Quickies

Kinsey starring Liam Neeson.
Kinsey sure tries to make the namesake a hero, but ultimately comes across a little histrionic. You can only gold plate a plastic trophy so much before it collapses under the weight. This movie would have been more effective had it taken a clinical or documentary-esque approach rather than "glowing historic hero" approach. But, as Ebert says, you review the movie you saw, not the one you wanted to see. It was enjoyable and, if you're a movie addict like myself, worth the solid two hours of run-time. Kinsey really did have a lot of positive influence in demystifying sex and redefining what's "normal," but he apparently, like the free love generation, just couldn't grasp the point that sex is more than genital manipulation for most people. It's tied very close to our emotions and attachments. This movie does a decent job at portraying that, but then downshifts and tries to gloss over that lesson. Liam of course and as always is spectacular in the role, though Laura Linney is miscast as his brown-eyed, brunette wife. With some actresses you just can't hide the fact that they're really blonde, and vice versa; imagine seeing the amazing Ava Gardner with platinum hair - you would still know in the back of your mind it didn't quite fit. (In a much more frivolous example, think of Freddie Prinze Jr. as "Fred" in the Scooby Doo movies. Even my 8 year old said after a couple scenes, "That guy's not really blonde, is he?") Stick around for the credits, because after the initial scroll of who played what, there's a montage of animals doing the nasty to a jaunty soundtrack - compiled form footage which was originally done by the Kinsey institute. Apparently Kinsey thought there was value in watching all kinds of critters hump. The final pair is especially entertaining as it provides proof to the veracity of the old joke: Q: "How do porcupines make love?" A: "Verrrry carefully."


Magical Mystery Tours by Tony Bramwell.
Mr. Bramwell literally grew up with the Beatles and entered the biz by starting out as their roadie and graduating to production and management. If you like rafts of trivial detail, this is the book for you. But, it's like sitting at the pub (or reading a blog) and listening to someone gas on and on about the events in their lives. The book is roughly chronological, but Bramwell often digresses [shit-eating grin] back and forth through time as things occur to him. Therefore, even though this book has the best outsider's view of the Beatles I've encountered, it becomes tedious reading. For example, (and I paraphrase wildly here), "We went here and did this, then we shagged some birds, then John was a jerk, which pissed Paul off, George was gloomy and quiet, while Ringo ordered another pint." This one is for hardcore fans, all others should just watch the video series The Beatles Anthology, as it's much more fun. Highlights are: Though a complete original and the de facto leader of the group, John was often a jerk who was eventually as unhinged by fame as Elvis was. Yoko Ono was an opportunistic freak (her performance art act consisted of audience members cutting her clothes off until she was nude, which would qualify as tragicomedy because she had the kind of body that cried out for concealment) who intuited that she could leverage John's weaknesses to weasel her way into permanent fortune and carte blanche (no surprise there, but it's fun to read how she did it and how shameless she was). One prime example is when John and Yoko were doing their ridiculous infamous bed-in for peace, Yoko ordered an entire bucket of caviar every day, had about two bites, and let the rest rot. George was insecure being next to the white-hot talents of Lennon and McCartney and only realized how good he was once he branched out (even the greenest, most lush lawn must sigh with weltschmerz while gazing at a tree). Ringo did his job as a drummer and reveled in the life of celebrity and access to great parties. McCartney was the most grounded of the group, and according to this book, is still that way today. Personally, I think he comes off as a little conceited in interviews these days, but if anyone's earned it, Paul has. Linda was a class act who, being raised by the rich and famous, fit right in with the newly rich and famous. Final verdict: Somewhat tedious, but filled with info you'll find nowhere else. I'm amazed Yoko hasn't sued this guy within an inch of his royalties.


A Dirty Shame, directed by John Waters.
I've never liked Waters' films. They're childish and prurient in much the same way as Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but without the razor wit and with way too many drag queens. I mean if watching a morbidly obese man dressed as a woman eating freshly excreted real dog shit on screen does it for ya, be my guest. But, I love Tracey Ullman, so I'll eventually hunt down anything she's in, and here she's wasted playing an uptight woman who turns into a nympho when she's hit on the head, sitcom style. She is then indoctrinated into a little group of fellow sex addicts who have Johnny Knoxville (of MTV's "Jackass") as their savior, who happens to have a snake for a penis (which he blows in an out-take). A portion of the gay community considers Judeo/Christian beliefs fair game for mockery (for reasons known to anyone who cares), and this movie takes it to the wall in that regard, using J/C religious iconography as the structure of the sex addicts group. So, not only does the flick lack legitimate laughs, it tries too hard to be offensive, and ends up being so only because it tries so hard - in the same way that a movie trying to be funny but failing subsequently loops around to be unintentionally funny (see Ishtar if any undestroyed copies remain). This one's not even interesting in a car-wreck sorta way. Avoid.

Musicology by Prince (once again known as the artist "Prince").
It must truly suck being a genius. When I meet someone whose intelligence vastly outstrips mine, I get the same sensation I got when I first saw the contrail of the space shuttle arc all the way out of the atmosphere. I'm given to wonder how it must feel for someone who truly towers above the rest of us in either intelligence or talent. Practically every time I spin up a new Prince album, I expect it to suck and thus I'll be able to proclaim he's finally lost it, that the well has dried up, but time and again I've been pleasantly surprised that His Purpleness can still pull it off. This guy is just freaky talented, a bonafide and true musical genius, which (to me) goes a long way towards explaining why he comes off as kind of a freak. How could you not be a little out there when in fact you are one of the best around? So I suppose I consider myself lucky to be average, as I stand there gazing at the towering contrail that goes someplace I never will. Musicology is a must for fans, and everyone else should give the samples a test listen on the web site of their choice. I hope Prince has taken Kevin Smith's advice and wears tennis shoes more often (his high heel addiction has ruined his knees) because we want him wiggling his microscopic ass across the stage for decades to come.

After all this time...

Was playing with MPC1 last night - see I got a Star Wars aircycle and Wookie for Father's Day (I love that particular childhood logic: "Dad will love this! I know I do!") - and it dawned on me after all this time: How in the hell did Wookies discover fire when they're covered with long hair?

Batman Begins

Denver has one of the last remaining drive-ins, which is a perfect way to go see a movie with kids. Or so it would seem. The drive-in itself says on their web site that they take in shorts when they show a kid flick. Seems daylight savings time moves the showtimes back so far most parents won't take the kids. (Does anyone still like daylight savings time?) Last Friday we granted a parental exception to bedtime and off we went to see the latest cartoon, Madagascar. Alas, it was gone, so we saw Batman Begins instead.

I liked it a lot; the wife did not. MPC1 fell asleep before it could really get off the ground (hence proving the drive-in folks were right), and MPC2 was just confused and cried a lot (little babies are creatures of habit and schedule - we were supposed to be home in the quiet living room, not in a dark car somewhere with the call and refrain of horns interrupting her sleep.)

I suspect the difference in my wife's opinion and mine is due to expectations based on previous incarnations of Batman. We both love the campy TV show - it was a fixture of both our childhoods - and we both liked the first movie. I was (... well, "am") a comic book fan, though, and the Batman of comic books was a much more serious character. (I'm not gonna bother with the defense of comic books being serious art. That opinion is kinda like your political opinion - no doubt you've already formed it and no amount of persuasion will sway you. Which is OK. Gotta stand for something, donchaknow.)

So, whilst I enjoyed the campy Batmans, this was the Batman I'd always wanted to see: A guy just barely hanging on to sanity, pissed at the world due to all the injustice, and equipped with enough money and toys to do something about it. My wife thinks the premise of Batman is silly enough in the first place, so trying to play it straight rather than as pure fantasy kinda trips her bullshit meter so that she can't suspend disbelief. Funny how we can both have the same problem with a premise - how can a guy justify putting on a bullet-proof batsuit and chase down crooks who have a thing for costumes, too - but require completely different solutions. Me: Make it as plausible as possible in the given world; Her: It's a goof, so play it that way, Charlie. If "make it real" is the new trend in the Batman films, I'm probably going to be seeing them sans wife from now on.

The only thing this story really muffs is the credibility of the scheme that Batman must unravel to save the city. Anyone who understands the technology employed will wonder if the writers did any research on it whatsoever (I'll put that below in a spoiler section).

Outside of that, it’s a fun ride, with just the right level of detail to thrills. For instance, the machinations of Bruce Wayne's wealth are presented in enough detail to answer nagging questions I've always had. Also, the villains in Batman are supposed to be pretty freakin' sinister. Superman gets the mad geniuses you can almost appreciate in a Wile E. Coyote sorta way, but Batman's thugs are supposed to be exponentials of more fucked up than he is.

Most thrilling of all, though, is they manage to make the main bad buy, the Scarecrow, legitimately scary. The wife and I were very glad MPC1 had fallen asleep when he popped up. After about scene 3 of some truly goosebump inducing stuff, we vowed we will now strictly adhere to the PG-13 rating. (This is only the second time we've taken the chance and yet we got burned again; the first being "Legally Blonde 2" where it comes out that her Chihuahua "Buster" is gay and wants to boff a boxer or something.)

Collective opinion across the web tends towards identifying this as a guy flick, which might also explain my wife and I not agreeing on the merits of Batman Begins. So it looks like we have a new excuse for a boy's night out. Take advantage, my friends.



*** SPOILER ALERT ***

Ok, the big mistake is that the evil plot hatched by the villains involves using a large microwave device to vaporize the city's water supply. Microwaves energize water atoms which results in their releasing the energy as heat. Well, folks, anything that vaporizes water by merely passing by it would also vaporize every living thing since we're composed primarily of the stuff. It would be an effective weapon as intended, but it would play hell on the plot because not only would the citizens of Gotham pop like nasty water balloons, so would Batman and the bad guys, quickly bringing the movie to a gorily splashy halt. Apparently, the writers have never seen JoeCartoon.com's classics exploring that very messy fact.

All Things Peter Pan

The story of Peter Pan has been a persistent presence in our lives lately, much like Peter himself visiting the nursery until he finally persuades everyone to fly off to Neverland.

It started with a family viewing of Finding Neverland wherein Johnny Depp stars as a playwright with scissors for hands, er, who pens the now classic Peter Pan and Kate Winslet plays the doomed, widowed mother of the boys who inspire him. I resisted this movie because scuttlebutt was that it was a disease movie (where the main engine of the plot is someone wonderful dying of a terminal disease and all the steel magnolias get their big scene to attempt to touch your heart without your permission, which makes many of us in the reluctant audience feel like rendering our review with the aid of a chuck bucket). But the charms of Kate Winslet were enough to place my grumbly butt in a seat for family movie night, with a curmudgeonly warning that if it veered into disease movie cliche land, I'd bolt and go read blogs or something. Thankfully, it was tasteful enough to center on how others are affected when a loved one dies rather than train the camera on the deathbed and line the area with chewable scenery. And as such, it was a legitimately touching entire-Kleenex-box-weepie, especially when the little boy, Peter (yes, him), is trying to understand a world where both his mother and father die. Not since the little trooper in Terms of Endearment broke our hearts so completely that I heard grown men openly blubbering in the showing I attended has a child's grief been portrayed so bracingly. It moves any parent to want to save all children from any possible harm and suffering.

Now, like Terms of Endearment, Finding Neverland is also leavened with much humor and magic, so it's not all sniffling and sweaty eyes. I wouldn't recommend it were it otherwise. The portrayals of James Barrie's various inspirations for the story of Peter Pan are brilliant. The juxtaposition of the real life Peter growing up too quickly pressed against the fictional Peter who never has to grow up is just one of the many. A seemingly evil mother trying to steal Kate and her family from Depp (Barrie), who is the template for Capt. Hook, is another. I still wonder how much truth was bent to provide these dramatic touch points, but to be honest I don't really want to know. The fiction will suffice for now.

And speaking of the fiction, the live action version of Peter Pan from 2003 is spectacular. I had wandered through the living room a couple times when MPC1 was watching it and was amused by what I saw, but hadn't sat down for the whole voyage until this last weekend. What a joyous little piece of entertainment. I swear, all the best movies anymore are the kid flicks.

For example, one reason Wendy has been brought to Neverland is because of her wonderful stories. In one scene, the pirates have Wendy and the boys captive, and even the pirates are so rapt by Wendy's stories that in the midst of Captain Hook having Wendy tell a story to wrangle valuable Peter Pan information out of her, it comes out that one of the pirates is featured. The pirate beams, "Didja hear that Cap'n! I'm in the story!" Hook shoots him on the spot. Not since Pulp Fiction has a character's demise via a gun been so damn funny. For some reason I don't recall, a second pirate is dispatched moments later. Smee opines over his shoulder to the camera, "The story's just begun and two dead already! How exciting!" We alarmed both the cat and the dog with our howls of laughter. Do check it out.

We were watching Peter Pan because my daughter had her first dance recital the next day, and the ballet was - yup - Peter Pan. Now, this isn't the Bolshoi's classic version of Peter Pan that made Catherine the Great weep so profoundly for the endangered Tinker Bell that she claimed she'd swear off horses for a couple months if it would help the poor little fairy. No, this was cobbled together from ballet cliches, new age music (particularly during Tinkerbelle's big and completely inexplicable solo), and direct liftings from the soundtrack of the Disney version. But I'll be damned if seeing my lovely daughter come out to play a marionette in the Darling's nursery didn't make it feel like the best damn ballet EVER.

It totally removed all uneasiness my wife and I had over the amount of makeup we were directed to apply to our young daughter's face. It was surreal to see an entire lobby of little girls made up like Gloria Swanson on a Cecil B. DeMille daiquiris and delusions night. Makeup tends to bring out the eventual adult face these little babies will use to break hearts, which tears at a dad's soul like a monsoon in the rigging. On stage, under the bright lights, the eye shadow and lipstick washed out enough to make them all look like little girls again, though.

Well, save for the high school senior who played Wendy. Dear Lord, I'm sure many of the dads in attendance are still ashamed of the thoughts nubile Wendy in her nearly transparent babydoll dress stirred. I know I am. (This just speaks to the fact that no one consulted an adult heterosexual man on the girl's costume. If her father is still around, I doubt he saw it under the hot lights until performance time.) Fact: Most men past a certain age feel so pervy for oogling anyone under twenty-five that we just turn it off and don't even usually notice. But once in a while, a pop fly will come at you out of nowhere.

Brief group pervy moment aside, it was a sweet, sentimental time in life where the memory machine in the mind engages to record every detail down to the smallest molecule and when hard moments visit, which they eventually always do, this is one of the memories that will flip past on the greatest hits reel to bring back the joy that keeps us sane. Forever in my mind will my sweetie twirl onto the stage, beaming that smile, and dance like the prettiest doll in the universe.

This threefold trip through Neverland has come to be an unintended exploration of mortality for me, and a revisiting of the loss of our baby girl a couple seasons ago. As anyone who's lost a child can tell you, the grief never goes away. It just hides out in the canyons of the heart and can always be heard in the echoes that sometimes bounce back.

The struggle with maintaining hope and finding the strength to enjoy the happiness that life has to offer can be as desperate at times as the insomniac's search for restful sleep. Sometimes all that can be done is to take heed to the gentle reminders everywhere that joy and happiness do eventually return from wherever they hide, and all you have to do is wait it out, just like - and pardon the triteness of this if you can - a child believing in fairies and clapping her hands for Tinkerbelle can bring about the miracle of restored life.

And if you wait, sure enough, happiness pirouettes onto the stage and makes you feel a little embarrassed - just a little - for the that brief moment you took slightly too seriously that moment of darkness that precedes the orchestra striking that first note as the lights begin to glow again.

________
Update:

For those of you who were wondering: Yes, this post has a lot in common with the following joke:

A woman spotted the mother of a young child at the checkout line in the grocery store. The child was screaming at the top of her lungs, grabbing stuff off the shelves, and throwing things. All the while the woman remained level, and said things like, "Calm down, Heather. That's OK, Heather. Don't cry, Heather." Usually parents in this predicament are angry towards their children, so the woman walked up and commended the mother, "I just wanted to say I noticed how kind you are to your child. Most parents aren't as patient as you. I take it her name is Heather." To which the mother replies, "No, I'm Heather."

We've always been monkeys

Reading Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (idea guy) and Stephen J. Dubner (word guy), and it's a blast. You've probably heard of this book because in it he (Levitt) posits that the decrease in crime in the 90s was due to abortion, in that the generation that would have been the criminals of the day were presumably greatly decreased due to being snuffed in the womb. Well, of course, I doubt we can ever end that debate, because the correlation is nearly impossible to prove. Therefore, that's not the topic of this post, so if you've not surfed away at the drop of the "a" word, you can relax. Maybe.

What blew my mind into the void was how much the mass media had to do with the waxing and waning of the Ku Klux Klan. More to the point, the fact that the mass media I'm speaking of was that of 1915 (!!!) and the early 1940s.

Apparently, when the infamous movie about the Klan, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (in terms of innovative movie spectacle, it was the Star Wars of its day), was released, it caused a huge reinvigoration of the Klan which lasted until the World Wars overshadowed events. In the 40s, a man by the name of Stetson Kennedy (couldn't make that one up, couldja?) infiltrated the Klan with the intention of finding a way to bring them down. One day, while watching children play spygames, he noticed how similar their passwords and behavior were to the secret structures, passwords, and activities of the Klan. He realized that if he could somehow expose the silliness of this side of it to the world at large, it would humiliate and thereby render them impotent. He contacted the producers of the radio program Adventures of Superman and gave them the whole box of Klan secrets, which the producers then worked into the shows where Superman took on the Klan. The next week after the show, kids across America where running around doing all the Klan handshakes, using their passwords, and so on while playing Superman that the dads who were in the Klan were embarrassed beyond expression. They tried changing the passwords and stuff, but the next week they were on the show anyway. People left the Klan in droves. Kennedy is acknowledged in the history book as the most important player in squelching the Klan (along with Superman, of course).

These days, especially since the widespread punditry of the web via blogs like this, there's a lot of complaining about the mass media and its negative influences. Almost always, it's discussed as being a relatively recent phenomenon, say since the late 50s or early 60s, kinda when rock and roll was born. Obviously this is not the case.

Society, at least American society, appears to have been in the thrall of the mass media for at least a century now. Holy doctoral thesis, Batman.

Something old,
something new,
something borrowed,
and something blue.

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The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Funny how some seminal movies never end up in film classes, or even get an honorable mention. I took a lot of film classes in college (what fun!), but don't recall "Taking of Pelham" coming up even once. Pity. But then, I doubt The Poseidon Adventure got mentioned either - other than as the subject of a snigger from the prof. - even though it spawned a film genre (unless you wanna be a twit and sniff that Airport probably was the real progenitor of disaster films). Whereas you can make a decent case that The Poseidon Adventure was hackneyed, regardless of how influential it was, you can't claim the same for "Pelham." It, quite simply, is a wonderful, grubby, authentic little film.

Though dated in the sense that you can tell from whence it came, it's not in the sense that time has diluted the impact of it. As a matter of fact, (and I swear I did not take this from the Netflix description which I didn't see until after I went to rate the film), this is really the font from which most of Quentin Tarantino's film have sprung, particularly Reservoir Dogs. As the film spooled out of my DVD player, and it dawned on me how much Tarantino "borrowed" from this movie, I began to wonder when something goes from "homage" to, well, theft. Reservoir Dogs is sort of a remake in which the fates of the criminals are slightly reimagined, is all.

Walter Matthau stars at the transit cop who has to deal with one of the subway trains being hijacked. Jerry Stiller, Ben's dad (or George Costanza's dad if you think in fictional terms), stars as the beat cop who works with Walter. Robert Shaw, the shark boat captain from Jaws, is the head hijacker. Joseph Sargent directs. Interesting note on Sargent, he also directed Colossus: The Forbin Project and the "Star Trek" episode: The Corbomite Maneuver - the one where young Clint Howard (Ron's brother) takes a break from his series, "Gentle Ben," and fakes out the Star Trek crew that he's an ugly green alien via ventriloquist dummy until he finally invites them on board for some Tranya.

It's a fun, tense ride that's entirely plausible, if not almost quaint in the days since 9-11. It's filled wall to wall with ugly New York mugs and accents (check out the cast character listing - it alone is a hoot), and pretty foul language for the day. The film is rated "R" pretty much for language only. Of all the joys of the movie, one of the best is Walter Matthau's final scene. Actors can work their whole lives and never get a moment like that.

If you are a movie lover, this one should be on your "must see" list.

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Dave Matthews - Stand Up

For once I'm not gonna whine about the state of rock radio because today, brethren and sistren, we have a cause for celebration. Yea and verily Dave Matthews and the band have created a masterpiece, in my opinion. Stand Up indeed.

The reviews on Amazon.com are intriguingly schizophrenic, and I have a theory about that. When an artist bursts out of their previous mold, fans are often dismayed that the old stuff ain't quite like the new stuff. Imagine what the reviews on Amazon.com would have been like had it existed when the original fans of Fleetwood Mac encountered Rumours. We all know what a classic Rumours is, but Fleetwood Mac started out as a blues ensemble (check out "Black Magic Woman") and here they are kicking out smooth California pop rock. I'm sure many a drunken rant ensued in pubs across Britain at the time. So my theory is this, the more groundbreaking an album is, and the possibility that it's a potential classic, the more you'll see that in the confusion of the reaction towards it. If it sucked, that'd be obvious. If it were good and what's expected, that'd be obvious too. But if it's just out of the blue possible genius that wasn't presaged by earlier work, you get a "what the fuh?" reaction like you see on Amazon.com. Imagine if Cobain had survived to finally make that album that would rival the Beatles we all knew he had in him (Queue: "If There's a Rock and Roll Heaven...").

The last album I thought was this groundbreaking and out there was the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, but while that one's kinda quirky, and more along the lines of you'll love it or hate it depending on your tastes, I can see Stand Up as one that is much more universal. (I'd be interested to see what my buddy Sleemoth thinks of it, hint hint.)

Though there's not a stinker in the whole set, standout songs are:
- "Dreamgirl" - Which starts the album with a gorgeous harmonizing that evokes a sunrise on the savanna, then sways into a loping gait that melts into a melody worthy of the title.
- "Old Dirt Hill" - About racing your bike around when you're a kid. You can almost hear the playing cards clothes-pinned to the spokes.
- "Stand Up" - Awesome bass break which then dives into the chanted title. My wife snarked that it sounds like a record skipping, but dogonnit, if a record skipping sounded that funky, then there'd be all these DJs just making records skip. (...Wait a minute!...)
- "American Baby" - Probably the standout hit. My daughter's favorite. "God's grace lost, and the devil is proud." - Beautiful line. Kind of the antithesis of Guess Who's "American Woman."

These are just the first four tracks folks.

The rest of the greats are:
- "Louisiana Bayou" - A funky snort of a groove, replete with South African guitar style. (I'd always wondered why you never heard any South African guitar from Dave, a South African artist.) The vocal is a lot of fun, and I've not heard any other contemporary artist take such an interesting chance and choice outside of Dwight Yoakam.
- "You Might Die Trying" - A tense scuffle about not wasting your life, braced by a phenomenal sculpted drum sound reminiscent of Bowie's intro to "Modern Love" and decorated with great sax work.
- "Hunger for the Great Light" - Though this starts out sounding like a hymn, it fades into an all-out rocker about sex. Hilarious! The opening lyric: "Here ... you ... go, you dirty girl! Good God! Try to love ... try to ... uh ..." and from there he's clearly too swept away to go on. This ends with a luscious violin meditation, and since it's the last song it flows directly into the harmonics of the first song as though the album were designed as a continual loop. Beautiful. It leads me to wonder if they constructed the album as an event, a whole work, like the artists of yore used to do.

And, to make things even more spectacular, this album is available in the DualDisc format, where one side is a standard CD, but the other is a DVD (all on the one disc). Most DualDiscs that I've seen waste the DVD side with "extras" or a 5.1 mix of the album (which can be cool, but so far, outside of the mix on the Beatle's DVD of Yellow Submarine), I've not been impressed with a surround mix on a music DVD), but this one is a Linear PCM format: An uncompressed 96 kHz/24 bit sample version of the whole album. (It does contain a short documentary on the "making of," but the highlight is this version of the songs.)

Oh. My. God. (Or, to quote Dave from the last song: "Good God!") I imagine the leap in sound quality here is equivalent to a move from a wax pressing of a 78 played on a phonograph whose speaker was really a megaphone to a stereophonic vinyl LP played over a high fidelity system. I have literally not heard such amazing sound come out of my stereo before. See, even the 5.1 soundtracks in movies are compressed, which causes a limit to the sound, and the intent of a movie soundtrack is usually not pristine music delivery anyway. When the first song started, I stood gobsmacked, pricking up my ears like a cat homing in on a mouse, because I'd never heard sound that full and bottomless before - outside of an original 24-track master played in a recording studio. There is no discernable limit to the high end or low end on this recording. I turned to my daughter who was sitting there with kind of a shocked look on her face, too, and asked, "Have you ever heard anything like that?" She just smiled and shook her head and then shushed me. We have yet to stop playing this thing when we get an opportunity. It's now the primary soundtrack I use to lull my baby asleep (the sound is so rich that even the upbeat songs don't have harsh edges to them - something I was completely unaware of in other recordings previously), which is great because I was getting a little tired of Enya.

And ignore those warnings in the Amazon.com reviews about this version not being copyable. I've made a copy of the CD for my car (a strict rule in my house is only copies can be used in a car stereo) and MP3s for my computer. Perhaps they were trying to copy or rip the DVD side, which is silly if you're going to be playing it via an MP3, or in your car. Any gain in sound from the DVD side as I've described above wouldn't survive the transition to a compressed MP3 or the sonic environment of a car.

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The Book Meme of the Blogs of Summer 2005

I've not been tagged, nor do I intend to tag anyone, but I've really enjoyed reading other's lists, so....

1. Estimate the total number of books you've owned in your life.

I don't even have a clue as how to estimate this, because as a Lit major, I've owned so many books and anthologies, I will have to completely guess.

TLD: One of the tiny regrets of my life (and all of mine are tiny so far, I'm happy to report) is that I had to sell all of my college books about three years after graduation in order to have enough money to get home after a disastrous attempt at graduate school (disastrous because that was when Ronnie cut all the education funds, and I could no longer afford it; the caps on the loans I could get would have only paid for half of the degree - but no regrets, as I said).

Anyway, on a slow day when I worked in a bookstore, I went around and pulled forward an inch (so I could easily push them back quickly) all the books I'd read to that point, most of which I had owned. Even so, the store had only about 1/3 of what I'd read. I ended up pulling about 1,200 books. And that was in my twenties. So, round up, add two decades, and I'm guessing I've owned about 3,000 to 4,000 books.

2. What's the last book you bought?

I don't buy books anymore. A couple years back when I got laid off during the Bush Depression, I finally had all the time in the world to read, and no money to do it. Luckily, we have one of the finest libraries in my town that I've ever encountered, which even allows you to search for and then reserve books via the web, so I've never looked back. Kinda like Netflix, only free. Plus they have this "lucky day" section where all the latest and greatest releases are available; no one can reserve them or keep them for more than one checkout period, so the turnaround is great.

Now, I only buy books I want to keep. The last book I bought a couple years ago was: Which Lie Did I Tell? : More Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. (This does not count books I've bought for my daughter.) I love movie gossip and trivia, especially when it comes from the horse's mouth.

3. What's the last book you read?

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. It was on the "lucky day" shelf and my pile was empty. I enjoyed the suspense of The Da Vinci Code even if I had to roll my eyes through all of the BS conspiracy theory about Jesus having a wife who bore a child, and thought this would be fun, too. It was. Mr. Brown deserves his bestsellerdom.

4. List 5 books that mean a lot to you.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Perhaps the most perfect novel ever written in the English language. No other work has ever moved me as much as this does. The Great American Novel, and all that.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Funny as hell, and as complicated. A trippy Mobius strip as promised by the title.

Robots of Dawn by Issac Asimov
What science fiction can be if it tries hard enough. This has it all: Love, mystery, robots, sociology of planetary systems (which is more interesting than you'd think if you're not a sci-fi fan), and a twist ending that knocks you right off the couch. And, by this time, Asimov had become a pretty decent stylist.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
Funny and profound all at the same time. Even my mom, who's not a fan of sci-fi at all, loved this series. She laughed so hard at one point, a neighbor came by to make sure she was OK.

Texasville by Larry McMurtry
The second in the "Last Picture Show" series, though you don't need to read the others to enjoy this one (though the whole trilogy is good). McMurtry is probably alone in his ability to evoke real people with all their warts and still make you love them.

Here's a page I put together years ago along these same lines. Odd that I haven't really read anything worth adding in a while. I should add The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, come to think of it.

5. Tag 5 people!

Y'know, I've come so late to this game, I doubt there's anyone left to tag.

---

Primer Plot Graph

No movie has haunted my thoughts in recent years more than Primer has. While a better film and ultimately more satisfying, my other recent obsession, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was more of an emotional rush than an intellectual one - though it certainly has an intellectual payoff, too.

So I was suffused with joy when I happened across all this prime (har har) linkage on Kottke.org, particularly this one which is a graphical representation of the time travels of our heroes in Primer. It's a thing of beauty, a thing of joy. (And it's blue in keeping with my theme!) I got a big printout of this thing and have had a lot of fun pouring over it. Luckly, my wife understands me and waits until she's in the other room before she rolls her eyes after she catches me tracing my finger around this thing.

These guys, however, disagree that the timelines, multiple people copies, and so on are as complex as that graphic makes them. I haven't decided for myself, yet (I have to buy a copy of the damn thing and watch it a few more times - yay!), but I betting that the amount of work that went into that graphic speaks to its accuracy.

Have fun!

Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith

(Minor spoiler ahead. See if you can even pick it out.)

Maybe I should recuse myself, because I'm a hardcore Star Wars geek from way back, having seen the original version in the theatre (before it was called Episode 4) - a theatre with a HUGE screen that showed "Scope" movies in their proper frame format. I was unable to hoist my dropped jaw for about a month after seeing it the first time. A buddy who'd seen it in L.A. before it made its way to my small town had warned me of its awesomeness, but it surpassed all expectations and became my favorite movie of all time, for a while. I can pretend no objectivity in these matters. Even though the newer Star Wars movies have been flawed to the point of surpassing newer iterations of Star Trek in terms of suckitude, I am required to see them, if only to witness the death spiral of a dream.

The wonderful ubergeek hisownself, Harry Knowles, usually frames his reviews with a description of what he did that day, leading up to a viewing, because he believes it helps portray his frame of mind going into the flick. I'm going to borrow that trick, since my circumstance probably colored my mood, further absolving my eventual opinion.

The long weekend loomed, and I was ready for fun until a surprise visit by the in-laws, who intended on staying the night. My in-laws are decrepit, amazingly narcissistic chatterboxes who can't stay on topic any better than your garden-variety aphasic. Their kids are used to this, and have developed a strategy to ignore most of the noise, only cherry-picking the occasional word to appear interested, but I'm used to people actually having something to say when they open their mouths, so their visits are sheer torture for me. When they descend, I end up having to hide out in a remote part of the house to avoid their gapped, circular, incessant patter lest I go nuts and end up being dragged away screaming in my underwear like that poor soul at the end of Fargo.

Sunday morning presented itself, and MPC1 and I were listlessly trying to fill our time, awaiting with dread the eventual rising of the wordstorm troopers (they sleep 'til noon). My wife was also abed, catching up on being awaked for nursing during the night. We had scheduled Monday for seeing Star Wars at the big screen here in town, but as the tedium of the coming morning yawned before us, I grabbed the paper and saw there was a showing we could just catch at another theatre. I procured release from my lovely wife, and off we went. We had escaped! (Or so we thought. When we got back, we discovered our absence merely prolonged the visit.)

So, as the famous intro scroll began, letting us know that Obi wan and Anakin are in the midst of saving Palpatine from a kidnapping attempt, I was in a foul mood, brightened only by our respite from the destroyed weekend and the fact I was there with my daughter, whom I love to go to movies with. I'd heard largely positive reviews, so I was expecting enjoyment rather than a two-hour cringefest for once. In other words, a small spark of hope was alight in my breast, much like ET's when he first comes back to life.

The initial action sequence is good and wisely has a little humor in it, but once that's over, we dive back into what made the other new eppys suck - a lot of yadda yadda about political maneuverings, angst over who's a more righteous or kickass Jedi, etc. The movie doesn't pull it's head out of its black hole until Mace Windu (Samuel Jackson) fights Palpatine, converting the latter into the burned lizard we know and love as the Emperor from the earlier, final 3 movies.

It's revealed that "the force" is really a form of Buddhism that's practiced only by people lucky enough to have the cellular component called "midichlorians" that empower one to manipulate the force - kinda like Harry Potter's (or Samantha Stevens') magic powers where you're either born with them or not. Attachment, meaning personal love and not a vague love for mankind at large, leads to jealousy and inappropriate feelings of possession, which lead to the dark side, and thus all passion is directed inward, selfishly. So, by extension, having a wife and kids is a path to the dark side, if you wanna cut to the chase. Therefore, in the Star Wars universe - where it now appears to a blessing that it occurred a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away - if you are born with enough "midichlorians" (which makes me think of badly synthesized computer music that occurs during photosynthesis), you are destined to roam the galaxy as a sexually frustrated monk, putting on a game face while working out your tension by lopping off limbs with a noisy glowstick.

Anakin finds himself in the midst of The Thornbirds in Space, because Natalie Portman is just a drop-dead full-press mondo ultra hottie of galactic proportions, and she's got a kingdom to boot. What's a young monk to do? It's time to get out the light saber that's way more fun, that's what ya do. Even Yoda have a hard time justifying that not, would he.

Now, pardon me whilst I lurch into dime-store psychology here, but I've noticed that Darth's story arc has a lot in common with George Lucas' renowned, self-admitted troubles with women. Seems one of the richest, most well-known directors/screenwriters/auteurs in Hollywood history has trouble holding on to women. This guy ended up having to raise his kids all by himself, even given his wealth and influence. It's hard to face that we live in a world where Donald Trump and His Amazing Wind-resistant Comb-over can get a date, and even marry a pretty young gold-digger, but George can't find one bucktoothed girl who has a secret thing for Ewoks to provide ballast for the other side of the waterbed. Apparently for George, it all comes down to it being preferable to having appendages sliced off rather than face the agonies of a relationship.

The twist in "Sith" that causes Anakin to become Darth, hinted at here, is actually kinda cool and compelling, and I imagine it's the source of the positive reviews out there - along with the fact that this installment doesn't just totally suck out loud. Sometimes just crossing the finish line is enough, dear heart.

Once the freefall of Anakin begins in earnest (which, for those of you in the cheap seats, begins with another character's literal freefall), the movie picks back up and is a decent entertainment (as evidenced by my daughter's losing interest in the crowd behind us and something stuck to her shoe, and tuning back into the movie). As we near the end, we begin to come full circle and see the sets and costumes we did at the beginning of eppy 4, which is a visceral rush for old fans like myself. We are back where we started, after all.

So, my thumbnail review is that this is better than any of the previous new Star Wars, but it's only just as good as the last one (chronologically) in the series - the futzy Return of the Jedi - which is pretty lukewarm praise, my friends. I did not like it as much as Kevin Smith did. My reaction is approximate to Harry's. As always, Ebert is close to the mark, though he gave more stars than "Stars" is worth, imvho.

And now that it's all said and done, I can put my finger on why these movies weren't that good.

I doubt I'm the first one to point this out, but what was wrong with the first (er, last) three Star Wars films was there is no Han Solo. His character helped a lot towards leavening the space opera. Luke was too busy becoming a Jedi, saving everyone's ass, and feeling icky for snogging his sister to provide much humor. Come to think of it, Princess Lea contributed some of the best female smackdown lines, too. How come no one in the new films was a smartass? I'm guessing that Lucas had Jar-Jar in mind for that role, but the mass hatred for the character (not counting the little tots who dug him) must've had him remove the smartass component altogether.

Irreverence, along with great action sequences, was the central joy of the original films. Without it, the new ones just seem like channel surfing between C-SPAN and a lengthy CNN report that features spaceships instead of tanks. (And talk about your classic victim of bad timing, we get this humorless trope right when the majority of us (according to recent polls) are seeking escapism from that very sort of thing.) Alas.

TLD: Whilst writing this post, I discovered that Microsoft Word 2000 actually knows how to spell correctly the names of the main Star Wars characters, but it doesn't know how to spell "shithead." Interesting, no?

Just goes to show you that there are those who hope Darth Vader wins...

I've been doing my best to keep my head down and ignore the current political situation in order to preserve quality of life, and since a bazillion other blogs are snarking about it, I don't have to.

Still, when the Watergate scandal's Deep Throat finally reveals himself, and a large portion of the conservative punditry actually criticizes HIM rather than admit Nixon was a crook, it just seems surreal.

Tom Burka, via the Poor Man, illustrates.

Gotta give'm their props

Hey, imagine that. The Senate decided to stick with tradition and good sense and not allow the wingnuts to change the rules anymore. Yay!

Primer - Movie review.

Boy, what an uber-geek experience.

These two guys, Abe and Aaron, who run a cottage tech industry out of their garage at night, try to invent a levitation device but accidentally invent a time machine instead. They discover this because their test subject, a weeble (which wobble but don't fall down, donchaknow), keeps getting coated in slime, which ends up being a common bacteria that grows really slowly on everything. Thus, to coat the weeble, it would have to have been sitting still for hundreds of years.

What's cool, or overwhelming, is that the movie never slows down to provide a simple explanation as to what's going on. We get no Doc explaining the flux capacitor (well, we do, actually, but it's pretty complex) and we particularly get no clues as to what specific times they travel to - or for what reason. That's for YOU to figure out. And what fun it is!

I'm willing to bet that folks who haven't read a few time travel novels will be utterly lost as to what's occurring. I think the only reason I followed it is because I love the twisty knots of time travel, and the first book I read on it is still one of the best.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold* is a trip. And it figures in a seminal moment in my childhood. My mother didn't allow me to read any books with any sex in them at all. We had a huge fight because I wanted to read the script of the movie Westworld, but it contained the word "hooker" just once, so she didn't want me to read it. I eventually got to, but you get the idea. So, in The Man Who Folded Himself, the guy discovers that if he goes forward a day, if he's home that day, he bumps into himself. After discovering this, he often picks a day in the future, and travels to it several times and to have an orgy with himself. Which begs the questions, is it homosexuality, masturbation, incest, or all three? Anyway, due to my initial shock at this development, I turned to my mom on the couch and said, "Guess what this guy is doing." And I told her. She reached over, took the book from my hands, ripped it in half and said, "Sorry, but you're not reading that kind of trash." The fight that ensued from that event was one of the biggest I ever had with my mom. I was mostly incensed that I couldn't finish one of the most intriguing books I'd read up to that point, but it fixed in my mind the evils of censorship. To this day, any and all censorship pushes my buttons like few other things. (Which is one of the reasons the intense secrecy of the Bush administration makes me froth.)

        *David Gerrold, btw, also wrote the famous Star Trek episode about the Tribbles.

I eventually went to the library, checked out a copy of the book on the sly, and finished it. It was great, and it really walks you through all the permutations of time travel. So, since I'd read that book, I think I was able to follow the plot of Primer easier than someone who hadn't read anything like it.

Also, in my work, I've had to work on financial systems that bill and process data from previous periods, so discussing those systems is often like discussing time travel.

You can kinda tell Primer was made on the cheap, but that just lends to its credibility, and gives it a quasi-documentary feel. I think if two guys discovered time travel in their garage, the subsequent events would take place in cars, warehouses, living rooms, and look just like this film does.

Shane Carruth, conceived, wrote, directed, edited, and scored the thing. He also plays one of the two main characters. Film buffs should make a point of listening to his commentary as it's a great little film school, points out things easy to miss, like how they used color correction to give subtle hits as to what's going on, and he helps with understanding the plot - so if you missed it during the movie, you can catch up.

The web site is pretty nifty, too. It even offers MP3s of the score. How cool is that?

Just Because I Can

A looooooong time ago, pretty much back in the day when the internet became widely publicly available (can you say "Mosaic"?), I created what came to be known as a vanity web page. It's still out there, mostly to provide a home to my Christianity FAQ, because up until recently, it was one of the top-ranked FAQs on the topic. I don't know what happened, but about two or three months ago it dropped from showing up on the first page of every search engine when you went after "Christianity FAQ" after doing so for many years (though, while just checking, I found that if you include it in quotes like I have here, it still shows up in the first few pages of results). (And, the site that is at the top of nearly every first result page is a rabidly anti-Christian atheist site run by a Grade-A asshole. It's an interesting site if you want to see how nasty and vicious some can get in slamming the faith of believers.)

Anyway, the other thing I created that I'm still kinda proud of is this attempt to make the original intro page look somewhat like an animated Yes album cover. I drew/created everything you see there except the gifs for the twinkling stars.

This was back when the rage was creating the wildest - if not oblique and difficult to use - intro page to your site possible. The idea was that if it were enticing, people would click around just to see what happened. Well, as the web took off, the crabs of the world and the people who knew something about graphical design started complaining and putting up web sites bashing the terrible design of others. (Where I work, we still have a Developer (Computer Programmer for those of you in the cheap seats) who still fears and dreads anything of his showing up on the lists of one of those sites.)

So, I retired the page and put up an intro page that actually explained what the links might take you to.

I still like how my original one looks though. And the reading page (first tree on the left) has a decent collection of the better jokes and articles that circled the web back in those days. Enjoy.

Owned

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack in Salon, 05/18/05:

And I think Republicans do a better job with language. They've spent a lot of money and a lot of time thinking about these things. Democrats have spent all of their time and energy on policies and programs that impact and affect people's lives. Republicans have spent all of their time on ideas -- how to couch those ideas, frame those ideas, and communicate those ideas.

Exactly.

I think that's the frustration most liberals, like myself, have. For now, the neocons/wingnuts of the Republican party do a great job of sugarcoating dog turds and selling them as tootsie rolls. This drives Democrats crazy because they (we) feel that if the neocons presented their policy goals straight out, they would be much less popular. There would still be a core group that supports them, but the percentages of people who say they identify with those ideas would probably drop noticeably.

I guess we liberals have got to get over the notion that a good idea will succeed on the strength of being a good idea alone. We've got to get to work on the presentation. And, we have one advantage: We won't have to name things the opposite of what they truly are, as with the "PATRIOT Act", "No Child Left Behind", "Right to Work", and so on.

When I met you at the station, you were standing there with a bootleg in your hand

Via Salon, specifically the Audiophile column which regularly has links to free MP3s, three of which have actually been good songs, recently linked to the Bootleg Browser. The question posed by the Audiophile was whether folks considered bootlegs posted on the web as fair game, or did it infringe upon the artist's copyrights and lose them money?

Well, like I do on a lot of issues, I'm on both sides. If an artist doesn't want you recording their show and putting it for free on the web, well then you shouldn't. But, so many artists are bright enough to realize that allowing fans to tape shows and even trade them achieves a lot of things at once:
- It shows you have live chops, so they'll probably pop for a ticket next time
- The quality of boots is usually pretty bad, so anyone who cares about the sound will end up going out and buying a CD or two - unless they own it already, and then the artist got their money anyway
- The goodwill it sows pays off in spades (whatever that means - whose ever been paid in shovels and was happy about it?)

Anyway, since there weren't band statements on bootlegging to be had (and direct me to them if you know of any), I went and snagged some of my favorite bands, because I know, for instance, Dave Grohl wouldn't care. Besides, I doubt he'll ever release his impromptu version of "Big Me" where he changes the lyrics to a treatise on the Technicolor yawn, renamed "I'm gonna fucking puke." Had I known of this when I wrote
my soliloquy to the accidental personal protein spill, I would have linked to it then and dubbed it the theme song for the post. Alas.

Also hunt down Elton John's "Rocket Man." It's got that way back in the cheap seats ambience common to bootlegs, but somehow that renders it more poignant.

And, for those of you who want to find MP3s of songs, just to sample, delete, and then go buy legal copies, I've found that Alta-vista - one of the original web search engines until Google eclipsed everyone's sun - has a pretty decent audio search. Check it out, mang.

Oh, and whoever recalls the song referenced in the title gets a cookie!



The Footprints of God by Greg Iles - a review

This was a mildly entertaining expansion on the famous sci fi short story - the author and title of which I forgot to look up but it's anthologized all the time - where scientists construct a giant computer to ask it the one question, "Is there a God?" To which it replies, "There is now." A major plot point of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy centers around such a computer. Another precursor to is the movie (from the books) Colossus: The Forbin Project. Yet another, kinda tangentially, is the movie and book The Demon Seed by Dean Koontz.

Yes, it's been done before. And some of those were better.

Still, The Footprints of God is a diversion that's not a total waste of your time.

I give it this lukewarm review only to put it on the radar of fellow avid readers whose reading lists need a decent thriller/sci fi jaunt, but also to quibble about a development near the end.

So, for those of you who intend to read the book, surf away now. SPOILERS are en route.

---

Ok, just us?

Here's what cramped my nougat not that much, just a little tiny bit: The author attempts to reconcile ALL religions into one view of God - kinda sorta an attempt at stirring together all of the views of the elephant that the blind men report. The reason this sticks in the craw is that religions are elephants unto themselves, not parts of one elephant. Were you to try and merge several elephants into one larger elephant, chances are you'd encounter resistance from those very elephants.

There is a tendency in America, born by the civil rights movements and other factors, that wants everything that can be used to define a person to be truly equal, no one category of something is inherently better or more true than the other. Since religion is something most people consider part of their identity, some well-meaning folks want some grand unification theory of all religions, so they don't have to pick, or be forced to declare one religion better or truer than the other.

Well, sorry folks, but outside of Unitarianism, all religions - yes, even Buddhism - claim exclusive ownership of the truth. That means if you believe one is true, all of the rest are false. You have to make a choice - including choosing to not choose. Trying to mash them all together as if they were all puzzle parts of some larger truth just ends up making an incoherent mess that no one wants to clean up.

I mean, gosh, thanks for trying, and bless your heart, but just - don't.

Oh, and btw, this is a theme of the novel: Unifying that which is separate to create a greater whole product than the sum of the parts. The plot surrounds an effort to create an artificial intelligence by doing a very detailed CAT scan of a human brain, and recreating that structure (which supposedly contains the knowledge and experience of the person) in a computer. Because thoughts can travel at the speed of light (electricity) in a computer rather than at the speed of electrochemical reactions as in our brains, any brain loaded into these computers can think thousands of times faster, while having the advantage of instantaneous access to any knowledge that can be stored on computer disc, i.e. instant learning. This makes the brain in the box very powerful, "almost like a God" as the novel sets it up.

Well, humans getting fantastic godlike power invariably end up like those in the first true Star Trek with Capt. Kirk, where his buddy and a shrink on the ship both end up with god powers, replete with glowing eyes, zapping powers, and dramatic music queues. This is solved in The Footprints of God not by dropping a really big rock on the supposed god, like Kirk did, but by loading two more brains alongside the original one - one of them female - to create a trinity of minds that will balance each other, in theory. This becomes tied to the merging of religions theme because yin/yang, Hindu views of male/female duality/unity, the Dao - and so on and so forth - is central to those religions, and so this merging of the male and female into one supposedly perfect whole fulfills some of their goals.

Again, gallant effort, but ultimately doomed. It kinda made the book very silly in the end.

And there you have it...

The national ID card.

The Ladies' Room!

(The title of this post is of course the audience supplied punchline to the original Star Trek opening speech, which my daughter screeches out with unalloyed joy when we have mini-trekfests. She doesn't allow us to skip past the opening credits for that reason, and because she digs the song - the version with the woman warbling the melody, particularly. That's our topic, the TV show that died but wouldn't lie down. (Lay down? I can never remember.))

Today, Mr. Lileks kinda mourns the demise of Star Trek (and, y'know, a little blog like mine linking to the LILEKS is kinda like the bacterium on a flea linking to the dog upon which the flea rests). He does a great takedown of what was wrong - and get this fanboys and girls - what was done right. And there's only one gratuitous toupee joke.

I agree with the whole post. I often felt alone in my intense dislike of the holodeck episodes in tv Trek II/TNG (and the resulting spread of the virus to the other latter shows). About the only thing I liked were the Data and the Borg episodes. Oh, and I loved the episode where Troi is impregnated with Starman for so many reasons: 1) the shameless ripoff of the movie, 2) the Starman Tinkerbell light going under Troi's covers and popping into the correct place to be to start a fetus - the audacity alone of showing that on TV - and her reaction to the same, and 3) all the resulting hilarity from Troi flunking the pee test. In the bright, shiny future when you don't have to buy whole season sets, or ridiculously expensive 2 episode DVDs of TV shows, and can pick and choose individual ones to buy for say $3, I'll prolly get those eppies.

I saw only one tv Trek III/DS9, which was a retread of the Tribble episode from the original series. It was fun watching them recreate the old sets and digitally fold the new story into the old. That'll be on the list, too.

I dug tv Trek IV/Voyager, but mostly because I had a thing for Capt. Janeway (I thought she was the only Capt. outside of Kirk with any guts), and of course Seven of Nine was just fun to watch. Neelix was amusing in a wonderfully grating way. But, after his wife died and joined that bald chick from the first movie as some sort of cosmic entity, the series got old for me.

I tried tv Trek V/Enterprise, but it was the same old same old, politically correct shite that the Trek team since tv Trek II had been spewing at us. Even though Trek characters had sex in the later episodes, it always smacked of Human Resources approved courting and was about as believable as "professional" wrestling. I dunno, when Capt. Kirk was pulling his boots back on, and his latest conquest was at the mirror putting her hair back in place, it just seemed like a good time was had by all.

Oh, and tv Trek V/Enterprise had a cute little beagle. Which meant that they would snuff about a bazillion redshirts, but the damn dog would never be in greater peril than missing a mealtime when the Capt. was held hostage on an alien ship. Wouldn't it have been bold to have an alien hoist the puppy on a pike to taunt the Capt. and crew? But then we'd have to have a very special episode where they went back through time to rescue the dog - so maybe it's a good thing the doggie was protected by the Hollywood double-standard of wiping humans out left and right, but the doggie is always OK. (And forgive the brief segue into a very serious topic, but this is kinda reminiscent of the Muslim world flipping out over the supposed defacing of copies of the Koran, but not being so concerned about all the loss of human life - including their own people - through the incessant suicide and car bombings. Tell you what, if I were given the choice in some fiery cataclysm where I could either rescue an original copy of the Bible or Karl Rove (our current governmental Darth Vader, for those of you in the cheap seats), I'd save Rove's fat ass without even pausing to think about it.)

Mocking the themesong of tv Trek V/Enterprise is about as effortless and icky as pushing a little old lady off the curb into the path of an oncoming bus. We won't pick on the totally helpless here.

The fambly and I tried tuning in a few episodes ago to try and pick up the thread to watch the finalies, but after the first 15 minutes of a show (no one does boring quite like latter day Star Trek), we took a quick spontaneous vote that our time was better spent in other activities.

I still think the originals were the best. Try one on if you haven't lately. They were snappy, funny, and compelling. Three words I would never apply to hardly any of the retread series(es).


Here's a thought, though. The last Star Wars is this year. Trek is finally probably really over. Even the Matrix series, which never lived up to the first, is complete. We have reached the end of an era.

I thought so!

My family was discussing movie stars the other day because we were trying to explain to our daughter who Renee Zellweger is, because she married a favorite country star of ours, Kenny Chesney - whom we were a little worried about because he never seemed to be able to get a date. It came to our attention that - outside of voicing an animated fish - Renee hasn't really been in a single movie that is kid friendly (see for yourself).

Stuff like this gives me teeny tiny little thrill because I've just discovered a little factoid that is evasive unless you look directly at it. I feel like I'm viewing tiny stitches in the weave and pattern of the universe when I put something like this together. Is it important? No. Is it a waste of brainspace? Prolly. Do I still dig it? Sock it to me, baby!

One of my daughter's recent favorite movies is I, Robot. This love/love/(fear!) (as opposed to love/hate) thing with robots appears to be genetic, because they captured a lot of my imagination when I was a kid, too - and just a little dread. Asimov was correct in that the primary reaction humans would first have to humanoid robots of sufficient sophistication would be fear. Because of I, Robot (and Shark Tale), my daughter definitely knows who Will Smith is.

While flipping through the channels the other night, we passed the opening song to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. (Hey Hommes! Smell ya later!) Our daughter perked up and said, "What's he doing there?" And we explained that's how Will started out as an actor, and that he'd made it as a rapper first (which didn't impress her since we as a family abhor rap (even though I do like some of Will's stuff)), and that he became a big star over time.

For a while now, I've been pondering just how big a star he is, because he really is ubiquitous. As I write this, he has another CD on the charts, I, Robot is still selling well on DVD and cycling on the movie channels, "Fresh Prince" is in syndication, this early movie season's romantic comedy Hitch is still in the bargain theaters and is due on DVD. Will Smith once claimed he owned the 4th of July weekend ever since Independence Day, and the first time I heard it, for a brief moment, I thought it was kinda arrogant, until I realized he was merely stating fact.

So when I would see lists of "who are the big stars" kinda things in the tawdry entertainment mags I consume like a diabetic committing suicide via cotton candy, I would wonder why he wasn't grinning back at me more than he was. It just felt like he was bigger than his press.

So, today, in Roger Ebert's review of Kicking & Screaming, this interesting little tidbit was dropped:

Will Ferrell is now a major movie star, with nine more new movies in the pipeline. I learn of his status from the industry analyst David Poland, who has crunched the numbers and come up with the "real" list of box office heavyweights. He says top 10 stars in terms of actual ticket sales are, in order: Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Denzel Washington. The highest-ranking woman on the list is Reese Witherspoon, at No. 12. [Emphasis added.]

AHA! I knew it!

I also thought Denzel would be in this kind of a list, though I don't often see him in those entertainment strokefests, either. I must say I'm kinda surprised that Ben Stiller's on the list, but it makes sense. I'm very sad to see Tom Cruise is. I am also shocked that there aren't any women, and the first one on the larger list (which I would love to see) is at number 12. Other than that, this looks about right.

Note that 7 out of the 10 come from comedy or sitcom backgrounds. Hmmmm. More fabric of the universe?

Making Room for Baby

The last few weekends have just been sheer hell of a sort for me. Mother's Day was the first day I'd finally stopped having coughing, sniffles, and other indignities of the disease I complained of a long time ago. It's our daughter's soccer season which automatically brings a busy schedule, but then we've had something else scheduled on both days of every weekend for a while - all of this with a 3 1/2 month old. To boot, spring has done sprung, bringing with it all of the chores outdoors to get the lawn and landscaping accessories to the proper state to avoid the housing association nastygrams (though I am allergic - way allergic - to grass, so my wife is the primary lawn warrior, thus I am the odd-job guy, such as clearing sprinkler heads).

Man, I'm tired.

Thus, the most common activity of my current existence is especially taxing: Walking the baby around to quiet her, which includes doing little bounces, dances, and hops to keep up the all-important jiggle action. The theory (blatant guessing, really) is it reminds babies of being safe in the womb with the accompanying motion of mom walking around. Thing is, pregnant women like to sit, too, so why doesn't sitting still relax them as well? It's one of those mysteries only God can solve, to be sure, so it's on my list for Him right after the truth behind the Kennedy assassination, how hardcore right wing fundie Republicans think they're following Jesus' directives on behavior towards those in need by wrecking every program intended to help the poor, what really happened in Memento, and why are breasts so damn fascinating (to men at least - women are often surprised when they find out it's a mystery to us, too).

Part of the hell lately, then, has been trying to do this in a cramped and crowded restaurant, or a windy and blindingly sunny field, or anywhere women are gathered together in any great number, so they can cast disparaging glances at the dad who can't magically make the baby stop crying and where is the mother who would know how to anyway? (I've actually had women - complete strangers - walk up and ask if they can take the baby so she'll stop crying, as if handing her to a complete stranger would aid the situation - for either of us. Trust me, a baby's "who the hell are you?!" cry is much more piercing and shrill than the "I can't get to sleep" cry. More factoids for my presumably compassionate sisters: Mom isn't holding her because then the baby would want to nurse, which she's already done, pushing the inevitable nap back probably half an hour, and heck, mom's tired dammit, so I have her for a darn good reason, k?)

I don't mind this walking the baby so much, I love her dearly and want her to be happy (plus it burns calories), but doing it in the environment of tables placed 1 foot apart, with little old ladies and childless earlytwentysomethings scowling at me - or out in a wind storm with nary a cloud in sight so I have the extra challenging of keeping a hat on the sweet little bald head, the owner of which detests anything of the hat variety and all its cousins too - can feel like the challenge of standing up in a hammock to screw.

Especially challenging are the young, impatient, childless earlytwentysomethings of the world. Being fresh from childhood themselves (or not truly out of it yet), some of these pups openly resent parents and our small children. They frown directly at us as though the impertinence of a baby crying is something they feel they have a God given right to not have to deal with, <Napoleon Dynamite Impersonation>Gosh!</Napoleon Dynamite Impersonation>. No doubt they're of the crowd that's been taught every new baby is a drain on our resources, so as a parent I've committed a grievous sin by brining about one more mouth to feed and someone who will consume more energy than the third world, and so on. Or, they feel put upon because parents get to leave work to go home to the unique joy of a projectile vomiting child when they have to stay at work. Check out some of the moister complaints in this post on Slashdot that was supposed to be about skipping work to see Star Wars, but immediately degenerated into one of these resentment fests against "breeders." (For the record, I have found that - to a person - anyone who ever uses the word "breeders" in any non-ironic fashion is a festering pustule on the butt-crack of humanity.)

Having once been a non-parent, I can easily extend my sympathies and understanding to anyone's annoyance at a noisy child, or a child that is trying to interact with them when all they want to do is read, eat their dinner, or pick their nose, etc. Even now as a parent, if I see some gummy-handed, oreo-smeared little face rapt, approaching me, I sometimes cringe inside and mentally race through friendly ways to quickly deflect the child. So I understand.

But, darnit, babies cry and sometimes there's nothing that can be done. They're just gonna have to wind down. And babies have a right to be here just as much as you do. Who's gonna serve you your fries if we don't have babies?

And finally, ladies... Please do not go up to strange men with a crying baby and offer to take them, because neither possible outcome is desirable. Chances are he'll be pissed at you for your presumption as to his parenting skills, feel dubious about your motives, or at worst fear you're going to try to run away with his child. But in the odd chance that he does take you up on your offer, keep in mind the fact that he is willing to HAND HIS CHILD TO A STRANGER! Do you really want to help this kind of a person? I didn't think so.

How to tell if research scientists don't have kids:

They discover something that's completely obvious to anyone who does.

Birth

Sometimes I purposely watch a movie that everyone has agreed is a stinker just to see to what degree it doth stinketh, and precisely how it doth stinketh (the cause thereof, therefore). Also, if everyone talks about a particular scandalous scene, I have to see it for myself. Now, I won't lay down money for this experience, no. It has to come from the library or Netflix (since I pay a flat fee, and turn these stinkers around quickly, it's free in my mind).

Thus, I got Birth because this kid was supposed to climb into a bathtub with a nekkid Nicole Kidman (who I consider a first degree skank, so I didn't tune in see HER*), and Hollywood has always skated the edge on what they make children do to get a shot. (For instance, everyone on the shoot knew Drew Barrymore was secretly convinced that ET was real, even though she knew he was a puppet and could see the puppeteers - who would often fire up ET and play with her between takes, further fostering her innocent delusion - so in the scene where he dies, her tears are real and it reportedly took a long time to console her after that scene. She claims she was sad for weeks afterward.)

*TLD: I've noticed that most straight men are either ambivalent about Nicole Kidman, or they think she's a skank. (Note the "most" there.) Almost universally, women and gay men think she's pretty and/or hot. How's that for an interesting demarcation line? My favorite one though is "Ginger or MaryAnn?" - with most straight guys answering without hesitation "MaryAnn."

Weeehelllll, Birth turned out to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, in almost every aspect there is, perhaps save the cinematography. (Before I go on, let me explain the premise so you know what I'm referring to later: This 10 year old boy shows up one day and announces he's Nicole's reincarnated husband and he wants her back; hilarity ensues.)

The direction is thunderously pretentious, and it's clearly the product of a film school weenie with mediocre talent. I detected a good two filmic cliches (or "homages") for every five minutes of screen time. The simplest and avoidable amateuristic errors are abundant; for instance: When someone has to go somewhere, we see the whole voyage. In one scene, Nicole has to walk to the bridge where her husband died (during the first 5 minutes of the film, which would have been the first 30 seconds of the film under a good director), but we begin the scene with her standing blocks from there. Just standing there for a minute. Staring. Then she starts walking and we follow her the whole time - once even cutting to a posterior view, and watch her back for a while before we cut back to her front.

All patches of dialogue contain gargantuan pauses between query and response. My wife and I were concocting a drinking game (for future use at a party) around the pauses between dialogue - the intent being to get a good buzz on, but not bring about alcohol poisoning or choking on one's own vomit. We arrived at having to take a drink (one swallow) when there was over 8 second gap between dialogue lines. And there are two built-in chug-a-whole-drink events (crucial to any entertainment-based drinking game**). These are: 1) an amazingly graphic and completely gratuitous sex scene between Nicole and her fiance - you chug when you can see his butt (for women) or when you see Nicole's other nipple (for men - hint: you see one when the scene begins), and 2) at 49 minutes into the movie, Nicole's character sums up every single event that has occurred in the movie thus far to another character - so the gratuitous and redundant deja vu, plus the irony (the Alanis Morissette kind) that the movie is about reincarnation and here we are reliving it - is a splendid reason for a chug.

**TLD: A good example of an entertainment-based drinking game is "Chugboat," which is played while watching "Loveboat." Everyone picks one of the main characters, like Julie, the Doc, the bartender, or the captain (you can pick the boat, too, but only a full shot of it counts, not parts of it in the background), and you all have to pick a different one. Whenever your character appears on the screen, you take a drink. If a girl walks by in a bikini, everyone must lift their drinks as if to toast, scream "Balloon Smuggler!" and chug the remainder of whatever they're holding. Another example is a game associated to the first Bob Neuhart show. Every time someone says "Bob," which they say a LOT for some reason, you take a drink. I don't recall the chug trigger for that game. I do recall you got plenty wasted in a half hour with just the "Bob" thing, though. Bob was a boot factor of 3, and Chugboat was a boot factor of 2, unless you picked a character that was central to that week's show, and then it rocketed to boot factor 4. If I recall the boot factors, 1 was only lightweights would get a buzz, 2 was you'd get drunk, 3 was you'd get very drunk with lightweights possibly "booting" (barfing), 4 was over half the people might boot and definitely everyone would get sloppy drunk, and 5 was the boot was simply "when" and not "if."

The casting is amusing because the character description of every single character (except the kid) must've been: "Perpetually smug-looking New York type." You get to the point where you want to build a time machine and miraculously appear in the middle of a scene in hopes the actors will find another facial expression.

Inability to portray more than one facial expression is an epidemic in this film. I've never thought Nicole was much of an actress - unless she was cast as a devious bitch, which seems to be her forte - but this movie finally completely confirms my suspicions. In one scene she is (I'm guessing) supposed to be awash in emotion while she accepts the fact that this kid is in fact her reincarnated husband. We stay locked on her face for a 5-minute closeup. In the entire time, not a single muscle moves, neither eye wanders (though they redden impressively), nor is there nary a twitch of the lip. You have NO IDEA what she's supposed to be thinking or what the script called for (unless the screenwriter honestly indicated she should remain completely still and expressionless for 5 minutes, and if it did, may the ghost of Bette Davis haunt his hairy ass). Were Cate Blanchett or Kate Winslet (or, hell, Renee Zellweger or Angela Bassett if we fear being too much of an anglophile) wasted in this movie, she would've killed, and you would've known every thought crossing her mind - down to the color of the wallpaper if she were pondering the renovation of her bathroom.

Even the boy playing the reincarnated husband remains neutral in voice and carriage, which, in terms of how it sinks this movie, is the equivalent of when the Titanic broke in half and hastened its gurgly rush to the bottom of the ocean. See, he's playing someone who's so in love and so driven to get back with this woman, that he's hounding her to take him back even though he's a different person and only 10, but he does this as though he's the shrunken zombie of the dead husband, not the lovesick reincarnation. If any part should be played for the cheap seats, it's this one. But no - it's as undisturbed and clear as newly blown glass.

The soundtrack veers between this over-the-top screeching of violins as if Hitchcock's birds were attacking, and this low thrumming noise that reminds me of the odious drum solo that accompanied Grateful Dead concerts, which is in the frequency range that makes most people feel like they have to move their bowels. (Well, at least it's an appropriate sensation.)

And then we get to the big controversial scene where the kid climbs into the tub with Nicole. It's as shocking as they say. The filmmakers claim they used special effects to achieve it, but in the scene where you see the kid actually climb into the tub, it looks live, because the ripples in the water show up on Nicole's bod. Given what they can do with digital effects now, it's not outside the realm of possibility that it was faked, but realistic water ripples on someone's skin is quite the feat. But, even if it was faked, the dialogue that the boy has to say is pretty explicit in that he's acknowledging that he's in the tub, nude, with her, and for all the reasons you'd crawl into someone else's tub. In a later scene, they blatantly discuss having sex, too. Folks, the boy had to know what he was talking about, and I dunno ... I think, as a parent, it's pretty icky to put a kid into that kind of a situation. How, organically, does that differ from a molester engaging a child in sex talk? (Maybe doing all those same kinds of scenes with her diminutive, glassy-eyed ex-husband has left Nicole a little confused as to when she's talking to a grownup or not.)

Update: I've watched that scene again before I sent it winging back to Netflix, and when you see them both in the tub together, it conceivably could have been special effects, because there's a clear line presented by Nicole's body. But, given the other things they had that kid do and say, I doubt they much hesitated to really have him plop himself into the tub with her for real. And - here's the interesting thing - since special effects are so good anymore, the producers have the room to lie about whether it was a live shot or not - it's not provable either way.

Well, offended morals aside, this movie is an absolute turkey, festooned with rotten tomatoes, good for nothing but carving up and serving on a tray with some lumpy mashed potatoes, like I've done here.

Unless you're planning on playing the drinking game we invented. In that case, please be sure to sleep on your stomach, and have a garbage can nearby. Bottoms up!

Beautiful Fugly

"He's so ugly, he hurt my feelings" - Moms Mabley

The other day someone waxed rhapsodic on how ugly someone was (a guitarist in a band, to be specific), and it brought to mind my past ruminations on those who are aesthetically challenged. (For the record, I consider myself dead average in appearance, though at my age I have to be up in the morning about an hour before I get back to average anymore.)

Science has tried to examine and measure exactly what constitutes or is the basis for our judgments of beautiful and ugly, and the short version is most people judge a symmetrical face as pretty and one not as ugly. Since I read that a long time ago, I've kinda done an informal survey, and have seen plenty of people I think are pretty who would not fit that criteria and ugly folks whose faces seem pretty symmetrical - which is sad in a way because both sides are equally ugly, removing all chance for a possible "get my good side" photographic reprieve.

Now bear with me here, this is not a bash the fuglies of the world post at all. In fact, it's the opposite.

I've come to the conclusion that many ugly people are just as interesting looking as pretty people are.

But, in coming to that conclusion, I noticed there are many different kinds of ugly, and sadly, there's a kind of ugly that only rewards close examination with seemingly infinitely recessing levels of ugly, sorta reminiscent of that cosmological view that asserts: "It's turtles all the way down."

Here's what I mean: Some people are ugly because of a single, but significant flaw. Some because individual features are nice, but they don't fit together well (I knew a girl in high school like this - gorgeous brown eyes, aquiline nose, cupid lips, but together they made her look like Alice the Goon from Popeye cartoons). Some because a feature or two is bad, but still doesn't gel with the good ones, and so on. Most of those people, however, typically fit into the category I'm suggesting here of people who are so interestingly ugly that they're almost pretty again.

So, there are a few poor souls out there that are hyper-dimensionally ugly - that is, ugly any way you look at it. For instance, I once saw this guy whose eyes were so deep set that it always felt like he was looking at you from under a rock. Worse yet, he had perpetual dark circles around them - sorta like a Terry Gilliam/Monty Python cartoon character - exacerbating the deeply recessed eyes appearance. But to top it all off, when he smiled, they shockingly pulled deeper into his head! The orbits of his eyes had this bizarre dimpled area just off the temple, and those dimples pinched and his eyes literally went deeper into his head - which I verified when I got a side view as he smiled. Then, he had a nose that - well I can't really describe what was wrong with it because I spent enough time on the weird eye thing and didn't want to give the impression I was staring, so let's just throw out the descriptive "porcine" call it good. He had one of those lipless mouths that just reduces to a slit when closed. All of these swam in a roundish, jowly face, that was alternately ruddy and then yellowish in complexion. He made me think of the Moms Mabley quote at the top of this post.

But, enough about those at the far end of that particular bell curve. Let's just leave them alone and hope that their denial skills are top-notch and take comfort that everyone can find someone who loves them, if they so choose.

The foremost interesting ugly person I can think of is this girl I had a pretty bad crush on in college. When I first spotted her, whatever it was that was wrong with her was visible from a distance. She looked as though at some point in her life, she'd been left out in the sun too long, and like a wax figurine, had just melted and flowed a bit slightly everywhere, but was rescued before collapsing into a puddle, and rehardened in this melted state. She carried herself oddly, too, giving the impression she was a marionette on strings; it was graceful, but disconcerting just the same. To the point: She looked like a melted Catherine Hepburn, and had a force to her personality that furthered the comparison. Close up, the illusion of having melted was even stronger. She didn't have burn scars, but every single plane of her face was somehow off. Every one. I don't recall why I had the opportunity to study her long enough to complete such a survey without her becoming uncomfortable, but I did somehow, and recall that after reaching that conclusion, I double-checked a couple more times later to be sure. Her eyes were green with asymmetrical brown flecks in them, so no feature was without the inclusion of some slight flaw. She's the only person I've met whose appearance came so close to repulsive without actually crossing that thin scar of a border. I never got the courage to ask her out, partially because, like a lot of guys, I was a wienie in the sense that I preferred loneliness to potential rejection, but also because there was a hint in her personality that what was underneath the hard candy shell of her public personality was something that would take some managing. Like the song says, it appeared whoever did crack that shell would discover that "to love me you have to climb some fences." At that point in my life, I'd had enough fence climbing (see other posts on my dating experiences). It would be interesting to see how she aged, though. Maybe she melted back into place over the years.

A buddy of mine from college was another one of these beautiful ugly people. I remember slight shock first time I encountered him because of his smashed face, but the second he said anything his overwhelming charisma wiped out any impression triggered by his physical appearance. He had reportedly endured nearly daily beatings as a kid walking to and from school, which left his nose almost completely flattened and odd cysts on his lips caused from being punctured by his own teeth. However, even though he's striking upon first view, he's one of those whose features actually gel into something almost handsome, in a latter day Hemingway sort of fashion. This guy has always had girls literally throw themselves at him, which is a testament to his charisma and the odd way his looks work(ed) for him (though he's happily married now, not that the female self-flinging has ceased).

To give you a clearer idea of the kind of strangely attractive fugly people I'm talking about, let me chuck some celebrity examples atcha:
- John Malkovich - This guy can pull off attractive enough to be cast as Michelle Feifer's love interest, but a close look really gives one pause - and maybe a fantod or two. This guy is the classic example of someone whose features on their own are all kinda nasty, but they work together to make something greater than the sum of the parts. ...with soft focus in dim lighting, and after a couple strong drinks, after returning from half a year marooned at the South Pole...
- John Turturro - What a mess. But he's one of those who can clean up well, or be made to look so bad you expect someone to show up with a retarded guy playing a banjo announcing ya'll've got a purty mouth.
- Barbra Streisand - OK, some would say she's obviously pretty - like buttah, even. I would agree, but take a close look. We won't go within sniffing distance of the obvious, so let's look at that mouth. It can do this weird thing where it can be sensuous, but then fall apart into a Frankenstein mouth that might be constructed from the lips of deceased collagen injection victims. (Please, no hate mail from the Babs-lovers of the world; I am one of you.)
- Cynthia Nixon - From Sex in the City. At times, I wondered if they'd put her on the series just to do the terrible old coyote ugly and/or double-bag (one over her face and one over yours in case hers came off) ugly jokes. But, ain't she striking somehow?
- Sandra Bernhard - The perfect example of what I'm talking about. She's just got this thing where a casual glance lights up the ugly column on your mental list, but take a while longer to look, and somehow her looks just work for her. Were I single and she decided she dug guys - me in particular - I'd board her yacht, baby.
- Steve Buscemi - Here we have the poster child for this post. Dear lord, what a strange looking man. But, I've read that he has quite the devoted female following who think he's just the dreamiest thing since Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream (perhaps since they're both very pale with incongruous doughy chunks throughout).
- Whoopi Goldberg - I have had a thing for Whoopi since I saw her original one-woman Broadway show (on tape). I almost didn't put her here because I think she's just cool looking, but her face fits my premise: Odd enough to be strikingly interesting. She's another one were she and I available and she gave me the nod, I'd fall.
- Lyle Lovett - The alternate poster child for this post. Clearly Julia Roberts sees some things the way I do (or at least did). I think God made Lyle like this because if he looked like Mel Gibson with his talent, he'd have been clusterfucked to death by female fans by now. It was just a safety measure, I'm sure.

But see? These are all people that more or less are kinda sorta ugly, but they're all fascinating looking at the same time, right?

Hence, I launch the meme (with apologies to the Poor Man) "Beautiful Fugly."