Books Lying Open
¤ Dark Tower VII, Stephen King
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Yet more blisters.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because there's always traffic.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your pets smoke crack.

riday's blog was late. An explanation is provided below, mixed in with discussion of my returning D2 column, martial arts discussion, fight scenes in movies, and more.  Up here there's a quick and pointless sports mention, and one news item.  I will try to get through the 3 pending book reviews next week, and will probably do a Team America review as well, if Malaya and me find time to see it this weekend.

Friday's game was rained out, which means they'll be playing Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I guess, assuming Boston can manage to avoid the complete humiliation of not even winning a single game in the series, and I suppose it would be for the best if NYY just wrapped it up before next week, so the rest of us could get on with our lives and the Sports Guy could once again write about something I can at least pretend to care enough about to snicker at the jokes.

 ¤ Another one of the all-too-common, depressing, "Is a complete lack of common sense a pre-requisite for working in a high school these days." stories.

PINE BUSH, N.Y. - A teen-age Civil War buff has been suspended from school and faces serious charges after his replica musket was found in his car trunk at school in the Orange County community of Pine Bush. Joshua Phelps had been at a re-enactment with his Civil War costume, including a musket last week. He threw the uniform and equipment into his truck and forgot about it. Yesterday a security guard at the Pine Bush High School saw it and called police.

...

Town of Crawford Police were called and Phelps was cuffed and charged with a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a weapon.

His mother, Valerie Michaels, is outraged, saying the school has blown this thing way out of proportion. She says also in the trunk was a costume, shoes, leather belt, powder keg, and a leather cartridge box.

Phelps used the costume when taking part of the re-enactment of the Battle of Chancellorville which was staged by the 124th New York State Volunteers. The re-enactors say they are models of the unit that came from Orange County and fought in the Civil war. High School students were recruited to take part in the re-enactors club. Phelps' mother questions why give the students fake guns and then arrest them.

Pine Bush School Superintendent RoseMarie Stark called the incident a student discipline matter and declined to comment further.

I mean really, what is wrong with people? If the kid had an Arabic last name would he have been disappeared for reasons of national security?  Of course schools have to have strict rules about weapons on campus these days, but how on earth can they find a replica, non-functional gun, see the rest of his civil war outfit, know that students participated in the event a week ago, and persist in making asses of themselves by prosecuting him, knowing the media will get on it and the public reaction will be one of outrage?

It reminds me of businesses that employ stupid people at unlivable wages, like low level retail, fast food, etc. In those sorts of jobs management simply has to assume that none of the lower level workers knows their ass from a hole in the ground, and needs specific training not to stick hamburger patties into either one. This is as soul-killing as communism for the workers, since any efforts to improve their job performance, be creative, etc are punished, but it's necessary since the vast majority of workers are simply too stupid to be allowed any flexibility in their job performance. (Trust me on this one, I worked around such people in such jobs for over a decade.)

I don't think of educators as being like that, and perhaps individual teachers aren't, but school administrators certainly seem to be, and it goes right up the line. Perhaps the district or state admins set rules, chisel them in stone, and do not allow the local administrators any intellectual leeway whatsoever? So while we all want to brand RoseMarie Stark there with the scarlet "S" for stupidity, maybe she's just doing as she's been trained and ordered, and she knows how stupid it is, but her boss and her boss' boss have told her over and over again that any sort of weapon found on a student or in a student's vehicle must be punished by the rule book. Thus if she acts like a sentient human being and dismisses the whole thing once she knows the facts and the kid just gets a warning she'll be reamed by her bosses for making a judgment call she is not authorized to make, no matter how objectively correct it might have been?

I'm just speculating, but since the alternative is that Mrs. Stark is dumb as a sack of hammers, I'd prefer to blame her superiors and the rat's maze of inflexible rules they've forced her to navigate through. It certainly reminds me once again why I so desperately never want to be stuck in a job in any sort of bureaucracy, since this kind of thing drives me insane.

Anyway, I had already spent a couple of hours Thursday working on my soon-to-return D2 column (bi-weekly, sort of a Diablo blog, but with a top ten list every other column, like in the old days) and didn't much want to spend more time on non-fiction. Plus she was up late Thursday, so by the time I got back in here and was faced with spending more time on the D2 column, doing a blog, or working on the novel some, I took the safe route and elected to surf mindlessly for an hour, before having a snack.

I did eventually do a bit more novel stuff, and then spent a couple of hours finishing up the feedback portion of the D2 column (that's the feedback for the last column, which was written over 18 months ago) and putting down some more thoughts for the one I'm doing for Monday (probably) and then the Monday after the Monday after that. I don't know what I'll do in the 3rd new Decahedron, but I'm not going to worry about that yet. Overall, I got a fair amount of work done Thursday... just none of it on this blog.

Friday I spent several relatively enjoyable hours watching some DVDs and skipping to the action sequences. The subject of my 2nd new D2 column is going to be realism in action, and while it'll mostly be an overview of how that works (or doesn't work) in D2, I'm going to mention movies as well. So I had to watch some action scenes to refresh my memory, and that led to Kill Bill 1, Matrix 2, Kiss of the Dragon, and a couple of others. The genesis of this is, of course, my own ongoing martial arts training (nascent thought it may be), since after less than two months of sparring, learning techniques, and seeing more advanced people spar, it's become very obvious to me how ridiculously fake most movie fights are.

Well, obviously they're "fake" in that no one is really being hit and it's choreographed in advance, but I mean they're fake in that they aren't faking it well. Punches are obviously not going to land even before they're blocked, swords are swung far from the target, and blows that we are meant to think landed fiercely hit with the power of a dropped tissue. The biggest fake thing though, is missed opportunities. I know enough now to see how many hits could be landed, if the people actually knew what they were doing, and while it's fine if the fighters are just guys, in movies we're usually led to believe that the combatants are highly-skilled. Martial Arts masters, deadly computer programs, experienced cops, etc.  And when it's obvious, even to my barely-trained eye, that they do not know what they're doing, it takes me a bit out of the movie.

In their defense, the movies aren't trying to duplicate realism; they're trying to present the action in entertaining fashion, and make it fun for the general public, most of whom have zero martial arts training or combat experience. Lots of the better moves I've seen used in class are not very impressive from a distance, and some of the best moves require some knowledge of the art to appreciate. Tuhan (master, as he's called) can do things that don't look like anything, and when he demos them on you, at about 1/10th power, you stagger back three feet.  That's useless to put in a movie though, since the audience can't feel the power of proper weight transfer, and it would just look like you were staggering back to pretend to be hit.  So movies want big, flashy swings, things that aren't at all effective or necessary in a real fight, and lots of subtle, fast, close things that are actually deadly wouldn't look very impressive at all.

The other factor is editing. Most of the fighting in the Matrix 1 and 2 is laughable, once you know enough to analyze their technique and footwork and speed (Speed especially, the actors do the moves okay, but they're painfully slow and have no fluidity.) but at least Keanu and Lawrence and the others learned enough to do several moves in a row, with some speed and accuracy, and it's photographed from enough of a distance that you can see they're actually doing it. Other movies; most of Kill Bill for example, are edited so tightly and chopped up so much in presentation that you have no sense of the actors having any ability at all. It's easy to hide a lack of skill by editing it like that, and it's easy to make people who can do the stuff, but very slowly, look faster. But it's never as effective as a single long shot of the actors doing a sequence of moves.

On the other hand, it's hard to take it all in with a full-length shot. It didn't impress me at all the first time I saw the movie, but the tea house fight in Matrix 2 between Neo and Seraph (before he takes Neo to talk to the Oracle) is actually pretty well done, and a lot of the quality of it is in the editing. There is some nice footwork as they switch places (never mind that numerous blows could have been landed as they passed by) and it's emphasized by a close up on their legs as they do it. Other times when the focus is fist-work and arm blocks the camera shows just those, cutting away from the longer angle shots to give you the detail. In this way the audience can appreciate exactly what's being done and get some feeling that they are grasping the nuances of the art. Of course they're not; I'm not able to see 75% of the fast stuff that's going on in a sparring match in class and I sort of know what they're doing; but at least the audience gets some idea of what's happening on a deeper level than "two guys fight."