Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

affles, forthwith!

I didn't do much on Wednesday.  Wrote a bit, limped around the condo a bit, and read Harry Potter #5 quite a bit. I finished it this morning, after rising at 4:45am due to my new, constantly shifting sleeping schedule, and I'll write about HP 4 and 5 below.  However after I finished the book I set to making myself some breakfast (I'd make it for Malaya too, but she won't be awake for hours yet.) and since I just had the best waffles ever, I thought I should share the recipe.  Simple but effective though it was.

Take the basic Krusteez pancake/waffle mix recipe, which calls for 2 cups of it, 1.5 cups of water, and 2 tablespoons of cooking oil. Pour the batter mix into your mixing bowl, fill up a measuring cup with the water, and pour a good amount of frozen (or fresh if you've got them/can afford them) blueberries, and microwave the water for about 2 minutes on high, to thaw out the frozen berries.  Wisk or smash them a bit, to turn the water all purple with blueberry essence, and also to mix the berries and crush them, then pour the water into the mixing bowl with the batter.  Mix it up vigorously, trying to crush most of the berries, since if you leave them whole they sink to the bottom, and you get blueberry flavored waffles for the first 75% of the mix, and nearly-solid blueberry waffles for the last 25% that have a tendency to stick to the waffle iron and rip apart in the middle when you open it up.

There's no real timing secret to making waffles; just go until there is hardly any steam still coming out. That's it; ignore the cooking light since it's on a timer based on the temperature and that tells you nothing if you're modifying the batter by using more or less water than required, and especially if you're throwing in extra ingredients. Like blueberries.

Serve the waffles with a sprinkling of pecans, and some fresh-cut strawberries, and season with the syrup of your choice. I prefer maple over them, since there's already blueberry and strawberry flavors on it so I don't want more of either with flavored syrup.

You could also just throw the blueberries on top next to the strawberries, but I like the waffles more infused with berry flavor. Hell, you could probably mix strawberries in with the blueberries in the batter and have it super infused, but I like my strawberries fresh and cold and crisp.

I generally eat about 2 waffles, and save the other 6 or 7 the recipe makes for later; they're awesome snacks if you toast or toaster over them a bit out of the fridge. But today I ate 4 of them, since they were just so delicious with the double berry and pecan bonuses.

And yes, it's been fifteen minutes since I finished, and I already want more.

Here's some news, Harry Potter books 4 and 5 discussion below.

¤ Kill Bill Volume One came out on DVD yesterday, and sold over 2m copies the first day.

While Tuesday's 2 million first-day sales figure is not a record, it does bode well for Tarantino's pop culture comedy, whose sequel opens in theaters Friday via Miramax.

"'Kill Bill' is an extraordinary achievement and reaffirms that Quentin's films are true movie events," Miramax chief operating officer Rick Sands said.

Warner's "The Matrix Revolutions," starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss, was the top-selling DVD for the week ending April 11, according to Nielsen VideoScan's First Alert weekly sales chart.

So you read that and you're like, "Oh yeah, there was a 3rd Matrix movie.  I think I saw that..."

Going against our usual "snap it up for the first day discount price" style, we haven't bought either of those DVDs, though I do want to get Kill Bill and watch it again before we go see the Kill Bill 2 this weekend. I wasn't sure if it would be any good or not, since I didn't dislike KB1, but I didn't really like it either. I'm sort of reserving judgment until I watch the DVD, and try to determine if the absurdly over the top violence and endless sword fight seem intelligent and knowing, or just ridiculous. I was torn in the theater, enjoying parts of it but also thinking it went on too long and was silly.

I wanted to like it, and I wasn't repulsed or anything, but I'm also perplexed when I see so many film geek types putting it on their top movies of 2003 list, and saying how they loved every minute of it.  I thought it had a lot of lulls and dead spots and that the good stuff wasn't so good that it overcame the unfocused moments.

As for the sequel, it's getting great reviews. It's at 24/27 positive on RT now, and they aren't "pretty good for fans" reviews, they're raving, 4-star "It's brilliant!" reviews. The type you don't see every day, and that some movies don't see at all.

Speaking of, my other weekend movie desire, The Punisher is not getting much critical love. Though there are only 16 reviews online thus far, 6 positive and 10 negative isn't a real good start.  I still want to see it, and I've watched numerous clips online and liked all of them, so I'm unclear how those can all be good while the movie isn't. But I'll find out soon enough, I guess.

¤ Courtesy of first time/long time Kevin, here's a beautiful editorial from the NYT about the student who was expelled from a SF college for writing a violent short story in his creative writing class. (You'll need an NYT online membership to read it, but it's free and the cookie lasts forever.) I blogged at some length about the story back on March 26th, if you care to refresh your memory. The author of the piece is Michael Chabon, Pulitzer winning novelist of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel I know nothing about. He begins by summarizing the details of the case, then takes off with his empathetic point.

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.

He then hits the part that really resonates with me, and probably horrifies the conservative self-appointed guardians of morality types who are forever trying to get something or other banned to protect "the children."

The imagination of teenagers is often — I'm tempted to say always — the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control. During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. But a fortress requires a constant line of supply; those who take refuge in attics and cellars require the unceasing aid of confederates; prisoners need advocates, escape plans, or simply a window that gives onto the sky.

Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. My secret confederates were the works of Monty Python, H. P. Lovecraft, the cartoonist Vaughan Bodé, and the Ramones, among many others; they kept me watered and fed. They baked files into cakes and, on occasion, for a wondrous moment, made the walls of my prison disappear. Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them. Tales and displays of violence, blood and horror rang true, answered a need, on some deep, angry level that maybe only those with scant power or capital, regardless of their age, can understand.

-------

We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness. And so we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.

Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale. How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!

That's sarcasm there at the end, in case you're a member of S.T.O.P. You should read the whole thing to really get the flow of his writing, but I thought it was masterfully-written, and made a very good point. I.E. a point that I agreed with.

¤ Good article about the frequently outrageous costs of hospital treatment.

When Karen Hamers' teenage daughter Michele needed knee surgery, Hamers called several hospitals near her home in Vero Beach, Fla., and asked how much the surgery would cost. At the time, her family did not have health insurance. After choosing a hospital, Hamers paid the surgeon and then also paid the hospital what it said the surgery would cost: $4,200.

"Six days after surgery, we receive a letter from the hospital asking for an additional $21,000," Hamers says. She asked for an explanation and got an itemized bill.

"It was two pages of gobbledygook," Hamers says. "We could not understand it. They could not explain it. We showed it to our doctor, and he didn't understand it."

Hamers had kept a detailed log of her daughter's 20 hours in the hospital, including a list of all the staff who cared for her and what drugs she was given. After reviewing the log and its own records, the hospital reduced its additional billing to $610.

So they owed $21k, give or take $20,390. And if they hadn't complained, they'd have had to pay it all. What worries me about this is that when this bill goes to insurance companies, they probably just pay it, or some fraction of it in the sort of unseen business dealings hospitals and insurance companies do. The hospital probably saw a chance to gouge this family and went for it, just like they would if they could get away with it 100% of the time when dealing with insurance companies. And we wonder why health insurance is so expensive?

Actually, you'd do well to wonder, since as the article explains it, the whole system is impossibly complicated and confusing, with a rat's nest of interweaving payments from insurance, the government, and private individuals.  Hospitals get less from big insurance companies for some things than they charge to Medicare for it, or to uninsured people, and it's sort of like buying airline tickets; where no two people on the plane paid the same amount.

Because most hospitals rely on government health payments for about 50% of their revenue, and private insurers who negotiate discounts for much of the rest, raising charges is one way hospitals can try to bring in additional money from individuals and insurers not covered by the discounts, Coyle says.

Even so, some consultants say raising charges doesn't help much because so few insurers pay full charges. Jim Callanan of the Impart Group, a hospital management company, says the consulting firm helped a large, inner city hospital with $300 million in annual revenue do a financial turnaround.

"We raised charges 45%," Callanan says. "We only collected $8 million more."

The best advice now, as always... don't get sick, and if you do, try to mend in your own home.

The third book was the first one I really enjoyed, since even while it was basically the same plot over again, the main characters were beginning to progress a bit, the new characters were entertaining, and the overall plot was better, even if it did wrap up with about 20 solid pages of explanation that readers needed to tie up all of the loose ends, most of which could not have been guessed at by reading the novel.  Mysteries are fun when you read along and figure them out yourself, or at least when you hear the solution you realize that you could have and possibly should have known.  When there's a mystery that you get the answer to and don't see any way on earth you could have guessed it you feel cheated by the author.  Book 3's involved ending was more cheat than clever.

Since I've written about the first three books at some length already, I'll get right to books 4 and 5.

The following will contain minor spoilers for books 4 and 5, but no more than you'd get reading a quick book summary/review on the back cover or in a library catalogue.

I thought book 4 was the best in the series, to that point. It wasn't the most fun, since it's much darker and bad things happen, which some of the fans have complained about. And it's a valid criticism, if you're a person who wanted the whole thing to remain fun and happy and light. I personally loved the turn to the more serious and darker, since that's more what I'm interested in reading and writing. I also thought it was realistic, as the characters are aging and Voldemort is coming closer and closer to fully returning to his powers. The plot shouldn't still be all Harry's happy fun exploits at Hogwarts. It should be more serious and heading towards and adult struggle, and that's what book 4 was. It also had the first real tragedy in the series, and I like that there was some collateral damage. It makes things far more serious and weighty and scary, and I'm sure if I were a little kid I'd have been shocked.

The overall body of book 4 wasn't superb; there were some major plot holes in terms of the bad guys making things far more complicated than they had to, though it wasn't quite to the point of "Dr. Evil putting Austin Powers into an overly-elaborate trap that he's sure to escape from." But the way Rowling wrote it meshed pretty well with the rest of the book, and allowed the usual "steadily rising action and danger over the course of the school year before the big conclusion around the end of the term."  Complaining about the way things developed is sort of like asking why the bad guy doesn't just shoot 007 the first time he's got a chance, rather than talking and explaining things to set up further deadly show downs. It's just sort of a property of the genre.

Book Five, The Order of the Phoenix, which I read yesterday and this morning, is the best in the series, by far. In my opinion, of course. Book 4 showed that Rowling could rise above the silly school boy stuff and craft a more complete, complex, mature novel, even though it had flaws and pacing issues. Book 5 is a quality novel, not just a kid's story, and deals with numerous mature issues and themes. Death, family, tragedy, danger, power and corruption, and more. It's not a brilliant novel, but it's quite a page turner, and it holds together very cohesively. Things that are hinted at or briefly mentioned early on in the book turn out to be very important later, the bad guys look to be too strong to defeat and the good guys looked doomed, and there are losses; it's not all happy fun good guys win and live happily ever after. Harry certainly isn't happy, not at the ending or the beginning, and I liked his character best in this book out of any of them.

He's truly become a teenager, bitter about things beyond his control, sulky, moody, and he's even starting to discover girls.  I'd thought it was sort of silly through book 4 that no one had shown any sort of sexual thoughts or desires. The guys were 14 and 15 years old; they'd be wanking like rabbits and obsessing over girls. Yet no male character seems to do more than blush and consider maybe asking a girl to go to the big formal ball.  In real life half the kids that age are screwing and/or pregnant, not to mention using drugs, smoking, etc. I found it sort of silly that no one seems to have any vices at Hogwarts, other than being assholes, in the case of the bad guys. I guess that's just how the children's genre works, and parents aren't real happy about buying their kids books that reflect reality with all of it's ugliness, but since I'm used to reading adult novels with characters doing real things, it's always seemed sort of silly to me.

Harry's friends are maturing as well, and along with them the action is becoming more adult. There are much greater risks and perils in book 5, there is suffering and unhappiness, and violence, hatred, and death. I don't know if I'm willing to give Rowling full credit for planning the whole series out that well, but the tone of books has definitely changed over time, growing more serious, more mature, and more adult as the characters have aged. I don't know if books 4 and 5 are really appropriate for the 8 year olds who so love Harry Potter, and who books 1 and 2 and 3 were written for. 

I'm going to cut this off here and possibly discuss the HP books more in response to future reader mail, but for now I'll say that books 1 and 2 are okay, if childish. Book 3 starts to improve things for the adult reader, and book 4 is more adult yet and the first book in the series that really works as a whole novel.  Book 5 continues that trend and is the best of the bunch, and it's a novel that I think most adult readers would enjoy. You don't need to overlook silly kid's stuff to get through it happily, there's real gravity and peril in the plot, and though it's still got tons of silly funny stuff for kids to enjoy, it's also a serious novel that should be satisfying to adults. It's at least an adult of a novel as most other fantasy I've read, such as the Dragonriders of Pern novels, or anything by Piers Anthony or Terry Brooks.

It's not an adult novel, nothing like the horror and sexual content of George R R Martin's masterful Song of Fire and Ice, and HP5 doesn't have the horror and war elements of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, but it's not at all bad.  I'll recommend it to any adult fantasy fans, though it's obviously going to be a lot more enjoyable if you read HP 1-4 first, and not all of those are as enjoyable as the 5th one.  I'm looking forward to books 6 and 7 now, and seeing how the whole thing turns out and what becomes of the main characters, who are all maturing and beginning to go their own way.

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