Books Lying Open
¤ DragonSinger, Anne McCaffrey
¤ Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Burnt chili.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because some bookcases are okay for kitties to climb upon, and others are not.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May you fly far, far away.

riday, and Xmas is coming up damn quickly. I'm going to be out of town from Thursday the 23rd through Friday the 31st, and since I'm not likely to be online much/at all while I'm visiting the family down in San Diego, and then spending some time with Malaya and other friends of ours in Las Vegas, I do not plan to update the blog that week. Therefore, Wednesday the 23rd's entry will likely be the last one this year, since I return home the evening of Friday the 31st and I doubt I'll leap online and upload a blog for that holiday weekend.  I should have some blog material and blog entries written though, since I'm taking Malaya's laptop and a good keyboard with me, and I'm planning on doing some writing while I'm vacationing in San Diego and Vegas.  Writing on my novel ideally, but diary-style blog entries if nothing else, since I enjoy typing out that sort of thing at night.  Those will go online with the Monday the 2nd update, in theory.  I'm sure you can hardly wait.

For today, there's some news, and then some reader mail below. Master Tuhan stopped by our Kali class tonight, and after watching for 20 minutes he pretty well took over things, as we'd all expected he would do once he arrived. I'd go on and on about it, but since that's pretty much what he does (demonstrates something with his incomparable skill, lets us emulate it for a few minutes with our partners, and then talks for 25 minutes about life philosophy) I'll try to stick to the point and spare you my usual much-longer-than-planned Wednesday and Friday kali discussion.

Class wasn't a total waste, and it was interesting to see Tuhan move as it always is, but I did about 1/15th as much Kali as usual, and I'd much rather get a quick tutorial on something and then try it out physically. The problem with taking instruction straight from the master is that he's been doing martial arts for 40 years, he has perfect body control, and he doesn't seem to entirely realize that other people don't. So he shows us something fast, effective, and awesome in its simplicity, then tells us to work on it ourselves, and when no one can do it properly (compared to his perfection) he then stops us and talks for 15 minutes about the philosophy behind it. Which isn't bad in of itself, but the problem, for me at least, isn't that I don't grasp the concepts and ideas; it's that I can't physically move my body in such a fast, powerful, and precise fashion. Not without practicing the move for a while, at least.  And just as I start to get the move down, he changes to something new, or else talks a lot more, during which time my muscle memory fades entirely.

He's an interesting speaker and a brilliant martial artist, but his style of instruction is terrible, for me at least. Plus he was taught in the old style, where the master beat the shit out of everyone, worked harder than everyone, gave virtually no instruction other than demonstrating the maneuvers, and expected the class to pick it up simply by watching.  Tuhan isn't that Kill Bill 2 in style, but his main weakness as a teacher (in my opinion, obviously, and since everyone learns differently he's probably perfect for some people) is that he likes to talk, and it pains him to watch beginners ineptly-execute the maneuvers he can perform so perfectly. So we get to listen a lot, regularly watch him do things we'd love to do, and then get hardly any time to work on them ourselves before he starts talking again.

Which is why I take classes from one of his students, rather than from him himself. Malaya takes classes from him directly, as well as from the Gura I train under, and she learns a lot from both of them, but she's got a lot more patience (apparently) with listening to Tuhan's discourses of life, discourses he peppers with Kali, from which you could learn much, if you had the body control brought on by decades of martial arts training.

Anyway, to the news.

¤ More on that recent mega lottery winner and his disintegrating life.

The wife of the lottery winner who took home the richest undivided jackpot in U.S. history says she regrets his purchase of the $314.9 million ticket that has thrust her family into the public spotlight.

"I wish all of this never would have happened," Jewel Whittaker told The Charleston Gazette for Tuesday's editions. "I wish I would have torn the ticket up."

Since winning the lottery two years ago, her husband, Jack Whittaker, has been arrested twice for drunken driving and has been ordered into rehab. He pleaded no contest Monday to a misdemeanor assault charge for attacking a bar manager, and is accused in two lawsuits of making trouble at a nightclub and a racetrack.

The article says his winnings were $113m after taxes, since he elected to take the lump sum, rather than waiting 20 years for an annual payment of what, $15m or so. Of course taxes would eat around half of that, but I think I'd rather have $7m a year guaranteed income than give up more than $30m of it just to get it all at once.  Of course I, like most of you reading this, think I'd be perfectly fine winning that much money and that it wouldn't ruin my life and that I'd invest it wisely and so on and so forth. And so does every new lottery winner, despite the surprisingly-high incidence of them being totally unable to handle the sudden wealth.

It's almost enough to give you some sympathy for how fucked up the lives of most rich celebrities and trust fund/heiress kids are. Sure, Paris Hilton is a loathsome creature, but when you compare her or your average prince or sultan to these lottery winners, at least Paris the Heiress isn't racking up DUIs and assaults and wandering around with $120k cash and an unlicensed gun on her. At least not as far as we know.

¤ The Laci Peterson murder case just ended with a conviction and a death penalty sentence. I paid as little attention to the trial as possible, so this article was news to me, but apparently Scott Peterson hired a famous and very successful defense attorney, Mark Geragos. Things obviously didn't work out too well for Geragos' client, and what I found amusing about this article is the tone it takes; the way it treats the conviction of Peterson for the murder of his wife and unborn son like a mere speed bump in Geragos' distinguished career.

Still, jurors — who felt enough of a connection to call Geragos "Mr. G." — gave him high marks.

"I respect Mr. G. I think he's a great lawyer," said juror Richelle Nice.

It was the facts of the case, she suggested, that conspired against Geragos. The bodies washed up near where Peterson told police he had been fishing alone and the husband who should have been grieving was instead calling his mistress and becoming increasingly detached from his in-laws.

Another juror, Greg Beratlis, said he would want Geragos to represent him should he get in trouble.

Those damn facts! Sometimes they even trip up the best defense attorneys. I suppose it's quaint of me to think that the whole purpose of laws and courts and justices is to punish the guilty; double murderers, for instance, but apparently it's much more important whether or not a verdict advances a famous lawyer's career. Like the way springing OJ launched Johnnie Cochran into the the A-list celebrity ranks, and nevermind the whole guilty man going free and miscarriage of justice and all that.

A MONTH LATER, when I added a basic anabolic steroid to the mix, I felt like I'd grabbed on to a car moving at 60 miles an hour. The effect was powerful, fast, and difficult to modulate.

Dr. Jones gave me a steroids tutorial over lunch one day, at a Middle Eastern place on Ventura Boulevard. He explained how "steroids" is a broad term for various synthetic substances related to the male sex hormones, and that they promote the growth of skeletal muscle and the development of male sexual traits. Though each steroid has different effects, they generally increase the amount of nitrogen in the body, which in turn stimulates protein synthesis.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that steroids help the body create muscle. They're used medically to treat everything from anemia to leukemia to AIDS, helping patients build strength.

Dr. Jones took out a pen and drew a chart on the paper tablecloth. On one side he listed various kinds of steroids: Anadrol 50, Winstrol, Deca, Anavar. Then he added columns labeled MASS, STRENGTH, WATER GAIN, RETENTION. For each drug, he filled in a number from one to a hundred.

"What you want is something that doesn't give you a lot of mass but adds strength," he said. "I'd start with Deca. It has almost no liver toxicity and has the nice benefit of helping joint pain. In Europe, it's used for arthritis. There's only one reason everybody doesn't use Deca."

"You grow two heads?"

"Worse, at least for most athletes. You can test positive for up to a year."

I stared at the chart, fascinated. Then it struck me that there was no column for side effects, nasty little consequences like liver damage, impotence, and steroid rage. I asked Dr. Jones about this.

He sighed and gestured along the wide table. "We don't have enough room to list them," he said. "The problem with steroids is that they do have some benefits, but nine out of ten people who are drawn to them can't resist abusing them. Then there's all the black-market junk out there. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that if you try this stuff a little, it will kill you. It won't. But you stay on it very long and you'll have problems."

The guy taking them, a competitive amateur cyclist in his late 40s, experienced substantial performance gains, added 12 pounds of muscle without doing any weight lifting, improved his vision enough to go without reading glasses, completely healed several years-old scars, and removed all of the lingering pain he had from past shoulder and knee injuries. Despite those gains, he stopped taking almost everything once his testing period was over since he didn't like the feeling of being on a physical rollercoaster and he didn't like the pressure to give himself so many precise injections on a daily schedule.

What I found interesting is that none of the drugs he was taking were illegal. They're all intended for human use, and available with a prescription; it's just that they're mostly used for people with hormone imbalances, severe arthritis, and other medical problems. And they're banned in most competitive sports, of course.  My feeling is that these drugs will continue to improve in quality and safety, and that in 5 or 10 years most older people will be taking cocktails of these sorts of things to keep themselves stronger and mentally sharper, as they fight the aging process. Not to mention all of the younger people taking them to look fit even if they don't work out, or to grow Arnie muscles even if they only work out a little bit.

¤ Yet another article about frivolous lawsuits. There's a twist though; instead of some greedy idiot trying to get rich off of a misplaced "wet floor" sign, these lawsuits are being filed by large companies against outspoken individuals who oppose their corporate goals.  Worse yet, the companies don't care about actually winning the cases; they just want to shut up critics and intimidate people who can't afford to hire a lawyer and spend months of their lives battling ridiculous libel suits.

With a meticulous eye to detail, Tom Diehl did his homework. He immersed himself in the regulatory minutiae of trash. He pored over environmental studies. And after publicly stating his case against a proposed garbage holding pen in his suburban St. Louis community, he won.

What Diehl did not anticipate was getting sued for his civic activism. The trash company has filed a $5 million libel and slander suit, alleging Diehl's and other opponents' characterization of the firm as "trash terrorists" suggests the company has killed Americans and intends to kill more.

...

"They're suing me to take away my right to be a citizen," said Diehl, a fundraising consultant for churches and schools.

Not so, said Gary Feder, a lawyer representing Fred Weber. Feder said the company had no problem with Diehl's public testimony against the proposal. Fred Weber singled out Diehl as the leader of the opposition, but it was a leaflet distributed by opponents telling local citizens what they can do "to fight the trash terrorists" that triggered the lawsuit, Feder said.

"The flier suggested it [Fred Weber] had operated like a terrorist," Feder said, adding that company employees have been endangered because people might believe they are working for a terrorist organization.

So the guy led a community fight to stop some trash plant from being built in his backyard, and he won, and obviously the company wanted to screw him for their lost profits. In the old days they would have just hired some goons to kneecap him, but in this more-enlightened age they had to turn to the courts, where they're suing him for calling them "trash terrorists" while pretending someone might actually read that and think they are Osama trash bin Laden and attack them. The fact that this has not happened and there's no way that it actually would is entirely beside the point, since all they really wanted to do was force the guy to spend a lot of money defending himself in court, as a message to others who might try to fight their next trash plant.

And they've certainly succeeded in that, as the paranoia evidenced in this next quote should prove.

Friends and supporters of Diehl have created a defense fund called the John Doe Society. People contribute money, mostly in cash because they fear that checks might be traced to them.

As for the larger issue:

Which is, of course, exactly what the companies launching these suits are counting on.

It's a valid point; many people have absolutely no interest whatsoever in horses or horse racing. I enjoy watching a horse race, or at least the last 30 seconds of it, when the announcer thunders, "And down the stretch they come!" and you can watch the equines trampling along, neck and neck, while the crowd screams madly.  I never care who wins, but the sheer athletic spectacle of it is exciting... for 30 seconds.

As for Seabiscuit though, the author, Laura Hillenbrand, researched the topic enough to produce a long magazine article on the horse and his associated humans. It was on the strength of the article that she got a book deal and the funding to continue her research and to produce the book itself. Luckily for us, the article is now available online, and in fact I read it several years ago, all the while thinking, "I'll never read this whole long article about an old racehorse." I did though, and wanted to read more about it when I finished the article, which put the idea of someday reading the book into my head. And I'm glad I eventually did so.

The complete article can be seen right here, and it's a good read. Everything in it is developed in much greater (sometimes too much, as I said in my review) detail in the book itself, and even if you don't like the subject, consider reading this book. Check out the reviews on Amazon.com; 520 out of 570 are 5-star, which is quite a grassroots endorsement.

¤ Next, here's Aahz, commenting on happy endings, which I have frequently advocated against; at least when they're the unrealistic, telegraphed, suspense-stealing type that Hollywood prefers.

It's funny that he mentions Less Than Zero, since that 1987 film seems to be largely forgotten at this point, whereas I think of it as one of the seminal films of the era, in the way other people seem to retain great affection for others, like say, Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). The irony is that I've only seen Less Than Zero two or three times, all on cable back in the 80s, and never since. Yet I still remember much of it more clearly than I do most of the movies I've seen in 2004.

If you've never seen it, it appears to be another of those annoying high school kid films (like the other 3 listed above) where teens will mature and life lessons will be learned. The big difference with Less Than Zero is that the main character is just back to his old LA home and his best friend from the high school popular scene is now a junkie sleeping in playgrounds in his stylish dress clothing, while trying to hustle investor money to open his own night club. The junkie friend is played by Robert Downey Jr., and it must be a memorable performance, since I still remember numerous scenes clearly, despite not seeing the movie in over 15 years. Mostly because he's still one of the beautiful people, still gets into all the best clubs and parties without waiting in line, but he's completely falling apart, his father has disowned him, his jock younger brother tries to beat him up when he goes back home early one morning, and he's being forced to do horribly-degrading things to get money and/or drugs.  And he's not cured and happily ever after in the end.

As Aahz says, the movie's ending is not at all happy, and in fact it's quite horrible and shocking. At least it was to my spoon-fed mind, back in my innocent teen years; however I have no idea how well the film would hold up today. Most of the IMDB and Amazon.com reviews are pretty mediocre, with the Amazon.com editorial review seeming to garner wide agreement.

On the other hand, I dug up Ebert's review from way back then, and he gave the movie 4 stars.

That's all quite beside the point, though it does make me want to watch Less Than Zero again, just to see what I'd think of it today, as a semi-adult.

Getting back to Aahz's email, his reaction to George R. R. Martin's series is just about exactly what mine was, and it's why I think the books are so brilliant. Unfortunately, I only have a review of the first one online now, and as Aahz says, it's not bad, but it's nothing special.  When the series gets great is when the plot starts clicking along in book 2, and when the characters we've grown to know so well begin changing massively, or struggling to survive, or not surviving at all. I've long planned to reread and write reviews about every book in the series when book 4 is released, but since it was due in early 2004, has been delayed twice, and still has no firm ETA, there's not telling when that will be.

¤ Lastly, here's a mail from Donnie, in which he critiques my movie review style, as I requested in a blog last week.

I often complain about my own rating categories, and mention other categories I'd like to have, but with 6-9 per movie (the number varies since some aren't applicable to some movies) I'm trying not to add any more at this point. I don't dislike his "satisfaction" score, but I'd say that much of the thought behind that rating is what forms my "overall" score. And as I relate in the category explanation on the main Reviews Page:

Overall: 1-10 - My total opinion, based on the above categories and other intangibles.

I initially considered doing what Donnie suggests, and averaging the category scores, with some weighting, to derive my overall score. I scratched that idea for several reasons.

• I would need an infinite number of categories for that to work.
• I'd want to weight them differently in every case.
• I didn't want to end up massaging the category scores in order to get a final total they're happy with

Basically, I wanted to say exactly what I thought about various aspects of a movie (or book) while retaining the option to give it whatever overall score I thought it deserved. It's the weighting that really would matter, since a movie could have great characters, great action, great scenery, etc, but if the story was stupid, or the characters did idiotic things, or the direction was awful, it would still suck. And in fact it might even be worse for the good aspects, since then you'd realize that it had potential, and failed to achieve it. Underworld, for example.

Also, my scores aren't any more objective or rational than those of any other critic. I'm always swayed by expectations, past history, potential, viewing experience, etc. If someone is noisy or the movie is out of focus or I'm sick and sleepy, I'm probably not going to enjoy a movie as much as I would if I felt fine and watched it without interruption. That wouldn't be the fault of the movie, and I'd try to mention that in my review, but I can't write the review and pretend I felt differently about the film than I did, as I hypothetically remove the offending distractions.

Expectations are a big one also, and I might even add a category for that, since they really influence my movie experience. Terminator 3 is an excellent example there, since I like T1 a lot, I love T2, and I had high hopes for T3. If I'd gone in expecting nothing, or less than nothing, I would have probably given it a 5 or a 6, like I do most of the other bad action movies I review. It's because I hoped for so much more from T3 that the dreadful casting and acting of the male and female humans bothered me so much, and the dumb holes in the plot and general stupidity showed by everyone but the Terminators was so frustrating. Aliens 3 and 4 lost points for that reason as well, while other movies I expected to suck, like Freddy vs. Jason, The Dawn of the Dead, and Tomb Raider 1 and 2 benefited from my rock bottom expectations.