To Your Health

While Camille Paglia, a columnist I still enjoy and used to agree with for the most part, continues her slide into becoming a neocon replete with raging denial, others are doing a much better job at defining the issues and problems in regards to the current healthcare debate.


The first paragraph of "Can Obama give 'em hell before it's too late?" by Michael Lind gives me goosebumps:

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred."

It's riveting and deeply tragic that this particular cycle of history had to repeat. The right has pretty much managed to undo most of the great things FDR did, and undo most of the gains of the labor movement of the early 1900s, and by that I mean if you work in a "Right to Work" state, the only protection you have as an employee is that you are legally due any pay for any documented hours worked. That's it. Yes, if you feel you were discriminated against, you can sue. But, if you're a white guy under the age of 50, well, fuck you.

(And you can tell it was a Republican effort by the very name "Right to Work." They have a particular love of Orwellian, opposite-meaning legislative monikers.)

Lind's whole article is good. He even thumps the left for the crap it did wrong - something very necessary when we're trying to accomplish something this historical that has this much importance. (And I say "even" because Salon is openly lefty.)


On a lighter note, Garrison Keillor's "We need a public pet option," brings perspective by pointing out that if this debate were about pets, it'd probably be over already.

The Book

The opening sentence to this great article (linked to by Kottke.org) reads: "It may be, as offline readership continues to decline, that the mere fact of a bound, printed book with a paper dust jacket is something to celebrate."

The article then veers of onto its real topic - book designs not chosen - but that sentence struck me because I don't agree with it at all. While newspapers may be in trouble, the printed paper book is here to stay (as is the magazine, but that's another story).

I know this is probably belaboring the obvious, so just a couple more points:

- Electronic devices need power, don't work well in the sun, and any moisture is toxic to their very being - and this will probably always be the case. I don't like the experience of reading something long on them. I often read in my driveway while the kids play on the block, and well over half the time they either run over my book, or knock my beverage into it. Books get funky if they get wet, too, but at least you can still finish the thing. And you've only lost the price of the book, not several hundreds of dollars of electronic device.

- Those who provide the media for any electronic device - be it broadcast TV, Tivo, DVDs, music, or books - are of the mindset that you are always just borrowing their content and only they truly own it. So any device, like Kindle, that has a pipe to the provider will allow them to control what's on that device, as with the famous ironic "recall" of Orwell's 1984 from people's Kindles. Once you walk out of a store with a book, CD, or DVD, that puppy's yours, and there's not a lot they can do about it.

We all know that those who read tend to have children that read, and that is the case with my family.

Ergo, books have a solid future.



Since we're on the topics of books, I plowed through something recently that was thoroughly enjoyable and something I intend to buy a used copy of to send with my daughters when they go to college:

Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan.

The summaries, trivia and "what to skip" jive with my memories of the books I've read, and it totally assuaged my (admittedly very teeny tiny) bit of guilt at deciding I will never try to read James Joyce's Ulysses again. How cool is it that someone took the time to put something like this together?

My only gripe is the overemphasis on gay studies ephemera. I know that the Lit departments of many colleges had more or less ousted white, straight guys (and their "dead white male" canons), but even with that knowledge, it was slightly sorrowful to encounter blatant evidence of it.

To Murnighan's credit, though, he's brave enough to dispense with the "dead white male" silliness right out of the gate, so the book's actually a nice cross-section of good classic lit.

Wisdom

Been reading Bios like crazy lately. I'm a bit of an impulse shopper at the library (wonderful when it's free) and they've had this bio section by the front lately.


Tom Bergeron - the host of Hollywood Squares, America's Funniest Home Videos, and Dancing with the Stars (which I think of as "Dancing with the Scars") - has a rather amusing bio.

What's cool is that it as much about how to make it in the biz as it is about how he did it. Anyone who wants to be in broadcasting should read this book.

My favorite parts are when he gets food poisoning and when he announces on the air that the reason a popular puppet character was removed from his morning variety show was due to the Peter Principle, but it so happens some studio bigwigs were watching - one of them named Peter - who didn't know what the Peter Principle was and assumed it was a swipe at him - which of course is a deliciously ironic example of the Peter Principle.

---

Read the strokefest The Garth Factor: The Career Behind Country's Big Boom by Patsi Bale Cox out of morbid curiosity as to what eventually happened to Garth, as near the end of his career he was kind of getting that Scientology-melted-my-brain/eyes-too-wide glare (for the record he's not a Scientologist, but I've noted most of them eventually have this odd glare in common).

It had a lot of great stuff about executive battles in country music, which is why I ended up reading it to the end, but it sure handles Garth with kid gloves. Then at the end we find that he's gearing up to come out of retirement, so I realized I probably just read an infomercial.

Still, if you're a fan, there's enough stuff about the inspiration behind some of his songs that you might dig it.

---

Finally, I plowed through A Little Bit Wicked by Kristin Chenoweth with Joni Rodgers. I picked it up to get the story on why my beloved TV show Pushing Daisies was cancelled (it being the ONLY new scripted show I've started watching in the past few years, only to get it yoinked out of my life); however, I kept reading because it was funny as hell.

Here are some excerpts I enjoyed:

The setup for this line is when she went on the "700 club" to promote her new CD (which had some Christian-themed songs on it) which pissed off her gay fans given the show's stance on being gay, so when she apologized to them, the Christian music tour she was supposed to join fired her.

"So apparently, though it's famously impossible to please all of the people all of the time, it is quite possible to simultaneously piss everyone off." - pp. 210

Here, Aaron Sorkin is lamenting the demise of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Chenoweth makes it a life lesson.

"Look, I screwed up Studio 60 nine ways from Sunday," he [Aaron Sorkin] told her. "I made storytelling mistakes. I wrote angry. And anger is good fuel for the tank when you're writing, but not over the course of twenty-two episodes."

It occurred to me that the same is true of life in general. At times you have to get your Harriet up, but it's corrosive to be constantly embattled. Life requires peace. Peace requires balance. And balance requires a certain amount of get-over-yourself. - pp. 212

This one really needs no setup.

Jerry [Zaks] stuck a cigar in the side of his mouth and said, "So, kid, tell me about the Rapture."

"Well, it's when Jesus comes and takes all his followers up into Heaven."

"You mean, we'll be sitting here and you'll just disappear?"

"That's what I believe."

"What's left after you disappear?"

"I don't know. A pile of clothes, I guess."

He opndered that a moment. "Will your panties still be here?"

"Yes, Jerry," I said with the loving spirit of Jesus in my heart. "My panties will still be here. And you may have them." - pp.213

---

What I realized is that most bio writers these days realize the words have got to pop, so the Bergeron and the Chenowetch bios were just plain fun to read.

If you're looking for a nice, easy beach or airplane read, try a bio next time.

My current music crush

I have slowly fallen in love with the site "The Ultimate Bootleg Experience" (aka T.U.B.E.).

They offer (illegal, I'm sure) complete downloads of bootlegs of concerts and concert video.

At times I have been really impressed by the quality of the sound. They usually spell out if it's from a soundboard connection, broadcast over FM or if it's a crowd recording (which usually sound the worse, but can have a certain charm - in the middle of the third song on the 2009 Steely Dan show, you hear some woman announce in a nasal voice, "These are our seats." which really puts you in the live moment).

What finally put me over the top was a posting of a late 70s Steely Dan show with the original lineup. I had always wondered what they sounded like. Answer: good.

Btw, they have many more artists than Steely Dan.

Enough babble, go check it out.

Changes

Just some housekeeping. You'll notice that some blog bros and sisters are gone from the right, they done retired. (Dropping like flies anymore. Have we passed into a new age on the web and no one noticed?)

I'll miss you Opinionated Home Schooler and Redwood Dragon.

Also, the link to my old vanity site will be coming down sometime in Oct. because Geocities/Yahoo is discontinuing their free hosting service, so it will disappear into the void. So, if there's anything out there that you like or liked, go grab it now. The Reading page in particular has some good stuff. I think it's the only place on the web you'll find Gahan Wilson's wonderful Pocket Movie Sci-Fi / Horror Calculator.

It's like asking a Xeriscaper how to grow Kentucky Bluegrass

The wife and I agreed a long time ago, after I had been given some sage advice from a teacher way before we had kids, not to allow video games in the house. They can play them at friends' houses, but not at home.

The few exceptions have all been games you can play on a computer, don't cost over $30, and specifically games that require something other than shooting things. Of the few allowed, "The Sims" has been a perennial favorite of the older MPC1. What's even more cool is that she enjoys creating the world and the houses as much or more than creating the simulated people that populate these worlds. She spent a week building an apartment complex once.

Often, she'll start regaling my lovely wife and me with something that has transpired in the Sim world, and I'm always amused because it's often so … nerdy. Not what she says, mind you, but what happened in the game.

Then it dawned on me: here's a game where the primary goal is social interaction created by a group renowned for being the biggest social maladroits ever to plod the face of the planet - COMPUTER GEEKS!

I've been in IT for almost 20 years now and of the hundreds of IT people I've known and worked with, I can think of exactly two who are good at talking to girls; I include myself in that number and I'm not one of the two. Now, let me qualify that IT geeks are some of my favorite people in the world. They're usually intelligent, kind (once you know what they consider kind), fun to talk to, and the list goes on. But, the vast majority are not the people you'd tap for relationship advice, whether it's friendship or romance.

Yet, here's this whole game created by these very people about that very thing.

One of her buddies got Sims 3 recently, and we don't have a computer powerful enough to play it (nor do we want to re-invest all the money on the new games and extension packs), so she's been limited to playing at her friends. She was belaboring the differences between Sims 2 and 3 in secret hopes I'd be so moved as to buy a new computer for her just so she could play version 3, and she says, "But, even though you can visit other Sims and more places in 3, it's still really hard to make friends."

After I'd pulled myself up from laughing my ass off and rolling on the floor, wiping my eyes and getting my breath back, she said, "You're going to blog this, aren't you?"

Yes, my dear. Yes I am.

Columbine

I was mere blocks away when the massacre at Columbine high school occurred. We heard of it over the police band or something, so got wind of it just as the first kids started spilling out of the school.

I recall being deeply frustrated with the media reports at the time because the police had (appropriately) kept a lot of information out of the news, so the hours and hours of local reporting (which you could not escape if you had a TV on) were footage of tear-stained friends and family doing memorial stuff while the news anchor droned banalities, punctuated by the occasional weepy interview about how special someone was.

Yeah, that's pretty harsh, I know. I did and do have sympathy for the victims and their loved ones, but the news managed to be useless and unbearable. If they were in a media blackout, they should've just said so, STFU, and move on to the weather.

When I saw Columbine by Dave Cullen - though I wasn't really stoked about a journey through that particular valley of woe - I picked it up with a sigh and got down to it because I still had so many unanswered questions.

The strength of this book is how thoroughly the psychology of the two evil little motherfuckers is constructed from the diaries and tapes they left behind, augmented with a the insights that psychologists and criminal profilers have from similar cases. If you want to know the mental patch-work of evil human beings, this book will show that to you. Jodi Picoult tried to do that very thing in her Columbine-inspired Nineteen Minutes, but ended up (I feel) just embarrassing herself. (I credit her for trying, though.)

Points of interest (to me, at least):

- The "quiet time" after the initial bloodshed. Once the two little peckers had gunned down several kids in the library and cafeteria, they wandered around not shooting anyone for a 32-minute "quiet period". The author posits that this conforms to typical sociopathic behavior, in that once the initial thrill of the crime is experienced, all the "fun" drains out of it and the sociopath lapses back into boredom and disinterest.

- What happened, specifically, to the two pricks. They blew their heads off at the same time. Good riddance.

- The Cassie Bernall mythology. It was initially reported that one of the attackers pointed his gun at her and asked if she believed in God, when she said yes, he shot her. Well, that didn't happen. In reality, she didn't say anything; the gunman poked his head under the table she was hiding, yelled "peakaboo!", and shot her. (Bless her heart and may she rest in peace.) However Valeen "Val" Schnurr a few tables away had been hit with a shotgun blast and started praying, "Oh my God, oh my God, don't let me die." The attacker turned around and said, "God? Do you believe in God?" She replied, after a pause, "Yes. I believe in God." "Why?" "Because I believe. And my parents brought me up that way." He began to reload but something distracted him and he walked away. (I now find I could have resolved this question just by looking around the web a bit. Yet, this book is authoritative and some of the sites still quibble over details, so I'm glad I've got the info from a reliable source.)

- The days of April 19-20 are becoming pretty big ones in American history. All this happened on those dates:

-- Waco Branch Davidian siege famously ended in flames on the 19th, 1993
-- Oklahoma City bombing occurred on April 19, 1995
-- Columbine shooting happened, on April 20, 1999 - the date chosen because of the previous two events on this list, and the fact that it was Hitler's birthday; don't know why they didn't do it on that Monday the 19th
-- Johnson Space Center shooting, April 20th, 2007

And, interestingly (and included by me out of sheer perversity):
-- April 19, 1987 – The Simpsons premieres as a short cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show (Source: Wikipedia)

Therefore, I'm gonna be jittery on those two days in April henceforth.


Even though I've mentioned it and it's obvious, the book is a grueling, hard read just because of the horror of the event. If it intrigues, gird your mental loins beforehand. If you'd prefer your summer be lightness and mirth, eschew this one.

Academia Decides to Join the Clan

M. Blowhard linked to "feministx," a deeply conflicted young lady (and college student) who's mulling over (among many things) "Human Biodiversity" (aka "HBD", aka "evo-bio") which is the identity-politics code term for, well, a bastard cousin of eugenics, meaning that there is not a movement to improve humans through selective breeding (and killing), but a perceived need to acknowledge that there might be significant enough racial differences that impact human behavior and thus should impact subsequent considerations regarding policy, education, and what have you.

Or, in a nutshell, act as though some racial and ethnic stereotypes are real. Formalize it.

I think most of us - at least folks who value pragmatism - do employ stereotypes a little bit, but I think we do it on a contingency basis, ready to abandon preconceived notions at the slightest reason to do so. A supposed propensity towards something does not equate to that behavior eventually presenting itself; we're complex beings, and our race is (or gender is, or ____ is) merely a component of what might determine our actions or reactions.

However, I think "formalizing" Human Biodiversity as a subject in academia will essentially institutionalize racism and ethnic tension (not to mention sexism).

I have worked jobs covering the gamut, and I have seen NO DIFFERENCE in ability or performance when it comes to race or gender. This includes 5 foot tall, tiny women tossing 60 lb. pieces of luggage into an aircraft's baggage compartment that's 7 feet off the ground.

(Well, I have seen a difference as far as male/female social politics go. Men employ different social politics than women do, and vice versa. But, for the purposes of this post, it's immaterial.)

I also think the folks who are forwarding "Human Biodiversity" as a field of study will dash against the rocks of studies like this where test scores were influenced by how the participants were predisposed to the test. Short version: two groups of Asian women of predetermined equal intelligence were give a math test, but one group was told beforehand that women typically didn't do well on math tests, so try hard, while the other group was told that Asians were better at math than other races. The group who were told they were "just girls" did worse than the group who were told they were braniac Asians.

Another reference to that study notes interesting information regarding a similar study about white guys who golf.

Pretty much sets the Human Biodiversity shite on its ear, methinks.

I also think Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel dropkicks evo-bio through the goalposts of bullshit.

Seems human advantage is directly tied to ecosystem advantages AND a culture's predisposition to other cultures. For instance, Diamond asks why China didn't "conquer the world" but western Europe did; the short answer: Chinese thought they were the height of human accomplishment and culture, so why go hang out with the stinky, slack-jawed idiots that comprise the rest of the world? Ironically, they WERE the height at the time global conquest began, but that very fact and their self-knowledge of it allowed pretty much two whole continents to be overtaken by (stinky) Europeans.

So, the success of various groups of humans is not comparable to the wrens of Galapagos having specialized beaks that allow them to dominate a part of the ecosystem. It's more like, "Hey, these plants here grow really easily. Too bad I don't have more land on which to plant them. There's a whole bunch of new land somewhere? Cool. Sign me up."


About the only (anecdotal) evidence I've ever seen that possibly supports evo-bio was on a recent repackaged "America's Funniest Home Videos" show that featured "the best scares." To a one, anyone of European descent just took a couple steps or just fell the heck over when startled. However, every single person of African descent ran like hell and got completely out of the room/house/dangerous place (or punched the assailant so hard, "danger" was averted). The dearth of Asian representation on that particularly-themed show might speak to some innate stoicism or unflappability. (And, yes, I am kidding about this being some sort of evidence for evo-bio bs.)

Ewwwwww

When Entertainment Weekly first came out, it was a snarky, helluvah fun read.

Then at some point after one of the big media conglomeration cycles, they moved to not really covering entertainment, but merely being a shill.

I stopped my subscription a few years ago, but while researching something a couple weeks ago I came upon a "get 4 issues free, then cancel" offer, so signed up to see how they are now.

Wow. The decline since is phenomenal. It's about the most content-less magazine I've ever picked up on purpose. Over half the "articles" are just lists of "what's cool!" or "see this!"

Sad.

Fidelity

"Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers,
You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.
Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways
Its still rock and roll to me."
- Billy Joel

The first time I heard those lines I knew from experience that they were true. Stereo wars in the college dorm rooms only confirmed this awesome truth.

TLD: Stereo wars occurred when someone would toss their door open and start blasting a song; if this gave offense, or if someone just wanted to out-blare the challenger, they, too, would wing open their door and crank it to 11. Turns out that many huge, expensive speakers can win on a sheer decibel level, but rarely on fidelity, and they tended to suck when turned down very low.

I had this pair of speakers that came with my original JC Penny stereo system I'd purchased in early high school. They sounded better at most volumes (save for learjet takeoff levels) than all the other speakers on the dorm floor. I kept those babies until I literally blew them out - the foam that ringed the speaker cone simply shredded one sad day (a couple decades after I got them).

The replacement set, which I purchased in the late 90s, were close in size and specs. to that old pair, and I still think they sound better than most of the stereos I hear at other's houses.

I used to be somewhat of an audiophile. I didn't get into those bizarre turntables that had the platen made of granite floating on a bed of compressed air suspended from the ceiling on a counterweight treated specifically to dampen vibrations, with the strobe light on the side, replete with a complimentary package of plastic sleeves for your vinyl. However, it did need to sound good, so I popped for a Bang ∧ Olufsen turntable, which I have to this day. Still sounds niiiiiiice.

When I use it.

Which these days is about a much as I use my CD player anymore - say 5 times a month, tops.

Which brings me to my point.

My fidelity preferences these days are completely driven by the media itself and not a general desire for the best representation of the media whenever possible. In other words, the song or movie I want to experience drives where I want to hear it or how I watch it.

In this day of portable music, a new unwritten rule has wafted into the cultural air: Don't inflict your music on me, or even your current song choice - even if I like the artist, because you can keep it to yourself, so please do.

Nearly all of my music listening is done through an MP3 player or a computer. Most of that is in headphones of various quality. About the only time I play music out loud is in my own car on the way to and from work (where I don't have the song selection I do on my MP3 players, which annoys me). A third of the time I try to put something on the stereo at home, someone pipes up and says, "Uh, I don't want to listen to that right now."

So, I've stopped buying CDs altogether because I just convert them immediately to MP3s, and music is now largely a private or mobile event for me. No sitting down and absorbing an LP like the old days.

When it comes to movies, I still want to see big event movies with lotsa special effects on the big screen for the obvious reasons (which boil down to an immersive experience), but for comedies and dramas, I prefer to watch them at home. Most comedies these days are released as emasculated PG-13 squankers to bring in the teenage audience, but come out as an "unrated" (essentially a hard "R") version of the same thing, and the latter is always better.

Also, anymore, when you see a comedy in a theatre, some people seem to get offended if you laugh at something they didn't. I've been glared at for laughing during a movie more than once this year. Some people need to chill the fuck out, methinks. Still, it diminishes the experience. I can laugh my ass of on my couch without reprisal.

Today's dramas often have a load of extras on the DVD, so it's kind of a "meta" experience. I often want to back up or watch a scene again if it intrigued the first time, too. Frinsance, when I watched the fantastic Doubt recently, there were a bunch of extras with the author/director about the history of the piece, his inspiration, the fact parts were filmed at the very Catholic school he attended, and so on. Good stuff.


The moral of the story is I find myself mildly surprised that most of my media consumption is purposely mid-fi or even lo-fi. This dawned on me when a couple other music and movie nuts made the observation out loud that they don't go to movies or buy albums anymore. And it wouldn't be that way if there were no such thing as DVD (because I would still see movies in the theatre if we only had mushy old VHS) and MP3.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have them, because the convenience of use - for me - outstrips the loss of fidelity.

But Billy Joel was more prescient than he realized.

Just in case you've never seen it

This is probably one of the funniest bits evar. Robin Williams channels a drunk Scot in the midst of inventing golf:

Perks

So, watching one of the news summaries of Farrah Fawcett's life, which was pocked with a generous sprinkling of clips from "Charlie's Angels," I began to wonder: did her nipples ever stand down?

I'd always thought that "Friends" took the award for most breasts at full attention, but Farah may have been the unbreakable record setter - the Elvis of pokies, if you will.

Without Permission

I have beloved a phrase coined by a college roomate: "Look out, they're trying to touch your heart without your permission!" - said during a movie we didn't expect to be so emotionally stirring. He was a renowned cynic and when his eyes started welling up, he had to come up with something I guess, and that was it. Brilliant.

The rule about entertainments that do that (the unsolicited heart-touching) is it has to come with some sort of payoff that makes it worth the emotional trouble.

Tragedies particularly illustrate this principle. If everything ends badly, then there has to be something in there that made it worthwhile. Apocalypse Now, Body Heat, and Terms of Endearment come to mind.

When there is no point to the tragedy, you get something like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where you start out getting your heart broken as this little deformed baby with liver spots on its hand reaches up to hold his adopted mom's hand at night, then it all ends with having to watch a baby die (in his ex-wife's arms, no less). And there you are, all wrung out for nothing.

This isn't even a one trick pony, it's a half of a trick pony. All the movie does is play out the premise and that's it. There's nothing else there. Since this is a Fincher film, it honestly surprised me. This is his first full-on stinker.

If you want to see something real, something with passion, watch the extras where they show you how they pasted Brad Pitt's face on various avatars and stand-ins to make it look like he's really a 2-year-old troll. There you see passion and meaning, of a sort.


This unsolicited heart-touching kinda scotched the new Pixar 'toon Up for my fambly. It made my eldest cry from the start, and thus left her too bereft to enjoy the rest. Same for my wife. What did it for me, besides that, was piss me off when the bad guy purposely set up the child in the film to die a horrible death. Even if it is just a cartoon kid, it bothers me that bazillions of kids now have the idea in their head that a mean old guy might just let them fall to their deaths.

Full disclosure, my family has been contrarian, though, on a few Pixar films. We literally couldn't get through Ratatouille and thought Cars was merely OK. We hated Finding Nemo. The eldest's first words as we walked from the theater were, "Jeez, everyone in that movie was damaged in some way. Weird." We all got tired of playing "what's the handicap?!?" during the flick. We found Denis Leary's dental-instrument-scarred fish the most disturbing.

We might have a different aesthetic than other families, perhaps.

__________
Note: I started writing this post on 6/22, and upon reading Whisky's recent post about David Edelstein's coinage of the standard Pixar plot: inconsolable woe ---> sentiment ---> riotous chases ---> rousing cliff-hanger - I nearly leapt up and said "Hell Yeah!" Because it's so true. But merely muttered "dammit" because I had been sorta scooped, even though my point is slightly different.

My opines technology that "failed"

Read this article on 10 disappointing technologies.

Here are my thoughts on some of them:

Biometrics
Biometrics always gave me the heebie-jeebies because it's simply giving too much information to people who really have no business asking for it in the first place. If you are doing something that requires a security level where biometrics even comes up as a topic, you pay a fucking set of guards to look everyone in the face and get pissy with them if they have the slightest suspicion you're lying to them.

Then, you put the biometrics after that. Or another guard in a worse mood.

The point being, you can always find a way to fool a machine. Fooling peoples is harder.

Or, people ARE the only viable biometric safeguard.


Ubuntu
I actually see a day where I might move some of my family's computers to Ubuntu, because I've installed it a few times now and have gotten everything to work that I wanted to. I haven't done it yet because for now I have valid instances of Windows 2000 running on most of the boxes and XP running on one (because they don't allow you to put it on all the boxes you own, which I think is a stupid business model for home computers) and it all works, so I'm too lazy to bother switching until I have to.

However, lately, there are enough web sites that check what my FREAKIN' OPERATING SYSTEM IS and wont' allow me to run their stuff because my OS is "too old" or "doesn't support" this or that, which is horseshit. I go onto the same site with an Ubuntu box and everything works. When I'm accessing you through a browser, you shouldn't care what my OS is.

I also have held off due to concerns about technical issues that arise when I'm not home, thinking that my family could troubleshoot Windows issues better than Ubuntu ones. It turns out they're typically floored either way, so I've tossed that out as a roadblock.

So, if I don't have the money to get newer stuff in the next couple years, I may have to switch operating systems just so sites on the web will let me do what I want.

If that's not silly, I don't know what is.

Oh, and I wish Apple would do a true port of the Mac OS over to standard "intel" chips, because then I'd just use them. They appear to be worth the money.


Virtual Reality
I knew virtual reality would never amount to anything because it faces the same problem robots and cartoons do, it falls into the uncanny valley. When your brain gets all the signals that you should be moving and feeling motion when you aren't, as it would in home virtual reality systems, you start feeling queasy, no matter who you are.

I got to try an early VR setup years ago, and I'm not the sort of guy who gets queasy easily, but man, after 5 minutes, I had to yank that sucker off my head and go sit down for a few.

The current spate of 3D movies demonstrates another side of the problem VR faces: at first it's a fun gimmick, but after a few movies, it becomes something of a distraction, because your brain gets over the gee-whiz factor and begins to get annoyed at being fooled. It knows what's real and what isn't and it balks if you try to get it to accept what is, in effect, a sensory lie.

Another way of looking at it is it's fun to hit the amusement park once or twice a year, but you wouldn't want to crawl onto one every time you wanted to watch a show.


Voice recognition
Ya wanna know who are the only people who need voice recognition? People without arms, blind people, and the freakin Captain the Enterprise. That's it.

You don't speak like you write, so no one's going to dictate anything other than a memo. Even then, the cleanup would be bad enough that it'd be quicker just to type it.

I've written before about what it would be like to work in an office were voice recognition is the standard.

It's a nice option for those who need it; the rest of us will always prefer a mouse and a keyboard.


Zune
IF the subscription model allowed you to keep your the tunes you downloaded if you decided to stop subscribing, then there'd be no issue. But, you decide you don't want to pay - or can't - and POOF! All gone. Suck to be you.

That may work for cable or satellite TV reception, because we don't consume TV shows like we do music. Music, however, has always been something that's yours once you buy a copy.

I know. I know, the music biz REALLY tried to change that model, but look where they are now.

Music files with no copy protection (DRM - Digital Rights Management) are the model for the foreseeable future.

Sadly, I think I ruined a friendship over this. Someone wanted to just GIVE me a Zune for free, because apparently it does allow you to load non-DRM MP3's on it, but I said I just didn't want to support a business model I disagree with. Someone once told me that as far as the market's concerned, you vote with your dollar. So I don't give money to corporations whose actions or policies I disagree with, if it's at all possible. (You can take the hippy out of the 70s...)

Still, he was being generous, and I pretty much came off as a dick - me with my precious morals and everything. I forgot, at the time, that people matter before anything else, and I should've accepted it gratefully and just used it as a player.

Recent Flick Viewage

Frost / Nixon
I actually convinced my eldest, who's 12 ∧ 1/2 (since she can't wait to be 13, with the "teen" on the end there, she makes a point to always add "1/2" to her age when asked by anyone), to give this one a try, and she did because she couldn't think of anything better to do. Now it has become the standard-bearer for her on which movies to avoid, e.g. "Dad, this isn't like that Frost / Nixon thing, is it?"

I, however, really enjoyed it. Much more than I thought I would.

But then I was alive at the time and remember hating Nixon (think of how Boris Karloff says, "The Grinch stood there, hating the Who's" to get the right tone). I actually have some respect for the poor bastard now, and think that if he hadn't turned a particular corner in arrogance and insanity (and had run with a better crowd), he'd go down in history as a pretty decent pres. But, no chance of that. He'll always be the crook. And all of his crook cronies coming back during Bush II and doing pretty much the same thing just proved the vileness of that approach to governance all over again.

I didn't realize that these interviews were the first ones where Nixon admitted he did something wrong. I read a later interview(s) somewhere where he really did cop to most of what he did, so I was unaware that this was the first time someone got him to crack.

Watching Frost get himself prepared for the event, and the politics, intrigue, and power games that swirled around the whole mess, are mesmerizing. It may be a function of my age, though. I've witnessed - or been involved in (sadly) - a lot of the kind of things you see in Frost / Nixon. So it's ugly fun to see that it goes on everywhere, and always has.

It's really too bad the movie is inherently boring for the young and/or those who weren't there (assuming, here). When kids are in a hurry to grow up and think it's all skittles and beer, this would be a great movie to show them about how parts of the adult world play out and what makes them suck so much. Not that you'd want to discourage them. Maybe just show it as a warning, so they can brace themselves.

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Update:
Nearly forgot - make sure you check out the video of the actual interview on the DVD. It's interesting to see how the writer deviated from what was really said, but still stayed within the bounds of what was conveyed.


My Best Friends Girl
This movie made me laugh really hard.

There is one scene of dialogue where a man and woman trade insults so creatively obscene, I laughed harder as each one zinged past. It has one of the best puke jokes, EVAR, too.

But beyond that I don't want to give away any of the plot, because discovering the shtick is half the fun.

The ending is predictable, but the ending of romantic comedies have been since Shakespeare, so: so what.

One proviso: this is a VERY adult movie. Even kids savvy about sex shouldn't really watch this one until they're about 16 or so.


Role Models
Like My Best Friends Girl, this is an R-rated comedy that has the uncut original version as an option on the DVD (and thus the only way to go with adult comedies, imvho). Unlike the above, though, this one is actually not all that foul, and is even sorta tender-hearted.

The premise is two guys end up doing community service and get specifically assigned to a Big Brother program. Since they are faced with either doing the community service or going to jail for a month, they get stuck with the kids no one else wants. Hilarity ensues.

I'd let anyone 14 or above watch this (unless they're specifically sensitive about dick jokes). There's one brief shot of breasts, but surprisingly it's not a gratuitous flash. Other than that, it's just bad, bad language.


So, for the first time in a while, I like all the flicks included in a post. Hooray.

The writing phenom that is Heather Armstrong

So, I ended up reading Things I Learned About My Dad: Humorous and Heartfelt Essays, edited by the creator of www.dooce.com and It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita back to back because that's when they happened to arrive at the library. (My local library has an on-line Netflix-like queue where you can put your requests on a list and they notify you when they come in.)

There's just no point it trying to be florid about it, Heather Armstrong is one hell of a writer. As with all brilliant stylists, she has a couple verbal tics that not only define her, but they force you into the column of "love it" or "hate it". If you're not familiar, read a few posts on her site, and you'll discover your column. (I usta link to her site in my "other blogs" sidebar, but that's like the flea referencing the dog.)

"Things I Learned About My Father" - which was edited by Heather, but includes material from other bloggers - has exactly three great essays in it, and two of them are by Heather. The other is the very first one, written by Kevin Guilfoile. Others are ok, but only those three stand out. It's worth your time if you're a parent and want a nice commiseration read. Everyone else should go see the new Star Trek movie.

"It Sucked" is all new original material, save for the letters to her daughter (I didn't check but I think those are culled from her site). If you're a fan, you'll want to read this, because it's another-side-of-the-story events you're already aware of because she's blogged about them.

One revelation for me was she would catch her husband, Jon, crying (when he thought she was asleep) during the time she was dealing with a crushing post-partum depression which culminated in a visit to a mental ward. At the time, I remember wondering how he was faring. Myself, I find I suffer more when my wife and/or kids are sick or suffering than when I am.

I started this post, gad, maybe a month ago now, and life just keeps getting in the way (a good thing mostly, of course, but today it included sick family, a toilet leak that has destroyed the ceiling in the living room, fires to put out at work, and I didn't sleep last night due to the sick child and other mitigating factors ... to top it all off, we have fire alarms that have battery backup and when the battery starts to fail, it does this little beep thing that is acoustically evil in that it takes at least an hour to figure out which one's doing it), so in the meantime, I've been scooped by Kottke.org and his link to another classic Dooce post, which is a great place to start if you want to see if you want to bother reading her books (assuming you don't already read her). And I've mentioned it before, but she also has the best fart story ever, thus far.

Have a Ball

The Ball family has immersed themselves in glory with this video from their wedding. Upon my first viewing, as he began to lip-sync, I must admit to dreary thoughts, but when the whole wedding party joins in and it's wonderful.

Brian & Eileen's Wedding Music Video. from LOCKDOWN projects on Vimeo.

Here's the direct link:
http://vimeo.com/1531870?pg=embed&sec=

I found this on the great Attu Sees All, but reposted it here in case you can't go to Attu's site at work (and I wouldn't where they monitor your internet use, some stuff is NSFW).

And I stole the title from myself from a page from my ancient vanity site where I thought I was being cute (and it's NSFW, again). I still thank God that the internets weren't around before I turned 30. When reminiscing, I sometimes find myself embarrassed over the things that could've possibly ended up on the web had it been around when I was a pup.

Greed Kills

As I have been (casually) following the news about the crash of Continental Flight 3407 on Feb. 12, I accepted on face value the general media consensus that it was most likely due to the inexperience of the pilots, and for the most part I think that's correct.

For example, the pilot had not been trained about what to do in a stall and what the signs were in that particular aircraft. The co-pilot apparently hadn't ever seen icing on wings in flight before.

But, when I heard about the pay the co-pilot was getting, the fact that she was sick, AND the circumstances of her employment with the airline, it was clear this was just an accident waiting to happen.

Back when I worked for a puddle-jumper airline, I was shocked when I found out how hard they worked the pilots and how little rest they were allowed between flights. On the amount of sleep they sometimes got - after being on shift for quite a few days on end - you wouldn't want these folks to pop open a twist-off beer for ya, let alone rocket your ass into the frozen, wind-torn sky in a plastic bottle fitted with wings and half-filled with explosive fuel.

When you put someone in that kind of a circumstance, pay them poorly, train them even worse, and expose them to schedules and working conditions that are essentially illegal in the manufacturing sector, it's bound to result in exactly what happened. Someone like an airline pilot should be aggressively groomed and trained, not treated like a temp whose primary duty is filing, where only fingers and a basic grasp of the alphabet are required.

From this article (read the whole thing, it's gripping), here are part of the details of how the co-pilot was paid and what her conditions were:

Shaw, 24, flew 774 hours in her first year at Colgan. Roger Cox, a safety board aviation safety expert, said she earned $21 an hour, meaning that she would have been paid about $16,254 that year. As a result, Shaw worked a second job in a Norfolk, Va., coffee shop when she started at Colgan, safety board witnesses said.

So, after handing folks their freakin' Venti's for a shift or two, she'd sleep on a chair in the pilot's lounge or on a plane, and then grab the controls of a FREAKIN' JET.

Dear God.

There are going to be a lot of corporate executives in hell, methinks.

Obligatory Review of the new Star Trek movie

Punchline: I had a grand time, as did my 12-year-old daughter (full disclosure: she's a fan of the original series). A hearty recommendation for fans, and a solid recommendation for newbies or folks who haven't liked any of the TV shows (particularly the latter shows).

Finally finally finally they have realized Star Trek is much better when it has a pair. A big pair. (I half expected the Enterprise to be sporting these, a tacky little trend that hopefully will be a short one.) And some hot green chicks, to boot.

The nicest surprise is that Sulu turns out to be a badass. Fans will recall that from the original show the episode where everyone gets wasted on an alien virus and Sulu ends up darting around the halls shirtless, challenging everyone to a fencing battle. Non-fans will enjoy things a bit more knowing that bit of history, and let's leave it at that.

My daughter's verdict, besides being the best movie she's seen this year (wow, huh?) was that they did a great job of casting. And they did.

Sulu is my favorite casting choice, as they used John Cho from the Harold & Kumar movies, and, as mentioned, he freakin' BRINGS IT. My next two faves are Karl Urban as Bones (he nails it while bringing the character freshness) and of course Simon Pegg as Scotty.

Kirk and Spock are cast wonderfully, too, though a few times you catch Zachary Quinto (Spock) being just a bit too doe-eyed for the Spock we know and love - but then it's actually a plot/character point, so even that works eventually.

J.J. Abrams was handed the keys to the kingdom, and admitted that he was not a trekkie, which was probably a saving grace. He clearly did his homework and was able to come to this without the nostalgic emotional haze original fans had, and so did not try to recreate that. His grokking of the series is so complete, I think he even included Galaxy Quest in his research, because there's a couple tips of the hat to that movie, too.

I can't say "my only quibble" because I don't really have one, if you follow Ebert's old rule of reviewing the movie you saw, not the one you wanted to see. If we step out of that restriction, my one wish is that Chris Pine (Kirk) had just once found a way to do Shatner's famous verbal tick when he was trying to remember a line where he would ... pause … before … rushing out the rest of the line. Maybe he's saving that for the next one.

And, oh yes, there will be a next one. They do manage to reboot the series in a way where they can do new adventures without having to betray anything that occurred in the original.

Aaaargh.

So who were the marketing geniuses in each studio who felt is was a good idea to release their big sci-fi film at the same time everyone else did. And on mother's day weekend no less?

This weekend we have the new "X-men", "Terminator", and "Star Trek" all opening, and there's "Angels & Demons" plus the sequel to "Night at the Museum." In the age where movies stay in the theatres for two weeks, tops.

Da fork?

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Update:
Turns out, I wasn't looking at the DATES of the ticket sales. When I went to the site I have for a while to find out movie times (because if you call the theatre for them, you're in for a 15 minute ride through menus before you know a movie time, and that's if you get the options right), I did not realize that you can now buy tickets for movies weeks in advance. And, the date of the show is listen in parenthesis, so it's easy to miss it's for a couple weeks out.
Frinstance:
Fri (5/22) ( 11:50 ) ( 2:00 ) 4:40 7:30 10:20

See the date in there? Well, I didn't when I was in a hurry and was skating past all the other crap they put in your way on commercial sites.

So, the only movie I did care about seeing was the only one playing.


{{sigh}}