Thursday, April 06, 2006
Wednesday Night.
No, I couldn't think of anything catchy for a post title.
So, scuba back. It fades, eventually, but damn it lingers like dog farts. I'm still a bit sore from nearly 10 days ago, and as recently as last night I was hobbled by the soreness. Initially I had a huge knot on my left side, right between the shoulder blade and my spine. Hurt when I breathed, even. Malaya had one in just about the same place on her right side, and her neck was super tight too. We traded more massage the week after scuba than we had all year, and finally the aches began to subside.
As my sore spot began to fade up high though, I got a new one on the lower right, just about over my lowest rib. You know, the one God removed to make woman. Anyway, that was really bothering me for the past few days, to the point that I had to take a really hot shower and stretch a lot just to get out of bed. It loosened up during the day; I've been going to the gym every day and doing Kali and such, but it was sort of a constant ache, and I couldn't bend over; I had to tie my shoes standing, with one foot up on a chair or something.
It was really bad yesterday, for unknown reasons, and after about an hour of Kali class I was really hurting. Kept having to stop and bend over to loosen up, and finally I just sort of sat down and stretched for the last 15 minutes of class, since it was hurting too much to keep standing and doing the stick fighting we were working on. Happily, that might have overstressed and stretched it enough that it got better, since I woke up Wednesday and felt the best I have since last Friday, before the scuba weekend.
In other news, Malaya got a new camera and has been happily snapping away. Hers is an SLR model, Single Lens Reflex, and it's one of the better digital types, in that you can control the focal length yourself if you like, and you can make it take a damn picture as soon as you hit the button. That's what drives most people insane about digital cameras (mine included), when you've got a good shot and click it... and the camera thinks things over for 5 seconds before taking the photo, by which time whatever you were aiming at is long gone. She's even taking a photo class at the local community center, and hoping to learn about film speeds and apature settings and all that other technical stuff that real photographers know about and that most digital cameras now automate so the vast unwashed horde can take pictures that are actually in focus.
At any rate, I'll likely be posting more photos of our uninspiring pets and condo in the immediate future, and I'm sure the difference in image quality will be almost noticeable, in my inexpert hands. I doubt anyone has noticed, but I've not posted any photos on here in forever. I hadn't really noticed, until I tried to offload some from my camera today, and couldn't put them in the main photos folder (since there were others with the same automatically-generated "P1010001.JPG" name already there). So I went to put them in the emergency backup folder... and it was full too. I had to create a 3rd level temporary folder just to get to the photo of my driver's license I had to send to Rush so he could send it to the E3 press people so I could get a media pass for this year's show, and wouldn't you know it; there were 18 more pointless feline/redwood stump photos already on the camera, from god knows when. And now they're on my computer, just as unsorted and willfully forgotten as their predecessors. Let's overlook the fact that Malaya's new camera is currently holding about 200 more just like them.
Firefly! Malaya and I both really enjoyed Serenity, both on the big screen and then again a couple of weeks ago when we bought the DVD (3 for $25 at Blockbuster, you know). So she up and bought crap! (I got 5%.) and now we've got the DVD box set of the original TV series, seen by several hundred fans during its initial airing on UPN. Or possibly FOX. And don't act like you know; you'd never heard of it until the movie came out either, or if you had it was entirely through the magic of illicit file sharing.
Anyway, we watched first first 100 minute episode, and I've gotta admit that it was damn good. Just like the movie in tone and look, and while having seen the film too some of the surprises out of the series (we know all the crew is going to survive for a few years, at least), it was fun to see how the characters were introduced, and how they interacted in less-stressful situations than they faced in the more action-packed film. I also much preferred the movie version of how the doc stole his sister away from the evil military dudes, and I liked her character in the film better; she was just completely cringing and sleeping and useless in the first episode of the TV show. She was that way at the start of the movie too, but there were nice hints that she was more than just a wispy victim psychic, and of course the hints became reality quite soon in the film.
I've got no idea if she'll become the same sort of unbalanced psycho weapon in the TV series, but I'm certainly hoping so, since that was the best thing about the film. Logically she shouldn't, since they had no inkling of her combat prowess in the film until she freaked out, and the film is chronologically after the TV series. However, the movie wasn't just a condensed season two of the show; it rewrote and tweaked the original events to suit a new purpose, such as changing how the doc rescued his sister in the first place, so it's entirely possible that she starts to come unglued in the series long before she did in the film, chronologically speaking.
And if you've seen the series already and know the answer to this question, please keep it to yourself.
Speaking of reviews, as I was looking over the chop socky one I posted tonight, I found myself thinking about Charlie's Angels 2. I watched it this week (literally, in about 4 blocks of 20 minutes each, since that's as much as I could take of it at one time and that's how long I needed visual entertainment while eating breakfast or lunch), thanks to the free library-based DVD rental, and while it wasn't any good, ir wasn't awful. I didn't expect to watch it, after all, I
concluded my coverage of the first film by saying I wouldn't see the second one because, "that's still 90 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back." I was wrong about that, though. It was more like 100 minutes.
On the chop socky angle though, how was CA2 really any better? Compared to a good chop socky film, CA2 had better visuals and music, equivalent acting, and worse figght scenes. I'd even give the edge in plot quality to most chop socky films, since at least things more or less make sense in those old kung fu theater efforts. CA2 feels like a movie made by an ADD 8y/o boy on a six pack of Red Bull. Every scene is in a totally different place, the actresses are always in different costumes, and the scenes have only the slightest connection to each other or to the movie as a whole.
Even with that said, I think CA2 was better than the first one. Perhaps I'm just misremembering it, since I watched and reviewed the first one nearly 2 years ago, but this one seemed a little more grounded in physical reality. Every fight scene didn't feature triple spinning flips and video game style fatality moves (none of which actually injured anyone), and while the efforts at comedy and drama fell pancake-flat, at least they were quickly dispensed with.
Like CA1, CA2 wasn't so much a movie as a long series of music video vignettes, and while I'm glad that style of not-really-a-movie didn't catch on, it was sort of interesting to see as a learning experience. I didn't keep count, but there had to be 40 or 50 different sets in the film, many of which were onscreen for no more than half a minute. I have never seen so much work by a movie crew for so little return. Several times the varous Angels had flashbacks to their earlier lives, and each time the full sequence would run hardly long enough to blink, yet you could see they had built entire gynastic competition sets, rented arenas to stage wrestling matches in, etc. They probably did as much work on all of those mini-movies as most films do on 30 minute sequences, and there was a new one onscreen every 2 or 3 minutes. I have no idea what CA2 cost, but damn they had to spend a lot of money and time setting all those sketches up, for so minimal a reward.
I'll write a review of the film in the next few days, though I suspect my scores won't be much different than the ones I gave the first movie.
Lastly, if you ever get a free sample of flonase, a nasal spray/decongestant, I recommend that you toss it out and resign yourself to continuing to sniffle. Malaya got a sample bottle of the stuff at the doctor's the other day, when she went in to get her swimmer's ear checked out, and while she hasn't had any cause to use it, I have. I don't know why, but I woke up Monday morning with a leaky faucet, and could not get rid of it. I hate to take chemicals/medicines of any type, but when my dripping stopped at the gym, then started up again once I returned home and showered off, my resistance began to weaken. I'd been awake like 6 hours, and the sides of my nose were already going red and raw from all the sniffing and blowing and wiping. So I tried the stuff.
It's prescription medicine, and I'd never sprayed anything up my nose before, so I followed the directions. Not that they were complicated; I just had to squirt the bottle a few times to prime the pump, blow my nose, and then give each side a couple of squirts, while inhaling steadily. There was one benefit; the stuff smelled good. Very synthetic flower, but not displeasing. Unfortunately, it didn't work to stop my nose running and it gave me a splitting headache.
Maybe five minutes after I took it I started to feel like someone had bolted a clamp onto the top of my nose, like up between my eyes, almost. It got tighter and tighter, and while my nose kept dripping it also began to itch. The sinus passages were swelling and shutting, and when I blew my nose it felt like squeezing a packet of relish through a pinhole. Felt about that good too, not that your average packet of sandwich condiments possesses a central nervous system.
An hour after taking the nasal spray I was sailing. Light-headed, congested but still drippy, and woozy; I had to brace myself against the walls to walk down the hall. Thankfully it began to wear off around that point, and after about four hours the headache was pretty much gone, though my nose was back to dripping as it had that morning. I almost welcomed it though, after the stoned feeling the drug had given me. Ironically, it wasn't until a couple of hours later that I realized my nose was no longer running, and by the time I went to bed I felt fine and pretty much normal. So maybe the stuff did work; it just needed eight hours to sink in, and it came at the price of making me feel like shit for the first four? Better than nothing, but I don't think that's quite the claim they'll be including in their promotional literature.
Labels: firefly, fitness, medical, photography, scuba
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Injury of the day/week/life
"Scuba back" I dub thee. A lingering condition all apprentice scuba divers are afflicted with after a weekend spent weighed down by far more gear than strictly desirable. Sunday night I was okay, but when I woke up Monday morning I felt like someone nefarious had bolted a small anvil to my left shoulder blade. After a hot shower I prevailed upon my dive buddy from some elbow-related assistance, and felt far better. Unfortunately, the sore spot returned on Tuesday, and though much-diminished, it lingers on even into Wednesday afternoon.
Malaya's got a matching area of concern, but hers is on the right, and it's up higher, just above the scapula.
Fortunately/tragically, we're going to get a while to rest and heal up, since after spending Sunday night, Monday morning, and most of Tuesday feeling like she had water in her ears, Malaya went to the doctor Tuesday evening and found out that... she did have water in her ears.
Swimmer's ear, they call the condition, and it's basically a bacterial inflamation that must be treated with antiobiotics. And obviously enough, you can't go back into the water until it's all gone. At least two weeks, Malaya's doctor told her.
If you're wondering, wearing ear plugs or something like that is not an option when scuba diving. You have to keep your ears open since you are constantly equalizing the pressure in them (usually by pinching your nose shut and blowing hard), and if you don't do that you will rupture your ear drums, as well as experiencing agonizing pain due to the pressure changes in the air inside your head. And that's just one of the many playful aspects of immersing your body beneath more than a few meters of liquid!
Since we were supposed to finish our (initial) scuba training this weekend in Monterey, and Saturday arrives in slightly less than two weeks, that's off. Happily, our two dive instructors are very nice guys and they say it's no problem. We can finish our training with another instructor, or come along with them in a month or two when they next take a group through open water training. I would have liked to get it over with this weekend, but I must admit some relief at the prospect of not having to get up at 5am this weekend. And now that we'll be home this weekend, we might even have time to finally go see
V is for Vendetta, as we've been itching to do for the past two weeks.
Labels: scuba
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Scuba, writing, and more unnecessary words.
Now that I'm feeling better (Sat and Sun we were too tired to think; Monday we felt like survivors.) I remembered a few things I forgot to mention in yesterday's scuba-related complaint-fest. For one thing, I forgot to mention another fun reminder of the weekend. Sunburn!
There's good news; I'm nearly as fish-belly white as I was before the weekend, since we spent 98% of or time in the pool in a full body wetsuit, including booties (they're needed for the fins we own) and usually gloves as well (to get used to fastening/opening staps and buckles with them on). My face was uncovered though, and since most of our time was on the surface, I got a pretty nice rosy red glow. This despite the fact that I had a scuba mask on most of the time. Drawback of the nice, high-visibility, transparent plastic it's made from, I suppose. I was a bit red Saturday evening, enough to smear on some aloe vera (just cut a spear of the plant on the back patio; fresh stuff is sorta smelly, but far better than any lotion made from its extract). I thought Sunday would be no problem though, since we were supposed to wear the extra hooded addition to the wetsuit. That and it had been cloudy and drizzling on and off all day Saturday.
So of course Sunday was clear and bright and sunny all day, and we didn't have to put on the hoods and such until the second session of the day, and even then most of us didn't wear them all the time, since they were so hot and constricting. Thus leaving me more time to sunburn.
I'm not really red anymore, but I'm peeling a bit, and the white dots all over my face are combining with my stubble to make me look quite rugose. It's not my best look.
Also, as you could probably have predicted, my hopes of spending a few hours a day working on the novel were dashed. Kinda hard to write when you spend 95% of your waking time either learning to scuba dive, eating before and after scuba diving, or driving to and from the scuba diving destination. I did get an hour's work done Saturday morning, when I woke up at 5 and had some time before our 7am wake up, but other than that I hardly even had time to surf a bit in the evening before crashing gratefully into the bed. Yesterday was pretty much a recovery day; Malaya had to run some errands and spend some time with her mom, while I mostly just laid around the house, doing a bit of work but mostly catching up on Internet news and blogs and such.
Today though, things can get back to normal. I went to bed with Malaya around midnight, we slept pretty well, and after I woke up at 7 I dozed in bed for 45 minutes until the alarm went off, thinking about the scenes I'm about to write in the novel. It's kinda fun; I'm very near the end when all the plot threads come together and the biggest scenes of the book are all about to take place, bang, bang, bang. I wrote the opening chapter to this novel (in a modified form) nearly 4 years ago, and I've always known how the story was going to end; it was the middle that needed work, to get characters from point A to point X, with numerous stops in between. Now that I'm finally to the end, with the big payoff scenes I've had in my head for years, it's strange. I'm reading notes on images and events I wrote and dated in 2002.
Not so long by some standards; Stephen King went what, 30 years between Dark Tower 1 and Dark Tower 7? But it's the longest I've ever gone between writing down story notes and then actually getting back to expand and finalize them. I'm just happy to see that I still like most of the ideas, and that I managed to write the novel without changing the characters so much that my initial ideas for the ending were ruined. I seldom make it through a chapter without that problem, when the last 1/4 of the plot outline becomes useless due to changes in details I made while fleshing it out.
And yes, I'd hoped to be finished with this novel in December 2005, but better late than never, and I'm actually sort of looking forward to being done and being able to go back to the start to rewrite the first few overlong, rambling chapters. I'm going to have to clip out literally 200-300k words from chapters 2-4, which would be oh, 600 pages or more in manuscript form. That's pretty much discarding an entire novel of minor plot events and digressions, if you can belive it. No wonder this thing has taken me so long to write, with at least a third of it basically dead space. Not that I'll admit that in a decade, when it comes time to publish some sort of cash cow of an unexpurgated trilogy-length version of the novel. *cough*
Labels: scuba, the fantasy novel
Monday, March 27, 2006
Scuba!
Scuba Diving!
Or more accurately, "scuba sinking" since you don't go down headfirst, you descent slowly and under control so you can equalize your ears on the way down, etc. I won't get technical, at least not this time, but yeah, we were in the pool pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, practicing all of the unfun, emergency exercises you've got to learn to get certified to go into the actual ocean and have actual fun.
They say that scuba isn't a sport that requires a great deal of strength or skill or endurance, and that may not be true for certified divers, but when you're learning it all at once... whoof. I have never been so tired as I was this weekend.
My weekend sleep times:
Friday: midnight - five am. Couldn't sleep any later.
Saturday: 9 - 6 am. In bed as soon as dinner was finished. Could have slept right beside the pool, if there had been a bed.
Sunday: 8 - 5am. I'm not sure I even lasted until 8. I could have gone to bed as soon as we got home and showered, but Malaya wanted a celebratory dinner out, and I managed to stay awake through that thanks only to free Pepsi refills.
We had to get up each day at 7am to get to the dive store by 8am, and we made it, more or less. Saturday we spent the first hour and a half getting ready. Trying out and renting wetsuits, BCDs, tanks, etc, and then learning to hook up the air to the tank to the vest, reading the pressure gauges, putting on all the wetsuit stuff, adjusting our masks and snorkels, etc. We were in the water until around 2pm to finish the first two sets of exercises, then after 30 minutes for lunch we got back in until nearly 6, and took all of our suits, air tanks, etc home, since we were due back Sunday at 8 and the shop didn't open until 11.
Saturday night though, we thought we knew what tired was. (We'd learn more about that Sunday, when we could add sore backs to fatigue.) Dragging home from the dive shop pool that evening, we tried to figure what was so tiring about it. We hadn't been to firefighter training, busy running up six flights of stairs with 50 pounds of hose on our shoulders. We were even standing in four feet of water most of the time. Scuba training is just slowly and steadily exhausting, thanks to the 25 pound weight belt, 40 pound tank, constricting wetsuit, slow movements as you push through the water, and perform a seemingly-endless litany of unfamiliar scuba skills, all of which must be concentrated on and done correctly before the instuctor will move on to the next item.
We got home after 7pm on Saturday, and I was literally in bed by 9, and asleep by 9:05. I stayed there, quite happily, until 7am Sunday, when we got up and ate and headed back for day two of the pool exercises, which ran until nearly 4pm. After that we came home, showered, washed our hair twice, went out for a celebratory Mexican dinner, and came back home, after which I promptly went to bed, this time by 8:30. *snore*
Sunday was even more tiring than Saturday, thanks to added fun of cold water gear. Our full body wetsuits were augmented by a second layer, which covers you from the knees up over the chest like a vest, and includes a hood that fits tightly enough that your hair hardly gets wet, even after ten minutes kneeling in the deep end. Everyone hated their hoods; they were tight, heavy, and basically made it feel like you had a weight on the back of your neck the whole time. I could hardly look down without fighting the stretching wetsuit, and that wears you out quickly.
We only wore them part of the time, since we were overheating in the sun on the surface in the heated pool, but it was plenty of time to learn how much we hated them. As the instructor said, "You sacrifice some comfort for warmth, in the Pacific." As Malaya said, "We're so going to Hawaii to dive."
In a perfect world, Sunday would have been done by early afternoon. In reality, there were delays galore as we all had to get more weights to counteract the added bouyancy of our extra suits, air tanks ran out, the more difficult proficiencies required multiple attempts, and so on. We ended up going from 8-4 without any break longer than a few minutes, and while the last 30 minutes were spent in the pool without any gear on, we had to swim 200 meters, and then tread water for 10 minutes as the final portions of our testing. Why they saved that for the time when we were all struggling simply to get in and out of the water, I couldn't tell you. I guess we now know we could swim that far or tread water for that long even after a really tiring day, though. And really, you don't need to be able to swim to scuba, since you've got floating stuff on, and even if you ran out of air you'd just drop your weight belt and float like a cork, in your highly-buoyant wetsuit.
We made it though, and a good thing, since this weekend the scuba training continues and concludes with 4 more dives into the ocean, down south in Monterey. The sleeping schedule fun will continue too, since we've got to be in the water at 8am both days. Which means we've got to leave here around 6 on Saturday, which means we've got to get up around 5am. On a weekend. This is recreation?
Happily, by this time next week we'll be registered and qualified sport divers, and will never need to take any scuba classes or exercises again, if we don't want to. (We probably will though, to get qualified for night diving, wreck diving, to learn to take underwater photos, qualify as rescue divers, etc.)
I can't really recommend scuba yet, since aside from a few minutes of floating weightlessly near the bottom of the pool, it's been nothing but expensive equipment and toil, thus far. We're sticking with it for now, with most of our training already done, and we keep telling each other that this is just the learning, and of course it's not much fun. It's all worst case scenario stuff now, with all skills being practiced that we will hopefully never use again. After all, there's no real reason you'd ever take off your weight belt, or rip off your mask underwater, or remove your BCD/tank, or run out of air and have to share a regulator with your dive buddy. You just have to learn and practice what to do in those situations, just in case disaster strikes.
It's exhausting and there's so much to learn, and it adds up. Nothing is that hard by itself, but it's time-consuming and tiring. Nothing is that individually challenging, you've just got to do it correctly, and when you're not used to being underwater, breathing from a tank, etc, it's a lot to manage at once. And you're doing one new thing after another for like 3 or 4 or 7 hours straight. It gets really hard to maintain concentration, and on Sunday, while we were standing around, sweating in the hot wetsuits, bent over with 60 or 70 pounds on our backs, I gained rapid insight into why the instructors take off their tanks and weight belts the first chance they get, and put them back on only when they absolutely need them on.
As for learning scuba, I definitely recommend that if you want to learn it, you do not do it as we're doing it. We took classes through a local college that does not have a pool or diving equipment to use there. So we did all the bookwork in advance, a chapter a week over 5 weeks, and then had all 5 units of water learning to cram into one weekend. Exhausting and stressful and sleep-depriving. The usual way to learn is at a dive shop, on a three week schedule. You do two classes a week that way, with a pool session after each one. So you're learning the skills as you read about them, and with just 2-3 hours in the water each time, you're not exhausting yourself with a full day in the water.
Numerous times this weekend, Malaya and/or me were quite ready to take all of that shit off and never think about scuba again. It's just so tiring to stand there in all that gear, or to kneel at the bottom of the deep end for 10 more minutes, sucking air and trying to keep your breathing slow while waiting for other people to get their weight belt recovery roll down, or manage to put their BCD back on under water, or whatever.
It should all be a lot more fun next weekend though, and then vastly more fun when we someday get to vacation somewhere warm and tropical, where we can dive in just a light wetsuit. Wearing the double layer stuff (as we were doing for testing, not warmth, at least not while in the heated pool) is like being a little kid in a heavy snow suit, where you hardly feel like you can move your arms, or bend over forward, and with maybe 60 pounds of gear on your back/around your waist, you can easily imagine falling over backwards and not being able to get back up by yourself.
Hopefully this weekend will be a lot less tiring, since we've already learned most of the hard stuff, and just have to prove we can do it in deeper water, with a current. The ocean should be a lot more fun too, with rocks and fish and stuff to look at, rather than just a dirty swimming pool. With any luck, by this time next week I'll be posting a raving blog entry about the joy of scuba, and discussing how eager we are to go do it again somewhere for real, etc.Labels: scuba
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Weekend Activities
Not activities for us, unfortunately. I slept all day and worked all night, and Malaya was out at Kali or family-related events Friday night and pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday. When you get right down to it, our highlight highlight was eating frozen pizza late Friday night. And really good Chinese food Monday evening, after doing the laundry. Whee.
If we had gone out though, we would have seen
V is for Vendetta. Plenty of other people have; it made $26m for the weekend, and it's getting pretty good reviews too;
75% on RT, which is unusually high for a comic book/action movie. (Not that
Vendetta is really an action movie.) It's a surprisingly high review score for this film in particular, since it's quite radical and potentially polarizing, with an obsessed vigilante bomber terrorist as the hero. True, he's fighting against an evil, totalitarian government, but the concept that a government in a modern country like the UK could be controlling and dangerous enough that it would need to be fought against and bombed is pretty radical, for some.
And while most of the critics like the film, and had no problem with the imagery or metaphor, some reviewers dislike it exactly for that aspect. Like Rush Limbaugh reviewing a Michael Moore film, they're automatically going to hate it on ideological principles that have nothing to do with the film's actual content or style. Take
this review from a self-proclaimed conservative film site. Good luck reading through the entire screed, but the reviewer basically takes every aspect of
Vendetta, compares it to something current in the US, and says liberals are idiots for thinking the world is anything at all like what they think it's like. A quote to give you a sense of the review's argumentative brilliance:
Note: like all Left-Wing fear-mongering, this films likes to erroneously equate the extreme Religious Right with mainstream Conservatism, which would be like equating NAMBLA with mainstream Liberalism.
Yes, because you see Democratic politicians just lining up to speak at child molester conventions, the way Republicans do with the AFA and Christian Coalition, and all the rest.
Furthermore, and it's a pretty easy argument to make, but I'll make it anyway: if a fictional film set in the future, in the UK, with and evil, terrorism-hyping, freedom-destroying, madly-Christian, anti-gay, lying, manipulative, totalitarian government makes you crazy since you're sure it's all about your beloved Bush Administration... that says a lot more about you and Bush than it says about
V for Vendetta. And what it says is scary.
Elsewhere, some serious reviewers have taken a similar tact, but with a lot more subtlety, of course. David Denby of the New Yorker has been pointed out by some, for
his sniffy comments. I thought he was fairly balanced on this one, or at least did a good job of hiding his pro-Bush = anti-
Vendetta sentiments. His review isn't very honest, since he cherry-picks details to harp on and does it inconsistently. (He slags the comic for being overly-radical and divorced from reality when it was written, then slags the Wacky-brothers for making the updated version too close to reality.) But at lest he doesn't spoil the film.
I've seen a lot of that lately, and I wish I'd saved the reviews, but the practice seems to be to attack a film you don't like (especially one you disagree with ideologically) with not only a negative review, but with indiscriminate use of spoilers. Perhaps the logic is that since people like to read nasty reviews, even people who don't agree with your review will take a look, and perhaps be turned off to seeing the film once they know every last twist and turn of the plot.
In that light, it's ironic that the most-enthusiastic Vendetta review I've yet seen
is this one, by some guy with a super hero-themed blog. While he's got some good stuff to say about
Vendetta, I strongly recommend that you
do not read his post, since he not only kills the fatted spoiler calf, he slings its entrails like a steam-powered trebuchet. Every major plot twist (most of which you can discern from the trailer and the TV ads) is laid bare, and plenty of minor ones too; stuff I haven't seen mentioned in any other reviews. Since you know, they don't want to ruin the film for people who haven't seen it yet.
I did get a laugh from his post though, or rather from a comment, after I stopped reading it halfway down and skipped to the end:
The word you're looking for is "spoiler". Please don't forget it in the future.
I'll give the blogger credit for replying to this comment, even though his reply guarantees I'll never read a word about upcoming book/movie on his site again.
Spoiler, shmoiler.... I presume when I read or write a review of a book or movie that there will be a discussion of the plot, unless the plot is somehow irrelevent, in which case the book or movie is probably not worth reading or seeing.
Well of course. Every review has to give at least some plot detail, to ground the comments in some shared reality. But there's a huge difference between saying
Vendetta is about a mysterious vigilante fighting a corrupt and evil totalitarian regime, and telling us why he's fighting, how he meets Natalie Portman's character, what his methods are, whether he succeeds, what their relationship is, and how the entire film ends. If you can't handle a "discussion of the plot" without throwing the entire carcass on the slab, then you probably shouldn't be writing movie reviews; at least not ones without massive spoiler warnings.
Is it petty of me to now want to find out what films this guy is looking forward to, see them first, and send him stealth emails with bullet lists of every key plot point?
At any rate, Malaya and me still want to see
Vendetta, and hope we'll get the chance sometime this week. Perhaps at a matinee Wed or Fri. It's iffy though; she's been very busy with work and other things lately, and I've been working on a near-vampire schedule, getting a lot of fiction done but staying up until 8 or 9am to do it. So our overlapping awake/free time hasn't been real extensive.
We did get to see a film Monday night, but it was just a DVD. Serenity, which we enjoyed in the theaters, got for $10 used at Blockbuster, and really, really enjoyed. It was better the 2nd time, actually, since neither of us knew anything about Firefly going into the film, and therefore spent half the movie trying to figure if we liked their Old West talkin' style Western in space. The second time we knew where it was going and what was going to happen, but that just freed us up to enjoy the events and acting and dialogue. It's a damn shame that film wasn't a bigger hit, since we would love to see sequels. We might even buy the DVD of the original show, and I
never watch TV series on DVD. Or on TV, for that matter.
Elsewhere over the weekend, the college basketball tournament began. Aside from a year of slight interest in UNLV back in their Larry Johnson/Stacy Augman/National Championship prime, I've never given a damn about the collegiate game. And since my current interest in the pro game is also at an ebb, I'm paying little attention to "March Madness." I love college football, largely since it's so much more wide open and (therefore) entertaining than pro football, but college basketball seems to be almost the opposite. Like 9 of the 10 guys on the court always seem to be about 6 foot 5, the college coaches always seem to have an almost military fanaticism for control and discipline and order, and like one player in two hundred has the skill to dribble drive or break down the opposing defense. So you get endless possessions of 20 looping backwards passes before the shotclock runs down and necessitates a desperation drive/shot, followed by a mad leaping scramble of equally-tall guys fighting for the rebound. The only college games I ever have any interest in are ones with an underdog trying to pull off an upset, and even those are pretty much unwatchable, since the last minute of every college game features a minimum of 6 time outs, often called two or three in a row.
A great deal of modern sports coaching seems to be about looking like you're trying hard. Coaches all do the same thing, and all try to look intense doing it, so then even if they lose, it's CYA material. "But look how many time outs I called and how much I screamed during them? You can't fire me when I'm making such an effort!" The Phil Jackson "let them play through a bad stretch and find leadership on the court." style of coaching is just unheard of in the college ranks. And it's pretty uncommon in the pros too, for that matter. So you get overcoached teams running around in circles, all doing the same thing with players all about the same size/talent, and since I don't have any colleges I care about enough to root for (just against, in a few cases), why watch?
Especially when watching a #13 seed leading a #4 seed by 2 with :55 seconds left entails 20 minutes of TV time, of which 19 are spent watching commercials, coaches gesticulating, or illiterate 18 y/o's missing the front half of "1 and 1" free throws.
I do check the scores though, and sometimes watch a bit of the highlights on ESPN, and I enjoyed the Men's Tournament for all the upsets. None of the top seeds lost in the first two rounds, but it makes me happy when I look
at the bracket and see all of those #2 and #3 and #4 seeds going home after a round or two, tails between their legs, hopes and dreams running down their thighs.
#3 Iowa lost to #14 Northwestern State, #4 Kansas and #5 Pittsburgh both lost to #13 Bradley, #3 UNC lost to #13 George Mason, and more. This year some of the TV guys (who are obviously biased towards big name schools, since they get higher ratings) ripped the NCAA selection committee for picking a lot of #2 teams from small conferences instead of packing the tournament with the usual bunch of #3-#6 teams from big conferences. Wonder how that crow tastes?
It's pretty clear, unless this is just a one-year anomaly, that the talent base is spread very widely and very thinly across the nation's top men's college teams. In the old days top teams had seniors playing, with very good freshmen and sophomores on the bench. Now the best teams stay the best forever because they get the best recruits, but with every guy listening to greedy agents and bolting for the pros after a year or two, the turnover is so fast that any team can catch lightning in a bottle and have a great year or two. (Before their key players go pro/graduate/flunk out, and they have no All-American recruits to replace them with.) Last year's champs, UNC, lost their top 7 players to graduation or the pros, and were playing like four freshmen half the time this season. That made their second round loss somewhat predictable, though no less enjoyable. Ahh schadenfreude, my old friend.
On the other hand, there are clearly
not 64 quality women's college basketball teams in the US. Nor would you expect there to be, without a big money pro league sucking them away at 18 and 19, and far fewer women playing high school basketball than men. The women have yet to complete their second round games, but in the first round every single #1, 2, 3, and 4 seed won, with the biggest "upset" #5 NC State falling by 10 to #12 Tulsa, a team that actually had a much better record on the season: 26-5 vs. 19-12, albeit in a smaller conference/against lesser competition.
More tellingly, the gap between best and worst is even larger. In the first round the four #1 seeds play the four #16 seeds, the four #2 seeds play the four #15 seeds, and so on. All the men's #1 and #2 seeds won their first round games, but other than UCLA's 34 point blow out over Monmouth (?), there wasn't a game decided by more than 16 points, and most of them were around 10 points. #2 Tennessee sneaked past unknown Winthrop , 63-61. (And then lost to #7 Wichita in the 2nd round, making you wonder how they got a #2 seed.)
Check out these first round scores for the women. 75-51, 102-54, 95-54, 96-27 (
really), 77-53, 72-48, etc. I guess they've got to play the games, but really, is there a need for 64 teams, when you get first round mismatches like these? How about going back to 32 and a hope for some interesting matchups before the 3rd round? Or 48, and giving the top 16 a bye while the rest of the chaff shakes itself clean?
Personally, I could care. Given how I feel about the men's game, I can't imagine I'll ever watch a women's college basketball game, no matter who's playing. But it doesn't look good for the sport when you've got blowouts of this level in your championship tournament. It's like a team from the local rec center taking on the Lakers. Although, if the amateurs just doubled Kobe the whole game, that might not be such a bad matchup.
Next weekend promises to be a lot more interesting, since we'll be spending all day Saturday and Sunday in a swimming pool. Yes, it's still cold here, but since we'll be in wetsuits and scuba gear, I doubt we'll mind.
You see, we have taking a scuba diving class for the past month, and we'll have the book portion completely finished after Wednesday night, leaving just our weekend of pool classes, and then our open water test down in Monterey. After that (if all goes well) we'll be PADI certified open water divers, free to rent equipment and explore the watery depths anywhere in the world. (So long as we don't go deeper than 60 feet, or into any wrecks or caves, or at night, etc. They have other, more expensive classes to get that sort of training, you see.)
Though we've never been yet, we certainly hope we enjoy scuba diving -- with over $700 spent thus far, each, we'd better find a way to get out and use our damn equipment again. No, it's not a real affordable hobby, and our money only went for the class fees, and then fins, snorkels (prescription for Malaya), masks, booties, gloves, dive knives, weights, weight belts, and carrying bags. We get free rentals (for our pool and open water tests) on the wetsuit, hood, BCD, and tank from the shop we're taking the classes through, which saves us $50 a pop for the rental. If we actually want to buy, we're looking at $200+ for a wetsuit, and way, way more for the breathing equipment. Cheap BCDs (the vest/jacket thing that inflates with air, along with the hoses and other parts) run over $1200, with quality ones $2000 and up, and that doesn't include the tank, air refills, and yearly tank inspections. Not to mention plane tickets to Australia, dive boat rentals, and shark-related taxidermy fees.
I'll blog more on scuba stuff next week, I suspect. So far, the biggest thing I've learned in scuba class should come as no surprise to anyone. Pretty much every single thing you've ever seen divers do in a James Bond movie... is completely bullshit.
Labels: basketball, scuba, v for vendetta
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