorts of things young boys do on their own in the woods. That's Spring.
Summer begins a decade or so later, when a mother brings her troubled daughter to live with them. Nature takes its course with two teenagers, and summer ends when the daughter is cured of her malaise and goes away, taking the boy's heart with her.
Fall begins some years later, when the boy is now a man, and when he returns in desperation to the valley and his old master. I'm leaving out the spoiler details here, but events have taken a painful and depressing turn, and Fall ends with the boy/man leaving again, and staying gone for many years.
Winter begins when he returns again, makes amends and sacrifices for his sins, and lives alone for some years until a woman brings her young son to him to raise there in solitude... and thus the cycle continues. We are left to wonder what the original old man did in his life before ending up alone in the tiny monastery, and what experiences shaped his life. You would never guess that the current old man, who was a young boy when the film began, had gone through all that he did before settling on a life of simple solitude.
Overall, it's a moving and powerful film, and while I've given it low scores in a variety of areas, I don't see how it could have been made any other way. It's frequently boring, and if you're watching it just for the plot you'll find the FF button irresistible, but without the long stretches of contemplation and simple observation of events the film wouldn't have any weight or power when it does finally do something. You've just got to book your chair for an hour and a half and let the film happen before you; this is not one you could appreciate watching it with a lot of distractions, or while FF'ing along, or in 30 minute chunks.
Spoilers follow!If you're curious, here's what happens. Most of it is profoundly sad, and yet meaningful, in a "find peace with the universe" sort of Buddhist way.
Spring: The boy ties a rock on a string around several animals when he's young. The master sees this, waits, and ties a stone on a rope around him that night, then sends him out to free the animals the next day, with the huge stone still lashed to his back. "Go and free that frog, snake, and fish. And if any of them have died, may you carry this stone around your heart all your days." he says, or words to that effect. Only the frog survives, and Spring ends with the broken-hearted sobbing of the young boy as he sees the deaths his thoughtless play has caused.
Summer: The mother leaves her teenaged daughter there, and after several days of great surprise and terror at the sight of her, the now teenaged monk becomes infatuated and prays frantically every time he bumps into the girl. They are soon in love, or at least in lust, and spend most of their time making love in the stream, on the rocks in the sunlight, and so on. The master sees it and does nothing about it, and when after a few weeks the girl is once again happy and cheerful the master takes her away, for she has been cured. The young monk can't let her go though, and goes after her, taking the Buddha statue from the monastery and leaving the old man all alone.
Fall: Years later and the old man is still alone. One day, while looking at the newspaper that came wrapped around some food he bought in the distant town, he sees an article about a man who murdered his wife and fled the city; and it's the young monk, of course. Soon enough the man shows up back at the monastery, still clutching a blood-covered knife, and after screaming and cursing and acting partially insane, he explains that the woman cheated on him and tried to live without him, and that all he ever wanted was her. So he killed her. He does return with the Buddha statue, at least. The monk makes no judgment on this, and does nothing but give the man his old monk's clothing again, and over a few days the man calms down again, painfully cuts his hair back into the short monk's brush cut (using the bloody knife and cutting his hands in the process) and begins to rediscover some peace in his life.
He must do penance though, and after a few days the old monk writes out many, many symbols on the wooden deck of their little island house. He uses a live cat's tail (it's a very patient cat) and black ink for his brush, and covers the deck with symbols in Korean. There were no subtitles for the writing, but it hardly mattered; it was some famous koan of peace and tranquility, they were large calligraphy style symbols, each one more than hand-sized, and there were probably 20 or 25 rows of about 15 characters each. Easily enough to fill your entire living room. The young man wakes while the monk is still painting, and when the monk tells him to carve out each letter with the knife and regain his peace while reading it, the man sets to doing so, though his hands bleed where he holds the knife. He keeps carving, brutally stabbing and hacking the upper layer of wood out of the deck, and all the while the monk keeps writing, and what you think will be a few lines keeps going and going and going, until you can't help but groan in sympathy for the murderer.
Complications arise when two men show up, dressed in modern city clothing. They call for the boat, the old monk rows over to bring them out to the island, and then leap off of it and point guns at the young man, saying they are there to arrest him for murder. He leaps up, brandishing the knife and snarling, clearly about to be shot down, until the old man shouts at him and orders him to continue carving. He does, and as he is on his knees the old man explains to the cops and asks them to let him finish. Proving this is not set in America, they do, sitting down and waiting all night and into the next day, while the man continues carving and hacking. He finally finishes the next day and simply falls over on the deck, on top of his work, and sleeps, utterly exhausted. While he sleeps the monk and the two cops work together to paint in the carved letters with a variety of bright colors, and when the man finally wakes up the next day he's amazed to see all of the decoration. The cops then take him away, he goes peacefully, and when one cop makes to cuff him, the other says that won't be necessary. After he leaves the old monk sets the cat loose on the shore, organizes everything in the house, folds and leaves his robes by the altar, stacks firewood in the boat, sits atop a huge stack of it, and burns himself to ashes while the boat slowly sinks into the pond.
Winter: Years later an old man walks up, white haired and tired, trudging along through the snow. The pond is frozen and he walks over to the old monastery, finding it empty and deserted. He sets to fixing it up, dresses himself in the old monk's robs, and then finds the boat frozen into the pond. Laboriously, using a small axe, he hacks a hole down through inches of ice (and this is real ice out on a real pond; all of the scenery and settings are completely realistic in the film) and scrapes out some of the old man's ashes, which he places in the Buddha statue on the altar. He then ties a huge stone wheel around his waist and drags it up to the top of one of the nearby mountains, struggling along for hours, until he places the stone there, with a statue on top of it, looking down at the pond valley.
Next he sets to cleaning up the monastery, making food, training his body in martial arts, meditating, and so on. Living the simplest of lives, alone and peaceful, clearly happy to be back there after the twenty or so years we imagine he spent in prison for murdering the woman. One day a woman comes to him with a baby boy in swaddling clothes, walking over the ice and all but collapsing in his door. He takes her in and helps her and the child, without a word being spoken. That night the woman slips away, leaving the child behind, but she falls through a hole in the ice and drowns. The monk wakes the next morning when the crying toddler leads him out onto the ice, where he finds the woman's body, fishes her out, and knows that the child is his to raise, thus continuing the cycle that began when he was a tiny child given to the monk. This is the only season that doesn't end with something that made me want to cry, and I actually thought having the mother drown was sort of unnecessary. I guess they wanted to emphasize the permanence of the child's presence; no mom is going to show up and take him back, but I was fine with him being there forever whether she lived or died.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Celebrations?
The only real problem with never wanting to celebrate anything for myself is that I forget that other people don't necessarily feel the same way. And while it would never occur to me to desire a celebration when I finished some big project, or if it did I would initiate it, that doesn't mean other people feel the same way. After all, even if I didn't really want to go out and eat or see a movie or whatever, I would at least appreciate the other person making the gesture and caring enough about me to notice my achievement.
Remind me of this the next time Malaya works all day, every day, for the better part of a week in order to wrap up a huge project she's been working on for several years, and I react with congratulations, and never even consider that she might want to do something special the next day. You'd think that by now the realization that everyone else doesn't always think exactly as I do would have sunk in, wouldn't you?
This is Why I Never Remember Them.
I never remember my dreams. This sometimes strikes people as odd, given that I am supposedly a writer and a creative type person, but what can I tell you. If I wake up with the memory of a dream more than once a week, it's a rare day. Even when it happens, they never seem like real dreams; they're just the half-dozing day dream/fantasies I had in my head during the last thirty minutes in bed. Today however, I remember two of them. And they're the most pointless, stupid thoughts I'll have all day, with any luck.
I was up late, writing steadily all evening, turning out around 6500 words of chapter five last night. I got into bed around 6:15am, but my mind was still whirring along on the story, so I doubt I fell asleep until closer to seven. I woke up around 10 with my legs completely off the edge of the bed, Malaya lying in the middle, and Jinxie lying between us, with her little furry head against my ankles. I hadn't felt Jinx in bed for the past week, since Malaya's been getting up before me and going out into the living room to work on her book project, and Jinx has been waking up and going out with her, apparently. Either that or not sleeping in the bed at all. She certainly did last night, prompting me to have one of those, "What did I miss about this again?" thoughts.
When she woke me up with her bogarting, I turned her 90 degrees and slid her back up against Malaya, scooted my legs back onto the bed and under the covers, and went back to sleep. Not for very long though, since I woke up again around 11:50, with Malaya gone, Dusty gone, and Jinx completely occupying my footspace. My legs were now over to the left, in the center of the bed, and I was basically diagonal, with my head at the top corner of the mattress. For those of you who are young or single and don't sleep in a bed with any other humans or animals... cherish these years!
I wanted to go back to sleep, since I'd had hardly more than five hours, but the room was warm and stuffy and my stomach was aching with hunger. I did have two dreams in my head, though. Stupid, pointless dreams, as I think I mentioned previously.
Dream #1 was a bit more surreal. In it Jude Law and his nannie were sleeping in my bed in my mom's house. That was okay though, since mom and the stepdad were in their bed, and my grandparents were visiting and using the spare bed at my dad's house. I'd slept on the sofa at dad's house, and come back over to mom's house, where I apparently lived, to wonder why Jude and the nannie weren't up yet. The door was open, and I sort of looked into the very dark room (I had heavy canvas light blocking curtain things when I lived there.) and wondered if they were getting up, and when Jude suddenly did and came yawning out to use the bathroom, I considered making a joke about how I could do get a nap and keep his nanny warm while he was gone. I didn't say it though, and he ended up standing back in the bedroom, looking around and asking where I kept all of my books. I said that they were on the shelves along the wall over the bed; basically right in front of him, he just couldn't see them in the dark. My memory of the dream ends there.
I can hardly begin to elaborate the levels this is weird on, but I'll try a few. 1) I was my current age in the dream, and it was a current event; what with Jude and his nanny. Yet I haven't slept in that bed in that room since I was like 19 and moved out into my own apartment, and there hasn't even been a bed in that room for more than a decade, since mom and glenn made it over into an upstairs office for my stepdad. Even when I did sleep there, it was a narrow single bed, since that's all the room there was, with my desk, lizard cage, bookshelves, dresser, etc. My grandparents never figured in the dream, other than me knowing they were staying at my dad's house, but they're long dead at this point, and anyway, I have a bed at dad's house, one I stayed in during my two recent visits to San Diego, and it somehow didn't exist in the dream at all, given that I was cranky about having had to sleep on the couch at dad's house while Jude and the nanny were in my bed at mom's house.
The weirdest part though is almost certainly the celebrity guest stars. I've seen Jude Law in one movie ever, as far as I know. (
Sky Captain.) and it made very little impression on me. He made even less of one, and other than seeing some celebrity news items about him cheating on his fiancee (who I've never heard of other than as his jilted fiancee) I have never given him a thought. In fact he pretty well overlaps Hugh Grant in my thoughts, until I'm not sure which one of them is which, and half remember him being busted getting oral from the nanny in his Mercedes in LA. The nanny was probably the oddest part, since I've seen her picture online a few times, but retained no memory of it, and can remember that even in the dream, I couldn't see the woman's face. She was just sort of this generic blonde.
Dream #2 was shorter, and even more pointless. In it I was playing some sort of cheap
Street Fighter II clone, in an arcade somewhere. It was modern day too, despite the fact that I haven't played any version of that game in maybe seven or eight years, and in the dream the clone version of the game had just Ryu and Guile as characters, except neither of them looked right, and they both had sort of overlapping moves; like they could each do all of each other's moves, along with their own. It didn't work right though, since Ryo's flying uppercuts had no range, and I kept getting frustrated as I tried to string combos ending with uppercuts, and kept flying harmlessly through the air, rather than hitting my Guile-like opponent. The dizzies didn't work right either, and when I was playing Guile I kept landing four-fierce combos (leaping, standing, sonic boom, backhand) and they were doing hardly any damage, and not stunning my opponent either.
I have no idea who my human opponent was on the game, I have no idea where I was playing it, and since I haven't seen or thought about that game in years, I have no idea why it was in my dream. All of which serves to remind me why I seldom regret the fact that I never remember any of my dreams. Brain farts indeed.
At Least Someone Listens.
You know those safety speeches flight attendants give before the plane takes off? You know, the ones you ignore by reading the inflight magazine and turning up your headphones? Looks like maybe they are
of some use after all.
TORONTO (CP) - The evacuation of more than 300 people aboard an ill-fated Air France flight took less than two minutes, with a co-pilot the last to leave the flaming wreckage - a "textbook case" of how to deal with an airliner emergency, officials said Wednesday as the investigation into the dramatic crash of Flight 358 got underway in earnest.
Three-quarters of the 309 passengers and crew who were aboard the plane when it skidded off a Pearson International Airport runway were able to escape the wreckage in the 52 seconds it took for emergency crews to arrive, said airport fire Chief Mike Figliola.
As you've probably read elsewhere, all 309 people survived, largely because they all got the hell out of Dodge before the plane was consumed by flame. I guess those emergency exit rows and inflatable slides and all that happy crap actually work too, huh?
Then again, this was an Air France flight going to Canada, and I wouldn't doubt that French and Canadians pay more attention to the safety lectures than Americans, given our perpetual "Nothing bad ever happens to us." mentality.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Book Review: Savage Pastimes
For today's review, here's my take on a recent chance read. It's far more relevant than anything else I've posted about lately, given the ongoing hysteria over the ridiculously un-sexual cheat code scene in GTA.
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter is, as it calls itself, "A cultural history of violent entertainment." This is the tag line, and it sums up the book very well. Schechter is a university professor in New York, and a prolific author, historian, and researcher. He's published several books about serial killers in history, and written several novels starring a fictionalized young Edgar Allen Poe. The man knows his stuff, when it comes to how and why people died in past centuries in America and Western Europe, and he's also a cultural historian, one who thinks the frequent outbursts of neo-Puritanism and fits of "blaming all evils on popular entertainment" we see in modern America are woefully misguided. To quote from the end of the first chapter:
..."The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth," observes the seventeenth-century satirist, Jean de la Gruyere. The current uproar over media sensationalism rests on two premises: that popular culture is significantly more vicious and depraved than it used to be, and that we live in uniquely violent times. Everyone seems to accept these propositions as the obviously irrefutable truth.
But what if everyone is wrong?
That's the premise of the book, and while Schechter doesn't spend that much time actually describing just how violent life was in the past, he does a very thorough job on the other premise. After reading his extensively-researched (and endnoted) writing, I have no doubt that various old and stuffy representatives of every generation, for at least the past 150 or 200 years, were entirely convinced that whatever the kids of their day were reading/listening to/watching, it was much worse than what they themselves had enjoyed in their youth, decades earlier. And they were also quite sure that whatever the kids were enjoying was going to turn them (the kids) into savage, violent, vicious animals.
And the fact that this has never yet happened, and has in fact been proven wrong every single time, has done nothing to slow down our current generation of politicians and self-appointed moralists in their frantic denunciations of computer games, gangster rap, death metal, reality TV, pornography, and so on.
To the scores:
Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter
Concept: 8
Presentation: 7
Writing Quality: 5
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 6
Entertainment Value: 6
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 7
The book isn't great, but it basically accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish. Schechter's main contention is that people have always and will always want violence in their entertainment. It's an integral aspect of human nature, as evidenced by the fact that almost all boys naturally pretend to play with guns or swords, even if they have to use dolls or just their fingers as props. Humans enjoy violence, it's far better that people read about it or watch it on TV than engage in it themselves, and there's no proven long term detrimental effects to children who watch reasonable amounts of TV or video games. Sure, some kids go too far and do crazy violent things, but that's always been the case. The murder rate today is a fraction of what it was decades or centuries ago, and anyway, children were constantly exposed to every sort of real violence then, something they are largely sheltered from in today's world.
The book has some weaknesses; it doesn't go into enough detail about the eras, it cherry picks examples and isn't always honest about the context in which the violent acts are presented, it doesn't present enough statistics about crime, total population, total books sold/TV programs watched, etc, and so on. Basically it's very thorough in some areas, while skimming or skipping others entirely, and it could certainly have been much larger in scope and much longer in length. It's only 163 pages, with another 30 of endnotes and citations, and it's actually rather redundant, with too many examples of the same thing given in each chapter. Schechter often quotes long passages from several books, showing us just how gory and gruesome they were, while not mentioning any other popular forms of entertainment of that era, or estimating what percentage of the comic books, or dime novels, or radio programs, etc actually had that sort of violence in them.
The book is divided into eight chapters, of which the first basically serves as an introduction. Two continues the introduction while quickly hitting on the very high prevalence of very violent radio and TV programming in the so-called golden era of the 1950s. It's in chapters three through eight that the book hits its stride, and each off those chapters has a rather similar form. They jump around in time, covering every era since about the 1860s, with a few bits about medieval Europe, but mostly concentrate on the past century and a half, presenting their arguments thusly: They open with a brief summary of the era and the forms of entertainment popular in it, then state how common violence was in it, then quote several long examples of the violent fare, before concluding with several quotes from the moralists of that day as they decry this new travesty and predict dire consequences for the youth growing up exposed to it. The fact that this happens like clockwork every 15 or 20 years, and that every generation invariably looks back on whatever they grew up with as wholesome while thinking the modern stuff is horrible, is largely left for the reader to observe and extrapolate forwards through time.
I think the argument is pretty compelling, if less wide-ranging than Schechter wants it to be. It's irrefutable that there has been public debate about the newly popular forms of entertainment for the last century and more, and it's indisputable that most of them have been condemned by many in the older generation. It's also clear that every generation has thought the new stuff was uniquely horrible and dangerous for children to grow up with, and it's also irrefutable that our society has grown steadily more divorced from actual violence and death, that the crime rate has steadily dropped for at least the last half century, and that this has done nothing to stop each generation of adults from thinking the kids are going to hell in a hand basket.
Whatever you think of Schechter's arguments, there are tons of interesting tidbits about violence and entertainment through the ages. I was unaware that many of the most popular early films were violent and gory, and wildly popular because of it. The first special effect ever was used to recreate the beheading of a Queen of England. The first movie made with anything resembling a plot was a film depicting a train robbery, which was pretty much non-stop violence and death from beginning to end. In the early days of Hollywood, when Westerns were king, many of the spectacular horse falls were real; they simply strung wires across the path and ran horses into them at a full gallop, endangering the stunt riders and almost invariably breaking the legs of the horses. Schechter humorously contrasts this to modern films, where every movie gets approval from the Humane Society, and even the deaths of insects, or fish in a fishing movie, have to be performed with special effects and fake fish.
I did know that modern society is almost unbelievably less violent than it was in the old days, but when he cites dozens of examples of the vastly higher crime rates decades and centuries ago, mentions the lower life expectancy and regular deaths children saw in the streets due to disease, lack of law and order, and accidents, and the fact that public torture and execution was by far the most popular form of mass entertainment through most of human history, it's hard to believe that people now are worried about some angry lyrics in a rap song, or some boobs visible in a video game. As
a recent article discussed, car jacking incidents are down sharply over the past five or ten years, even as one cultural puritan after another stands up to condemn
Grand Theft Auto for creating a new generation of murdering car jackers.
To stress the point about public execution; they were enormously popular. Entire towns would turn out to see notorious murderers killed, and if you think the killings were clean and neat, you are woefully misinformed. Towns in medieval Europe used to compete with one another for the right to hold executions of wanted men, and the way to win the event for your town was to dream up the most painful and savage torture method. Flogging, breaking on the wheel, torture with heated irons, crushing, dismemberment, and on and on. People loved it, the more gruesome the better, and they would travel for many miles and bring their kids to see the fun. And people today condemn Jerry Springer and Fear Factor?
Another interesting point he makes is how perceptions of new technology change. To the modern viewer, those old, jerky, black and white films with their handlebar-mustachioed villains seem hopelessly quaint. Yet to the kids watching them at the time, they were more impressive than iMax 3D is today. Imagine going from seeing nothing but puppet shows, or comic books, to actual moving images on a screen? People used to faint and run screaming from theaters when trains seemed to run straight into the camera, and it was thought dangerous to view images taken from moving vehicles, that viewers might lean forwards or backwards and fall right over. I don't think anyone even considered the things some people worry about today, like children perhaps having some nightmares after seeing something scary on the screen. In 1925, when people first viewed
The Lost World, many intelligent adults, including the publisher of the New York Times, were so amazed by the (to us) laughably primitive stop motion special effects that they seriously believed the film to be a miracle, and thought the makers had somehow gotten footage of actual prehistoric beasts. Imagine what kids thought, having never seen any sort of special effects in their lives?
Going back before films, the technology issue still existed, if you can believe it. Moral crusaders currently argue that special effects and video games are dangerous because they are so realistic and show everything of the violence and let the viewer control it. Precisely the opposite argument was made in the past, when moralists crusaded against early radio shows, classics like
The Lone Ranger and
Flash Gordon and so on, for exactly the opposite reason. Back then they said those programs were dangerous since the radio enabled children to so vividly picture the images in their heads that they would get carried away by the imagery. And the same argument is sometimes made about fiction today, and it can comfortably co-exist right beside the "they look too real so they're dangerous" argument, illogical as that seems to any rational person.
People were even blaming books and films for violence back then, just like they do today. In 1912,
The Great Train Robbery was blamed for inspiring a murder near a train track, in which the killer waited for a train whistle to shoot a man, so no one would hear the shot. Nevermind that no such scene exists in the film. Remind you of that
Beavis and Butthead hysteria, when some kid lit his mobile home on fire and his mom blamed the show, until investigation showed that she didn't have cable, that the kid had never actually seen the show, and that Beavis and Butthead had never engaged in any arson in the first place?
There are tons more examples, plenty to make the book worth a read, even if you just want to know how ridiculously history repeats itself.
Search Popularity
I'm guessing a lot of people are searching for info on
The Aristocrats. Here are some of the searches that my crappy website stats script tells me were carried out on August 1st, all of which landed the searchers on my
on my recent post about the film.
the aristocrats joke origin
gottfried aristocrats friar's roast
actual hefner roast the aristocrats
aristocrats cartman video
aristocrats dirty joke gilbert friar's
aristocrats joke origin
audio aristocrats gottfried
bob sagat aristocrats
cartman aristocrats joke
cartman joke
cartman telling joke
cartman's aristocrats joke
eric cartman'saristocrats joke
friar's club hugh hefner dvd
gilbert gottfried at hugh hefner friar's club roast in 2001
As for the film itself, it's still only showing in LA and NY, but is due to expand this weekend, I believe. (Correction:
August 12 is when it goes nationwide.) It's doing amazingly well too; check out
last weekend's box office, and note that while The Aristocrats is at #21, it was only showing in 4 theaters, and averaged $61k per screen! If
mega-flop Stealth had done that well it would have earned 213 million dollars and broken the all time
biggest opening weekend record by roughly $100,000,000. Maybe they should have put in a few more dirty jokes, eh?
Monday, August 01, 2005
Painful D2 Emails
From time to time I post one of the ridiculous emails I get at the D2 site, since I can't post and ridicule them there. This one is a multi-part embarrassment, so try and follow the bouncing ball.
A week or two ago I got an email at
the D2 site entitled "New Runeword." The email contained a link to a screenshot, and the text, "Don't ask how, but I will say it took expensive runes." I figured it was bullshit, but I clicked anyway, just to be sure. You can
see it here, and if you've ever played a moment of Diablo II in your life, you'll probably have the same reaction I did. You'll laugh, you'll say, "That is such a bad fake." and you'll delete it. Actually, I deleted it, Control+Z'ed it back, had Malaya look at it and laugh, and then deleted it.
That would have been that, if not for the new v1.11 patch. It drove me to look through the D2 forums (for the first time in months) yesterday, and while there I saw a thread entitled "
New Runeword," clicked it, and laughed when I saw that the first post was identical to the email I'd deleted. It was posted by a guy calling himself Slayer202, and his attempt went over about as well in the forum as it did in email. Here are a few quotes from just the first page of replies:
1) The text shown in "Congratulations" and "you have found a new runeword" are not used in the d2 games, as pretty much all text in the game is in an upright and times new roman look.
2) that is so... photoshopped
3) That looks so fake, by the way, who would stick random jahs/zods/bers into random items to check for RW's?
4)This is so fake it hurts.
5)So fake. I can't believe you even attempted this.
6) Since when in the history of D2 has there ever been a "You found a new runeword" screen? Seriously.
7) Exactly the new runewords are being released WITH the patch. Not before it. So stop lying through your teeth. No one is amused. No one belives you.
8) Stop fighting about it, obviously this is fake, it's like a 10 year old's photoshop project. And- no CRAP it's 3 runes, we see the picture of the diadem, and of course, everyone is going to go home to Zod-Ber-Jah their 3os helms so we can find this oMg New RUNEWORD!?!?!oenoen1!. I mean seriously, why even share something this stupid.
Those are just from the first page, and it goes on and on. You get the idea though; everyone says it's fake, no one believes him, no one is amused by the wretched quality of the fakery, etc. What makes it worth comment is that he, Slayer202, doesn't simply take his beating and slink off. He keeps posting to the same thread, saying people who don't believe him are idiots, insisting the screenshot is real, and so on. A few of his intellectually-dazzling replies to give you the flavor of the debate:
1) think what you want. and it wasnt random.
its called night demon btw
2) how are you all so sure its fake? because the font isnt the normal d2 font? lol w/e guys i thought you might like to see
and yeah, good idea, post the runes so everyone else can make it. no thanks sir. ill tell you it took 3 runes, all over vex
3) as far as i am concered you guys are just trying to act like mods and prove this wrong, even though you haven't said anything that shows this is a fake. would someone care to try to fake something like this? dont know how you would
He eventually changes tactics by admitting it's a fake, and then starts bragging about that, saying that no one else could make such a good fake and that no one can prove it's not real. Talk about moving in the goalposts, eh? So he posts a terrible fake screenshot that everyone calls shenanigans on, then argues it's real without convincing anyone, then gives in and admits it's fake, and then keeps arguing and trying to save his pride by insisting that yes it's a fake, but it's such a good fake that no one else could duplicate it. The saddest part is that he could just have taken a screenshot of the new Runewords in any of a dozen or more player-created D2 mods and said it was new on the realms, and it would have looked 100% authentic.
The forum thread really
hits its stride on page two, when the laughing skeptics begin posting their own MS Paint-quality screenshots of various ridiculous things,
D2-related and
otherwise (I especially
liked this one, just slightly modified as it is from Slayer202's original attempt.) Through it all, Slayer202 keeps popping up with defenses for his indefensible position, until the whole thing devolves into a flame war that was mostly deleted and led to multiple temporary forum bans being issued by one of the admins who actually pays attention to the forums (I.E. not me).
Just that would be enough for a laugh, but no, there's more. The worm took another twist a few days later
when I posted a screenshot some guy claimed to have taken from the Battle.net site with some info about one of the new monsters in the new patch. It turned out to be a clever fake though, and when I posted an update admitting that it was I mentioned that we see a lot of terrible fakes, and linked to Slayer202's laughable forum efforts.
I really thought that would be the end of it, until in amidst today's blizzard of "v1.11 is online now!!11!!111!1!" emails I found this little gem; from Slayer202 himself:
you post that crap lilith/andy fake screenshot and say it is good, and you post mine and say its bad? the only problem with mine is the font, i will admit, but nothing else. everything else is nice. the new window. the button and picture of the item.
the guy who made the other fake didnt even bother to change the name from andariel! and ll he did was edit some text. wow lol, i hope you really aren't like all the stupid people from the message boards
The least-surprising thing about this mail? His ISP. I won't say it, but it's got an L, and an O, and an A. Not necessarily in that order. I'll give him credit for trying, but he really needs to learn when to quit. He crossed the line between amusingly-determined clueless kid to pathetic and somewhat creepy troll around page two of that forum thread, and he's still going.
Labels: painful d2 email
Movie Review: Blade Trinity
For today's absurdly-long review, here's my take on the third film in the Blade series, which I just recently saw on DVD. It's not horrible, but it's not any good, and I'm relieved that I didn't pay $9.25 to see it in theaters. Like a lot of action films, it could have been far better than it was if the script had been any good, and that's largely what this review talks about. As
I said about Blade 3 in the comments after yesterday's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory review, "If they'd spent half the words on the screenplay that I did on the review, I wouldn't have had to write the review in the first place."
On with the review:
Blade Trinity is the third film in the Blade series. None of them are good, but the first two were at least passable action movies.
B3 is not, and it fails on multiple levels. The acting and characters are boring, the plot is non-existent and stupidly shallow, the fight scenes are unimaginative and so short and choppily-edited so you can hardly tell what's happening, and on, and on. It truly does almost everything poorly, despite having the potential to be at least okay.
To the scores:
Blade Trinity
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: 3
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 4
Overall: 3
I wasn't a big fan of the first two Blade films, but I didn't hate them. I haven't written a full review for Blade 1, and
I gave Blade 2 a 4.5, but that was based on my first viewing. I'd probably give it a 6 or so now, after seeing parts of it several times. Neither of the first two films are really any good, and you never give a damn about Wesley Snipes' character one way or the other, but at least there are interesting bad guys in the first two
Blade films, the secret world of the vampires and their internal political struggles are interesting, and Blade has some nice vignette battles against lesser vampires.
B3 tried to follow the same formula, but it didn't get there. The fight scenes are the limpest of the entire trilogy, the main bad guy (Vlad Dracul himself) is a pussy who never does anything special, there's nothing interesting about the vampire plans for world domination, Blade's curse of needing to drink blood is hardly touched upon, and there's absolutely zero sex appeal on the part of any vampires or their victims.
The remainder of this review is
full of plot spoilers, since that's really the only way to talk about why this film didn't work. Stop reading here if you actually think you'll be seeing this one and still believe that not knowing what's going to happen will boost your enjoyment (it won't).
The plot, such as it is, involves the vampires filming Blade as he kills a thrall (the human assistant of a vampire), then releasing that tape to the media as part of an effort to get the cops after Blade. It's not clear why they're going to this much trouble; they appear to basically just want him dead, and if they can entrap him and film him murdering someone, they can surely put a few silver bullets into him just as easily. There are some mumbo jumbo mentions of how they want his blood, but if so why not shoot ambush and shoot him a dozen times with regular bullets, then capture him and bleed him at your leisure? Involving the FBI and the media seems insanely risky on the part of the vampires, since they obviously have a great deal more to lose than Blade does, if the general public somehow gets proof of their human-stalking activities.
Their plan works though, and Blade is eventually captured by the FBI during the least-organized raid since Waco. The FBI busts in with dozens of agents, all of whom demonstrate the shooting accuracy of Stormtroopers while Blade's long time partner Whistler blows them away with a shotgun, while hobbling around a vast warehouse lair in order to trigger some sort of memory wipe sequence on multiple computer work stations. There's no telling what's on those computers that Whistler is so worried about erasing, especially since he just blows up the entire warehouse in the end anyway, and it's laughably dumb that he would have so many separate workstations running without any central control. Not to mention that the FBI wouldn't cut the power as part of their huge coordinated raid. Or use tear gas before they burst in. Whey they didn't simply pick Blade and Whistler on the street, while they were carrying out their advance surveillance, is a question you're better off not answering.
Blade's captivity lasts about thirty seconds, just long enough for vampires to appear and menace him, before the never-before-mentioned
Whistler's mother daughter and some other guy burst into the police interrogation room and rescue Blade, then spirit him away to their super high tech barge where the rest of their vampire-hunting posse lives.
Jessica Biel plays Whistler's bastard daughter, and her muscular sidekick is Ryan Reynolds. Reynold's character, ridiculously named Hannibal King, is sort of the narrator of the film, a decision I'd bet was made after they finished it and saw how bad it was. His voice over explanations don't help much, but they don't really hurt either.
The entire movie is chock full of "that could never happen in the real world" scenes, but the police station raid is near the top of the list. Blade's on the evening news every night, being depicted as this sociopath street killer. He gets captured by the FBI in a raid that claims the lives of dozens of agents, and yet goes right to some sort of local police station, where he's handcuffed in a chair while vampires with political power come in and shout a lot about transferring him to some asylum. Just as they're about to take him away, two heavily-armed people who have made no effort at all to disguise themselves smash through the glass wall of the interrogation room, revive Blade from the tranquilizer the vampire doctor drugged him with, and then shoot their way to the fire stairs, which are completely deserted and which let them exit right out to the street. (How boy/girl eye-candy Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel got up to the fourth floor of the police station while carrying small arsenals each, up to and including a bow and arrows, without setting off any alarms, while the most wanted criminal in the US was upstairs, is never explained.) They kill at least a dozen cops on their way to the stairs, which you'd think would concern Blade, since he surrendered rather than kill cops himself, since his weakness is that he actually cares for the stupid human animals. Or so says a vampire in every single film. Best of all, Blade's entire wardrobe, including the black leather cape, sword, guns, sunglasses, and more, were lying on a table right behind him in the police station, so he can instantly get back into costume.
Once outside of the police station Blade and company are picked up by an old SUV driven by another human, who immediately loses all police pursuit simply by driving down a couple of flights of stairs in a deserted public square. Helicopters? Additional units? APB for two mass murdering cop-killers who just busted the most wanted man in America out of a police station? Of course not, and in fact there's not another scene involving the police or the FBI in the entire film, during which Blade routinely walks around, undisguised, in broad daylight, despite the fact that he would then get more attention than Osama Bin Laden walking through Times Square with a ticking briefcase.
The other painfully dumb part involves Dracula. The film opens with a bunch of vampires climbing up into an ancient pyramid in some unknown desert. Once inside they stop and pull up one floor stone, which instantly causes a huge hole to open. They follow it down inside the pyramid, and after standing around a sandy area for a minute one of them notices a strange sort of sand whirlpool. A vampire is inevitably snatched into it, and as the metal-looking Dracula erupts from it and tears a vampire to bits, the scene ends.
We eventually find out that the vampires actually found Dracula, and that they want him because his blood is pure, or something, and they can analyze it and find a way to let themselves walk around in the daylight. Dracula can daywalk, since he's the first vampire ever, and his DNA is special and stuff. Why they want his blood is never explained, but then again, not much is. The blood of Dracula, for instance, since after an early mention about the vampires wanting it, they never take any or do any further research with it. They are not alone though, since there's a mention of the humans wanting some of his blood, since they have a brilliant blind scientist working on some sort of glowing yellow vampire poison potion, and if they can use it with Dracula's blood it could make a virus that would kill every vampire on earth. That plot line is forgotten as well, of course.
Dracula is a major disappointment in the movie, and the fact that he fails to become a worthy adversary to Blade is a real failing of the script. He's been buried for like 1000 years, apparently by choice, since he was just sick of killing and eating the lowly humans of his era. Yet when he wakes up he's ravenous, eating dozens of humans in very short order, and looking like some sort of monster, with a mouth a bit an Alien's, or like the steel maw of The Beast in
Brotherhood of the Wolf. Minutes later, he's calm and civilized, and speaking perfect, modern English. What he thinks of the modern world and the vampires around him and Blade is never explored, since this is a very stupid movie.
Imagine a good movie, in which Dracula comes back to life in 2005. Talk about culture shock. What would he do first? What misunderstandings would arise? Would he expect to immediately seize control of the ruling party of the vampire nation? Would he want to return to the Carpathians and free his homeland from the Turks? Apparently he'd prefer to obsess over Blade while wearing a lot of open-throated shirts with cheap jewelry, while walking around the anonymous any-city the film is set in and menacing people. If he's got any culture shock about electricity, automobiles, skyscrapers, etc, he gets over it instantly. There is one scene that tries to be funny by having him enter some sort of kitschy S&M goth-mart, where they are selling every sort of Dracula-themed product imaginable. Breakfast cereal, stickers, wind up toys, vibrators, etc. Nevermind the fact that no such store has ever or will ever exist, and ignore the stupidity of the flirty schoolgirl skirt-wearing cashier, or her pointlessly rude co-worker; how stupid is it for Dracula to see and react to a few toys bearing a bastardization of his name, and not to react to every technological improvement made in the last 500 years?
Dracula has one special power, that he can make himself look like anyone else for a moment. He does so twice, but both times it's stupid and unnecessary, to the point that you'd have been happier if they hadn't given him that ability at all. He never flies, or turns into mist, or bats, or any sort of animal, etc. He's just a beefy Eurotrash looking guy, the sort you'd expect to see escorting Paris Hilton at Cannes, who can turn into a sort of robo-vampire, with super metallic body armor and such. He never does so when it would help him win the fight, of course. He doesn't even appear to have super strength or anything like that, so he's just any other vampire who can walk in the sun, though of course he mostly wreaks havoc at night, since shadows are cooler on film.
His abilities are odd, but much the same as those of the other vampires. Blade can leap from tall buildings and land without being injured, and I thought he could cling to the roof and such in the earlier films, but if so he's lost that talent now. The other vampires are very weird in their skills too; sometimes they seem to be super strong and powerful, other times they're so weak that a skinny white girl can push them around. The other main vampire is a sleazy looking white girl played by Parker Posey. She was formerly the lover/owner of Ryan Reynolds' character, back when he was a vampire, and she can throw people through walls with her birdie arms, but her huge and hulking idiot bodyguard, played by pro wrestler HHH, appears to actually be weaker than he would be in human form, given his steroid-grown muscles. It's all very confusing, as is the fact that no vampire ever wears any sort of body armor or chain mail or anything, or even takes cover when they know Blade is coming and that he uses guns that can kill them.
The film goes on and on, with Blade and company discovering huge warehouses full of humans who are being held in a Matrix-like plastic netting while their blood is harvested for the vampires to consume. They see it, tell the one worker to shut down the software, and walk away, sparring it not another thought after they curse about how the vampires have hundreds of such facilities, and how they are clearly winning their secret war against humanity. How about instead of doing nothing and losing the battle, they instead call the media out and instantly expose the Vampire menace to the entire world?
Finally, when they have the big battle at the end of the movie and Blade kills the head vampire in hand to hand combat (exactly as he did in the first two films, if you were somehow expecting a change this time around), and then the FBI comes busting in once everyone is gone and all of the vampires are dead piles of ash. The camera pulls back as day breaks, and of course the entire vampire building is glass and open to the sky. Just like in Blade 2, despite the fact that the vampires die instantly if they are exposed to the sun. In both cases Blade would have won anyway if he'd just stalled for another ten minutes, since he would have been saved by
a Little Orphan Annie song.
I do have to mention one thing I liked in the film, and it was probably the single funniest thing in the entire series. The vampires had somehow made a trio of vampire dogs, including a ratty little Pomeranian. There were two Rottweilers too, all with the weird, gaping vagina-like mouths that the super vampires had in Blade 2, and the dogs' demise, though idiotic, was hilarious. They chased Ryan Reynolds's irrelevant character through the building, and broke a glass wall and fell to their deaths when he swung up onto a girder above the wall. And yes, we laughed loud and long at the sight of the Pomeranian sliding sideways across the floor and vanishing over the ledge. I actually grabbed the DVD control and reversed it to watch the dog skid over the side again, and I have never before done that while watching a movie for the first time. I wouldn't say the B3 is worth watching just for that scene, but it was certainly the highlight for us.
Misc Kali Bruises Blisters: #04
Motivated by my disappointment in my double stick performance during Wednesday's Kali seminar, I dragged the mentally weary Malaya outside Saturday evening, when the day's heat had faded, for some Kali practice. She was wiped from working furiously all weekend on her nearly-completed writing project, but she was game enough to swing some slow attacks at me to let me work on my double stick technique against them. I wasn't good, but I wasn't awful, and I definitely felt myself getting the hang of it. It's all in the timing and preparation, moving your body from side to side, spinning the sticks to get them ready on the correct side of your body, and knowing which hand to strike with first. And as usual, it's pretty well impossible to describe in words.
After twenty minutes or so of that she went back inside to shower off and get ready for dinner, but since I was well warmed up and into it, I kept going, working on double stick footwork, working on striking from every angle with the left or right hand first, working on making my siniwali faster and slower and smoother and so on.
I noticed a few sore spots on my hands while we were playing, but since I constantly get minor blisters from stick work, blisters that turn into calluses over time, I didn't pay them much mind at the time. I noticed them later that evening though, when they kept hurting and looked bubbly, and when I eventually had to snip open the dead skin to let out the juice.
Ouchie. They're worse than they look in the photos, but aren't exactly life threatening. Just painful to the touch. I put medical tape and a bandaid over them and did some light Kali Sunday night, but nothing fun. Like double stick. I'm not sure why these are so bad; I guess I hadn't done very much stick work lately and my calluses had faded a bit, and I guess my double stick grip and siniwali motion puts pressure on my hands in a slightly different location than my usual single stick work. The weird part is that these are on my right hand, and I use that hand all the time to hold sticks and swords. My left hand has tiny, non-photo worthy blisters, when it should really be the sore one, since it's virginal and got equal wear and tear while doing the double stick stuff. I also think the rough handles of my sticks, chopped up as they are from numerous broadsword impacts, exacerbated the friction.
I do wish I'd gotten up Sunday morning and gone to class with Malaya, since they did more work on double stick and broadsword, likely motivated by the fact that no one aside from Tuhan and my Gura looked more than just barely competent with double sticks during Wednesday's seminar. Happily, she was willing to show me what they worked on when we went out Sunday night, and it was largely just practicing the basic stuff. Which is, of course, exactly what I need to work on, no matter how badly I wish to fly before I can crawl, when it comes to double sticks.
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