Books Lying Open
¤ The Lord of Castle Black, Steven Brust
¤ Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
¤ Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ A lack of comfortable seating.

Answer of the Day:
¤ It has to be crooked to let the steam out.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May long-delayed construction intrude upon your sleep schedule.

nother vanished weekend. The last one and this one went by very quickly, which is how they all go for people with real lives, I suppose. Last time there were errands one day and Malaya birthday celebration stuff the next day, and with excessive football watching mixed in, the two days seemed hardly to exist. This weekend was even quicker, with lots of errands and food purchasing on Saturday, and then a long afternoon and evening of watching movies and eating exotic foods at the house of one of Malaya's friends. Add that to an hour+ workout each day, miscellaneous football watching, some requisite time spent surfing and cooking and eating and showering and such, and I don't know where the time went. Sunday was fun, though.

I was up late Saturday night working on Articles stuff, and I'll update that page soon with another 3 or 4 months committed to the archives, and 20 or 30 new articles added, with large updates to probably 100 others. (Yes, there are already far more than anyone can ever reasonably be expected to read. Your point?) I finally got into bed around 5am, after Malaya had turned in after midnight since she had to get up at 8 to take BART to her Sunday morning Kali class.

It's been cold here for more than a month, which means the cats come racing into the bedroom and pile on top of us on the bed as soon as they realize I've joined Malaya in the bed. The total darkness and lack of computer noise in the living room seems to be a tip off, but it still takes them some time to catch on. The bedroom is far from our one radiator, and it's always at least ten degrees colder in there than in the living room, but Dusty and Jinx seem positive that it's warmer in there with us in the bed, or they at least the comfort of curling up on the down comforter enough to endure the lower temperature. It's not as if they don't come equipped with their own winter coats.

Saturday night was no exception, and I had hardly even stretched out and pressed over next to Malaya to share in her body warmth than Jinx hurdled onto the bed and flopped down on my ankles. Dusty was close behind, and I was just starting to drift off when he engaged in his usual wandering bed survey, trying to find someone's thighs to curl up between. Malaya and I are wise to his furry-cannonball weight and ways though, so we kept our legs together and since we were pressed hip to hip, he couldn't take his second choice for sleeping locations and squeeze in between us. He settled for curling up directly on top of my legs, just above my knees, and while I usually don't allow that, and almost always roll over a few times before finally going to sleep on my side, facing away from Malaya, my last memory of Saturday night was Dusty lying there and me yawning.

Next stop; 10:20am with Malaya long gone to class, and both cats still against my sides. They get up and wander around when she leaves in the morning, so I'd slept right through Malaya's alarm, her getting up, getting dressed, the cats roaming around, her leaving, and the cats coming back and curling up again. I considered waking up then, but since it hadn't been more than 5 hours since I went to bed I settled for a quick bathroom visit, a drink of water, and the delicious sensation of sliding back into a warm bed in a cold room.

My eyes next opened at 11:55, and while I could easily have slept longer I forced myself up, threw the comforter over Dusty (he loves that), put on shorts and sneakers and a t-shirt, and headed out to the gym. I even ran there though that was mostly because 1) it's within easy walking distance from our condo, and 2) it was about 52º, windy, and partly cloudy outside, and all I had on were shorts and a t-shirt.

I warmed up very quickly at the gym though, as I grabbed the only free elliptical machine and jumped right into my 35 minute cross country simulation course, followed that with my customary 15 minute cool down and stretching period in the empty yoga class room, and then did a ton of situps and a few weight machines. Malaya walked in just as I was finishing up and poked me to hurry since we were already running late, so I trotted back home, showered, started taping the Denver @ SD football game, and with that we were out the door for more than eight hours.

When we got home I was excited at the prospect of watching the Chargers game on tape, especially since I hadn't seen any football scores and had no idea if they'd won or lost. They won, as it turned out, and while it was a close 20-17 game, it wasn't very much fun to watch. SD had ridiculous field position, mostly thanks to an aggressive defense and Jake Plummer being Jake Plummer, with his several long bombs more than offset by his 4 interceptions, but SD had no passing game whatsoever, and not a great deal of success running the ball either. Basically SD got the ball inside Denver territory four times and converted those golden opportunities into 2 TDs and 2 FGs, while Denver had horrible field position, missed a FG and got picked off in the endzone, and lost by 3.

SD did nothing on their other possessions, their passing game was horrible, they fumbled several times, and they looked very confused by Denver's constant blitzing pressure defense. The SD offense has very few quick passes; they almost never throw slants or quick outs, and lots of their passing works off of play action with long runs to fake handoffs and 7 or 8 guys blocking while just a couple of receivers go out for the pass.  None of that stuff worked on Sunday, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to the cold and wet weather, how much was due to Denver's defense, and how much was due to Brees and his receivers sucking.  Overall, it was by far the worst offensive effort I've seen from SD all year, and if not for Plummer's quartet of interceptions and very favorable field position, SD would have lost by a substantial score.

But they did win, and are now 9-3 with a huge lead over the 7-5 Denver team, since SD owns the first tie breaker. Of course the one year SD is suddenly good again would be the same year both Pittsburgh and New England are 11-1, and the Colts, potentially highest scoring team in NFL history, are also 9-3. The point being that the top two teams in the division get a first round bye in the playoffs, and only have to win twice to get to the SuperBowl, while the 3rd and 4th division winners and the 2 wildcars have to play 3 games. SD could possibly move up; NE has a cream puff schedule over the last 4 games, but Pittsburgh plays 3 good teams still and they damn near lost Sunday, so in theory they could close out 2-2 or 1-3 and SD could win out and still get the 2nd playoff seed. (SD plays at Indy the 2nd to last game, which may well determine the order of the 3rd and 4th seeds.) In any event, SD's season looks quite likely to end in a freezing second round playoff game in Pittsburgh or New England, and even if they win that one they'd be facing Pitt or NE a week later, in even colder weather. Of course SD was the consensus pick to be the worst team in the NFL this year, and any Chargers' fan would have been delirious to consider them a playoff contender, much less a good bet to make it to at least the second round of the playoffs.

The whole NFL has gotten quite interesting as the season closes, since everyone sucks in the NFC and like half the teams are still in the wild card hunt, while the AFC wild card spots have gone from very exclusive to wide open, thanks to Baltimore and Denver both losing their last two games and looking quite vulnerable in the process. Where once SD, Denver, NYJ, and Baltimore were all 7-3 and fighting for three playoff spots, you've now got SD almost sure to win their division at 9-3, NYJ looking a wildcard lock at 9-3, Denver and Baltimore slumping to 7-5 and tied for the last wildcard spot, and then several other tough teams just behind them at 6-6, with 10 wins almost certain to be required to make it in as the 6th seed.

That neck and neck, scoreboard-watching excitement is partially offset by the fact that there's only one good team in the entire NFC, with the Falcons beginning their late disintegration, led, as always, by Michael "Turnover-Machine" Vick and his 2 INT/2 fumble effort in their 27-0 shellacking by division rival Tampa Bay. So while it's fun to watch the JV NFC scramble for the two wildcard spots, it'll be less entertaining when Philly wins their two playoff games by a combined 40 points and finally reaches the Superbowl to take on the tired and bruised champion of the uber-competitive AFC.

And with that stream of consciousness introduction disposed with, here's some news and then another movie review down below. I'd write more tonight, ideally finishing up my already-one-week-delayed D2 column, but it's pushing 4am now and I've got to get up at a reasonable hour on Monday, so we can dare the dreaded Laundromat and run some other errands before nightfall and rush hour.

¤ One of the funny side effects of Lotto winners is how often there's a ridiculous Beverly Hillbillies effect. Mostly poor people play the lottery (lotteries aren't jokingly referred to as " taxes on people who are bad at math" for nothing) and when someone who has never had any money suddenly has millions, they don't have a clue how to handle their sudden success. I don't know how poor this guy was before his win, but let's just pretend he was penniless since it makes this a better case in point:

Record Powerball jackpot winner Jack Whittaker spent Tuesday night in jail after being charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and carrying a dangerous weapon without a license. Whittaker also was charged with failure to maintain control of his vehicle and failure to submit to a Breathalyzer test after he wrecked his Hummer on the West Virginia Turnpike.

The accident occurred about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday after Whittaker passed through the southbound toll booth at the North Beckley exit. Whittaker was alone in the vehicle. A police report said Whittaker had a small pistol in his left boot and was carrying $117,000 in cash.

This is Whittaker's second DUI arrest this year. He also was arrested on Jan. 25 on a drunken driving charge.

The article doesn't list his winnings, but a quick Google search turned up the answer. He's the biggest Lotto winner in US history, taking in $314.9 million dollars on Christmas 2002. The guy could easily have leveraged that into a financial empire and spent the rest of his life living on a private island. Instead he's driving around drunk and alone in a Hummer with a small pistol he'd likely shoot himself with if he tried to use it, and $117k in cash that he's got absolutely no idea what to spend on. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for the guy. Almost.

¤ So, how's the good ole "war on drugs" going lately, after four years of a "tough on crime" Republican president?

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Prices for cocaine and heroin have reached 20-year lows, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Washington Office on Latin America, citing the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the street price of 2 grams of cocaine averaged $106 in the first half of 2003, down 14 percent from the previous year's average and the lowest price in 20 years. An official with the Office of National Drug Control Policy confirmed the figures, which haven't been publicly released.

[The organization said that not only had the price of cocaine on U.S. streets dropped to a fifth of its 1981 level, but heroin was much cheaper too. A gram of heroin, which cost $329 in 1981, sold for $60 in the first half of 2003, it said.]

The report comes as the Bush administration and Congress work with Colombian authorities to craft a successor to Plan Colombia, which will end late next year after pumping more than $3 billion into Colombia to fight drugs since 2000.

Read that last paragraph again. Sure, we piss away $3,000,000,000 dollars in Iraq on a good weekend, but there at least we can still pretend it might be doing some good. To hear that we've pumped $3b into Columbia in less than five years, when drugs are more easily-available now than ever before, is sort of a kick in the nuts. Say we'd put all $3b of that into US schools; increasing teacher pay, repairing buildings, buying new books and classroom supplies. Is there any possible way it wouldn't have done far more good than pissing it away over the jungles of Columbia in an unwinnable war that the appetite of US drug users is fueling?

And that $3b is apparently just in Columbia; we spend billions in Central America, Mexico, etc, and that doesn't even count the costs of drug enforcement in the US, prison construction costs, vice cops, etc. If there's an area of public life in the US that's more about appearance over function than the so-called "war on drugs" I can't imagine what it might be. Ever politician campaigns that he/she is "tough on crime," yet discussions about what actually works to stop crime simply never occur. We're an astonishingly short-sighted and immature country in quite a few ways, you know.

Feel free to tie this into the "Why are Americans so terrified of everything?" question that I brought up in last week's review of Bowling for Columbine.

¤ Wow. It's "Welcome to the Dark Ages" time in Alabama. (You have to enter a fake zip code and DoB to read the full article.)

Why right wing Christians are so terrified of homosexuality is something I will never understand.  It really does illustrate why the term "homophobic" is often surprisingly-accurate though. These people really are afraid, even terrified, of homosexuality. They fear and hate gay people, and they are consumed with worry that their children will read about gays and "go gay" or something.

It's an easy argument, but the fact that you could change "homosexual" to "black" or "jew" or "woman" or "mixed race marriage" or whatever you like, without changing anything else about their arguments, seems largely to invalidate them in my opinion. Of course pointing that out would be meaningless. After all, I did that in my unreadably-long email exchange with the homophobic CAP Alerts guy, and it made no impression whatsoever. To briefly quote from that email dialogue, with my email double indented and his reply single indented:

Just taking recent American history; slavery was defended with biblical citations, as was the denial of equal rights for non-whites and women.

Again, the result of man's attempts to make the Bible say what he wants it to say.

This is an old argument, and yes, it's possible to find biblical scriptures to back up almost anything,

Only if it is the truth.

So all of the millions of Biblical scholars over time, religious leaders, politicians, etc. They were all wrong when they used Biblical logic and quotations to support slavery, unequal rights, oppression of women and minorities, and so on. But now that those things are socially accepted, thanks to the hard work of millions of people in direct opposition to most Christian leaders of their time... we've got those damned gays, who God clearly hates because the Bible tells us so. And we're right in our logic, and all of our predecessors who had the exact same opinions for the exact same reasons about blacks, jews, women, race-mixing, etc... they were wrong and were twisting the Bible to their ends.

Can you imagine thinking like that? How simple the world must seem when you are completely convinced, at all times, regardless of the evidence, that whatever you want to do is God's will and that everyone else is wrong. Which is why zealots are so dangerous, whether they want to blow themselves up in an Israeli coffeehouse, crash a jet into the World Trade Center, or burn every book that has any non-condemning mention of homosexuality in it.

FlixMix takes you into the history of action movies from Hollywood to Hong Kong cinema that spans a 20-year period. This one features action scenes from 16 action-packed movies featuring action gurus, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme and many more.

It's misleading because this collection of short and generally-mediocre action scenes from mostly minor films is far from a survey of the genre, or a highlight package of any famous action movie stars. It's not a lie though; all of the "stars" listed are actually shown in short action scene excerpts from various films, some of which you may even have heard of. Check out the IMDB full cast and crew listing to see every actor and movie featured, but even that isn't all that informative, since it just tells you what movie they got the scene from. Which is better than nothing, but since most action movies have half a dozen action sequences...

Complaints aside, the DVD does contain one action scene from 16 different movies; scenes that add up to about an hour in total length. There is a lot of padding and filler too, with "fight cards" in advance where they list the movie title and name of the characters (not the actors) who you're about to see fight. It would have improved things if they'd thrown in the name of the stunt coordinator, the stunt men/women in the fight, some info about the style of fighting used in the scene, etc. But since that would have been like... work, it's easy to see why this quick, zero-budget DVD didn't include it.

The scores.

Ultimate Fights, from the movies
Script/Story: NA
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 8
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 4

I can't really recommend this title unless you are a huge fan of action scenes. Malaya and I are, but we still found this one pretty mediocre, for reasons I will now elaborate on.

Script/Story: NA
Since it's just a bunch of movie action scenes presented without context, there's no story to critique. I do think they could have done a better job organizing things, though. It would have been nice if they had all regular fighting first, then martial arts, then the gun battles, just to give it some sort of rising action. Or if not that, they could have ordered them by genre, or period in history, or length, or quality of the scene, or something... anything to elevate it above the utterly random order it was presented in.

Acting/Casting: 5
There's not much to rate here either, but I'm scoring this one based on the actors they chose to include, and the scenes they chose to present. A few were good, most were mediocre, and several were awful. There was also a marked lack of big name stars, and most of the scenes weren't even presented in their entirety. This disk isn't attempting to be some sort of omnibus collection of the best fight scenes in movie history, but the quality of them varied greatly, with several so bad we watched it while wondering where the hell they got this clip, when we had never heard of the movie or any of the actors in it.

Action: 8
I think I'm being somewhat generous here, but since the entire disk was action scenes...  This is definitely a sum > than the parts, since out of the 16 clips, maybe 3 or 4 were worthy of an 8 or higher score. Most of them were pretty mediocre, and a handful were just awful. By far the worst was from some 70s chick-sploitation film where two unknown actresses rolled around a locker room for maybe 30 seconds, doing nothing more than pulling each other's hair and throwing a few laughably fake punches. That scene left Malaya and me wondering if one of the women had married the producer of the DVD or what, since there was no way on earth that scene had been included on merit. 

Eye Candy: 3
This is not something I expected to score so low, but the actual technical quality of the visuals was awful. Almost every scene was dark and underexposed, as if they'd copied the scenes from a tape through a minicam to a cheap DVD writer. The weird part is that in the extras they showed short bits from several of the same fight scenes, and the image quality was great. DVD quality, compared to the dark, old-VHS quality of the main presentation. I can only assume that some technician physically screwed it up in some way, turning up the darkness or processing it incorrectly.

Fun Factor: 5
It should be fun, and some of the fights are (Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx is probably the best), but most of the fight scenes are just very mediocre. Off the top of your head you could think of dozens of better fight scenes from movies you've seen in just the last year.

Replayability: 5
Since I'd already seen more than half of the movies they took the scenes from, it was pretty much a replay for me already. This score is based on the scenes they selected, most of which were pretty mediocre. If they had great scenes, I could have scored this one a 10.