Well join the club. But here is an excellent article explaining the whole thing in a page. Well worth reading if you have, use, or are affected by money.
And here's the actual text of the agreement.
And here's an example of what kind of silliness it has generated on the web.
Monday, September 29, 2008
SCIENCE- Robert Heinlein Would Be So Proud
Elon Musk's company SPACE-X has launched a privately financed and designed rocket into orbit.
Head over to Wired.com for more details.
Head over to Wired.com for more details.
POLITICS- I Wonder If the Ceremony Will Be in the Rose Garden?
After “terrorist fist jabs” and “Obama won’t say the pledge of allegiance” and “or wear a flag pin on his lapel” the McCain campaign continues to see just what ridiculous shit will stick to the wall when thrown. The latest “vote for me because of this silly thing that has nothing to do with being president” idea is…
…wait for it…
…riding to election on the coat tales of a Bristol Palin wedding.
If you don’t think this is a joke, I submit that Bristol and Levi are registered at J.C. Penneys, the most expensive gift is $150 (an air hockey table), and that not one, not two, but three items prominently sport American flags. It’s a joke all right. I just don’t know if it’s a joke by the Republicans or on them.
Now I have to give the GOP credit. They have started two wars, instituted a surveillance program that Stalin would have been proud of, given the rest of the world the finger, and wrecked the economy. And yet, in spite of the fact that nothing (NOTHING) has really been done in the last eight years to advance the agenda of the religious fundamentalist “base” they still have their support. Why? Is it because nobody ever failed by underestimating the intelligence of the American people (to paraphrase Henry Ford). That seems to be the opinion in other countries. I’d hate to think so. Instead I believe it’s just that these people are so motivated by bigotry that their leadership’s disregard of their agenda and all the other failures are inconsequential. If it’s bad, it must be the “libruls” fault.
There, I said it.
The south has a long history of motivation by prejudice. Republicans found that out after Lincoln. Democrats after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s (prophetically saying at the time that the Dems had lost the South for a generation- he was a southern boy, he knew). While hatred for blacks has lessened in the south, it’s been replaced by hatred of gays, “elites”, and liberals. This isn’t a classic conservative difference of opinion on the role of government, its just finding someone to blame for everything you don’t like. Xenophobia is a strong force in human nature. And since the Republicans seem to have abandoned their traditional values (small government, free markets) all they have left are identity politics and fear.
No wonder so many of us that used to be Republicans are voting for Obama.
…wait for it…
…riding to election on the coat tales of a Bristol Palin wedding.
If you don’t think this is a joke, I submit that Bristol and Levi are registered at J.C. Penneys, the most expensive gift is $150 (an air hockey table), and that not one, not two, but three items prominently sport American flags. It’s a joke all right. I just don’t know if it’s a joke by the Republicans or on them.
Now I have to give the GOP credit. They have started two wars, instituted a surveillance program that Stalin would have been proud of, given the rest of the world the finger, and wrecked the economy. And yet, in spite of the fact that nothing (NOTHING) has really been done in the last eight years to advance the agenda of the religious fundamentalist “base” they still have their support. Why? Is it because nobody ever failed by underestimating the intelligence of the American people (to paraphrase Henry Ford). That seems to be the opinion in other countries. I’d hate to think so. Instead I believe it’s just that these people are so motivated by bigotry that their leadership’s disregard of their agenda and all the other failures are inconsequential. If it’s bad, it must be the “libruls” fault.
There, I said it.
The south has a long history of motivation by prejudice. Republicans found that out after Lincoln. Democrats after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s (prophetically saying at the time that the Dems had lost the South for a generation- he was a southern boy, he knew). While hatred for blacks has lessened in the south, it’s been replaced by hatred of gays, “elites”, and liberals. This isn’t a classic conservative difference of opinion on the role of government, its just finding someone to blame for everything you don’t like. Xenophobia is a strong force in human nature. And since the Republicans seem to have abandoned their traditional values (small government, free markets) all they have left are identity politics and fear.
No wonder so many of us that used to be Republicans are voting for Obama.
Friday, September 19, 2008
SCIENCE- Paul Dirac and the Big Number Theory
So what did Dirac do that was so all fired great? Some mundane stuff like predicting the first antimatter particle. (Though he didn’t think of it as a particle, he called it a “hole in the Dirac Sea”. Didn’t like poetry my ass.) But the thing I’ve always thought was the coolest thing Dirac ever came up with is called the BIG NUMBER HYPOTHESIS.
Dirac was a born mathematician. In fact he once said that “getting beauty in one's equations” was the path to progress. Often he found himself playing with numbers and equations for the simple joy of it; the way a gifted pianist might sit and noodle at the keys. And just like that pianist might stumble onto a classic melody, Dirac stumbled onto one of the great mysteries of the universe. A mystery that is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the universe is a constructed thing.
In other words- evidence of God.
He realized that the ratio of the electromagnetic force and gravitational force between a proton and an electron was on the order of 10 to the 40th power. That’s a 10 with 40 zeros after it. A big number. Human beings have a hard time comprehending large numbers so we look for things to compare them to in order to get a sense of scale. What do you compare such a number to in a person’s experience? It’s a big number, so how about all the grains of sand on the beach? Problem is that it wouldn’t even be close. All the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world? That’s about 7.5 x (10)18th grains of sand.
http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html
which is still only (10)-21st of Dirac’s number.
So all the sand on all the beaches on the entire earth is such a pitifully small number in comparison that it can’t help us. What else might he compare it to?
How about the ratio of an electron to the radius of the Universe? That’s got to be a pretty big number. The calculated radius of an electron is (10)-15th and the radius of the universe is about 10)23rd resulting in a final ratio of (10)40th.
Wait. That’s a really good comparison. In fact it’s within the same order of magnitude. It’s unusual to find anything that matches up that closely when dealing with numbers of this size.
So, The relationship between the interactions of protons and electrons is about the same as the relationship between the size single electron and the size of the universe. Interesting.
What else might be a number that big? We’ve compared two of the four basic forces of the universe and we’ve compared a unit of distance. So, what about time? The universe has given us a fancy stopwatch in the form of the speed of light so let’s compare the length of time it takes a photon to travel the length of the radius of that electron we measured earlier and the length of time that the universe has existed since the big bang.
And guess what. That turns out to be about 10)40 as well!
Things were starting to get really weird.
What about a comparison of the mass of a proton to the mass of the universe? Well that doesn’t wind up being on order of magnitude of 10)40 instead it winds up being roughly the square of 10)40. That’s a little odd too. How about the number of elementary charged particles in the universe. That also winds up being about 10)80, the square of the number that kept cropping up.
By now Dirac was getting pretty excited. As he started comparing the fundamental constants of the universe the number 10)40 just kept cropping up. I’m sure he was beginning to feel a little like Jim Carry in the movie THE NUMBER 23. He figured that anything with this close a correlation must be important. But the connections were so odd. Why would the age of the universe and the size of a proton be related? Dirac continued to fool around and eventually figured out that all this could be the result if the Universal Gravitational Constant varied with the age of the universe. So he immediately set out to do what physicists do when they hit upon a new idea. He built a universe around it.
In 1937 Dirac published his paper on the Large Number Hypothesis and the possible Cosmology it implied. The problem was that his cosmology didn’t seem to support the big bang and for the next 20 years big bang was to become all the rage in cosmology. So most physicists said yes, that’s interesting, but it’s just a coincidence. Scientific numerology, it was called.
But the story didn’t end there.
Dirac was a born mathematician. In fact he once said that “getting beauty in one's equations” was the path to progress. Often he found himself playing with numbers and equations for the simple joy of it; the way a gifted pianist might sit and noodle at the keys. And just like that pianist might stumble onto a classic melody, Dirac stumbled onto one of the great mysteries of the universe. A mystery that is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the universe is a constructed thing.
In other words- evidence of God.
He realized that the ratio of the electromagnetic force and gravitational force between a proton and an electron was on the order of 10 to the 40th power. That’s a 10 with 40 zeros after it. A big number. Human beings have a hard time comprehending large numbers so we look for things to compare them to in order to get a sense of scale. What do you compare such a number to in a person’s experience? It’s a big number, so how about all the grains of sand on the beach? Problem is that it wouldn’t even be close. All the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world? That’s about 7.5 x (10)18th grains of sand.
http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html
which is still only (10)-21st of Dirac’s number.
So all the sand on all the beaches on the entire earth is such a pitifully small number in comparison that it can’t help us. What else might he compare it to?
How about the ratio of an electron to the radius of the Universe? That’s got to be a pretty big number. The calculated radius of an electron is (10)-15th and the radius of the universe is about 10)23rd resulting in a final ratio of (10)40th.
Wait. That’s a really good comparison. In fact it’s within the same order of magnitude. It’s unusual to find anything that matches up that closely when dealing with numbers of this size.
So, The relationship between the interactions of protons and electrons is about the same as the relationship between the size single electron and the size of the universe. Interesting.
What else might be a number that big? We’ve compared two of the four basic forces of the universe and we’ve compared a unit of distance. So, what about time? The universe has given us a fancy stopwatch in the form of the speed of light so let’s compare the length of time it takes a photon to travel the length of the radius of that electron we measured earlier and the length of time that the universe has existed since the big bang.
And guess what. That turns out to be about 10)40 as well!
Things were starting to get really weird.
What about a comparison of the mass of a proton to the mass of the universe? Well that doesn’t wind up being on order of magnitude of 10)40 instead it winds up being roughly the square of 10)40. That’s a little odd too. How about the number of elementary charged particles in the universe. That also winds up being about 10)80, the square of the number that kept cropping up.
By now Dirac was getting pretty excited. As he started comparing the fundamental constants of the universe the number 10)40 just kept cropping up. I’m sure he was beginning to feel a little like Jim Carry in the movie THE NUMBER 23. He figured that anything with this close a correlation must be important. But the connections were so odd. Why would the age of the universe and the size of a proton be related? Dirac continued to fool around and eventually figured out that all this could be the result if the Universal Gravitational Constant varied with the age of the universe. So he immediately set out to do what physicists do when they hit upon a new idea. He built a universe around it.
In 1937 Dirac published his paper on the Large Number Hypothesis and the possible Cosmology it implied. The problem was that his cosmology didn’t seem to support the big bang and for the next 20 years big bang was to become all the rage in cosmology. So most physicists said yes, that’s interesting, but it’s just a coincidence. Scientific numerology, it was called.
But the story didn’t end there.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
SCIENCE- Paul Dirac and the Big Bang Theory
I occasionally catch an episode of The Big Bang Theory on television. (I've loved Chuck Lorre since Cybil.) It’s a little broad for my tastes but I respect the fact that they seem to go out of their way to get both the geek references and the pseudo-scientific double talk in the ballpark of plausibility. But I wonder sometimes if the biggest joke in the series is intentional or not.
You see, I’m convinced that the tall skinny geek is modeled on 20th century physicist Paul Dirac. (I confess that I don’t watch the thing enough to know the names of the two main characters. For the purposes of this post I will refer to them as the tall skinny geek and the whiny Roseanne alumnus.) Even in the time of Einstein and Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac stood out as an intellect (he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize with Schrödinger) and also somewhat of a character. He was tall and slight, considered extremely shy and a little socially awkward. Someone once joked that 90% of his vocabulary was “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know”. He once introduced his new bride to a friend by saying “This is [Hungarian physicist Eugene] Wigner’s sister, who is now my wife.”
At another time he was talking to a colleague (either Rudolf Peierls or Peter Kapitza, depending on who’s telling the story) who’s wife was in the room knitting. After watching her for a while he tells her that “There is a topologically inequivalent way of doing what you are doing.” Of course she asks him what he’s talking about and he shows her an alternate knitting stitch. The woman then informs him that what he’s doing is called purling.
Replying to a student who had told him “I don’t understand the second equation.” He once said “That is a statement, not a question.”
Dirac kidded Robert Oppenheimer about his love of poetry. He once said, "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."
But there are two Dirac stories that make me sure that the tall skinny geek on The Big Bang Theory is based on the erstwhile physicist. The first is when someone making small talk with him at a banquet mentioned that the weather was blustery. Dirac got up and left the dinner table only to return in a few minutes to say that, yes, he had checked and it was indeed windy outside.
The second story could have come straight from the show itself. Dirac once postulated that there must be a optimal distance from which to view a woman’s face. Not so close that minor wrinkles and blemishes are too apparent or that the face is distorted but not so far away that one bit of the important detail is lost. After explaining his theory at a party once, another physicist asked him how close he had ever BEEN to a girl.
Holding his hands a couple of feet apart he said, “About this close.”
Maybe I’m just projecting Dirac onto the tall skinny geek. I don’t think the whiny Roseanne alumnus is actually a caricature of Einstein (though the hair is suspicious). It’s not likely that the creators of the Big Bang sitcom purposefully styled the character on an actual person. But the parallels are there. Even down to the character’s inherent sweetness. Niels Bohr said that of all the people in physics, Dirac had the purest soul.
You see, I’m convinced that the tall skinny geek is modeled on 20th century physicist Paul Dirac. (I confess that I don’t watch the thing enough to know the names of the two main characters. For the purposes of this post I will refer to them as the tall skinny geek and the whiny Roseanne alumnus.) Even in the time of Einstein and Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac stood out as an intellect (he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize with Schrödinger) and also somewhat of a character. He was tall and slight, considered extremely shy and a little socially awkward. Someone once joked that 90% of his vocabulary was “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know”. He once introduced his new bride to a friend by saying “This is [Hungarian physicist Eugene] Wigner’s sister, who is now my wife.”
At another time he was talking to a colleague (either Rudolf Peierls or Peter Kapitza, depending on who’s telling the story) who’s wife was in the room knitting. After watching her for a while he tells her that “There is a topologically inequivalent way of doing what you are doing.” Of course she asks him what he’s talking about and he shows her an alternate knitting stitch. The woman then informs him that what he’s doing is called purling.
Replying to a student who had told him “I don’t understand the second equation.” He once said “That is a statement, not a question.”
Dirac kidded Robert Oppenheimer about his love of poetry. He once said, "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."
But there are two Dirac stories that make me sure that the tall skinny geek on The Big Bang Theory is based on the erstwhile physicist. The first is when someone making small talk with him at a banquet mentioned that the weather was blustery. Dirac got up and left the dinner table only to return in a few minutes to say that, yes, he had checked and it was indeed windy outside.
The second story could have come straight from the show itself. Dirac once postulated that there must be a optimal distance from which to view a woman’s face. Not so close that minor wrinkles and blemishes are too apparent or that the face is distorted but not so far away that one bit of the important detail is lost. After explaining his theory at a party once, another physicist asked him how close he had ever BEEN to a girl.
Holding his hands a couple of feet apart he said, “About this close.”
Maybe I’m just projecting Dirac onto the tall skinny geek. I don’t think the whiny Roseanne alumnus is actually a caricature of Einstein (though the hair is suspicious). It’s not likely that the creators of the Big Bang sitcom purposefully styled the character on an actual person. But the parallels are there. Even down to the character’s inherent sweetness. Niels Bohr said that of all the people in physics, Dirac had the purest soul.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
POLITICS- Include Me Out
...of the incessant BS of the campaigns.
You notice I don’t write much about politics even though it’s something that I think is important. What is there to say when most of the dialog is like listening to a couple of four-year-olds argue. For instance, this morning the news is about how Barrack Obama used the phrase “you can put lipstick on a pig but that doesn’t make it anything but a pig.” He wasn’t referring to Gov. Palin but the Republicans were quick to say that it was sexist. Because of the joke she told at the convention about hockey moms and pitbulls (lipstick apparently makes the difference, and the legendary scarcity of AK females would imply that it’s funny because it’s true). I’m so sick of this crap. Mommy, he’s talking about me! I don’t like it! He’s being mean to me!
I’ve seen this happen on the playground a few times so let me explain it to you. Imagine that you are seven years old again. There are two boys at the edge of the parking lot having an argument that might become a fight. You know the types. One boy is a lout, a bully. He’s in these situations frequently but somehow they usually don’t seem to come to blows. But he calls a lot of kids out. The other boy is a slightly nerdy boy who “started” all this by saying something the brute didn’t like. It’s usually a different lout and nerd each time, picked seemingly at random from their subsets of the school’s general population. (Funny that I don’t remember many fights where both contestants were from the same group. I guess louts don’t fight louts and nerds don’t fight other nerds.) Anyway, the two are squaring off. There’s a lot of talking. Insults are thrown, there’s some speculation about family customs and heritage. This is the boring part of the fight. The subjects are varied, true. I remember one fight was over whether the British had ever captured the White House, with the lout taking the side of America. Another was sparked when some kid correctly answered about things falling at the same rate regardless of weight. That particular lout fancied himself brainy so there had to be a confrontation. Anyway, the subject was always something different but the argument was always the same. The nerd would start out thinking he could set the guy straight with facts and figures. The lout would grow frustrated that the nerd didn’t realize he was there to grovel, not make the same mistake a second time. This is phase called “one boy is afraid to fight and the other is glad of it” as we used to say. At this point it is the crowds job to try to help by shouting encouragement to one or the other in the hope that he will have an irrational surge in confidence and throw the first punch. Somebody would get called a fag and depending on how secure the person on the receiving end of that bon mot was in his sexuality, an actual fight would sometimes break out. Eventually someone in authority would arrive to break up the fight. If this happens before anybody gets hit, then the audience disperses to decide who was the bigger coward.
So that’s the campaign season in a nutshell. It rarely comes to blows but other than that…
And that’s why I don’t write about politics unless I’m addressing some purely wrong idea. And even then, the campaign brings it into sharp relief that most people aren’t listening and a whole lot of people are just rooting for their side to throw a punch. Doesn’t matter who’s right.
You notice I don’t write much about politics even though it’s something that I think is important. What is there to say when most of the dialog is like listening to a couple of four-year-olds argue. For instance, this morning the news is about how Barrack Obama used the phrase “you can put lipstick on a pig but that doesn’t make it anything but a pig.” He wasn’t referring to Gov. Palin but the Republicans were quick to say that it was sexist. Because of the joke she told at the convention about hockey moms and pitbulls (lipstick apparently makes the difference, and the legendary scarcity of AK females would imply that it’s funny because it’s true). I’m so sick of this crap. Mommy, he’s talking about me! I don’t like it! He’s being mean to me!
I’ve seen this happen on the playground a few times so let me explain it to you. Imagine that you are seven years old again. There are two boys at the edge of the parking lot having an argument that might become a fight. You know the types. One boy is a lout, a bully. He’s in these situations frequently but somehow they usually don’t seem to come to blows. But he calls a lot of kids out. The other boy is a slightly nerdy boy who “started” all this by saying something the brute didn’t like. It’s usually a different lout and nerd each time, picked seemingly at random from their subsets of the school’s general population. (Funny that I don’t remember many fights where both contestants were from the same group. I guess louts don’t fight louts and nerds don’t fight other nerds.) Anyway, the two are squaring off. There’s a lot of talking. Insults are thrown, there’s some speculation about family customs and heritage. This is the boring part of the fight. The subjects are varied, true. I remember one fight was over whether the British had ever captured the White House, with the lout taking the side of America. Another was sparked when some kid correctly answered about things falling at the same rate regardless of weight. That particular lout fancied himself brainy so there had to be a confrontation. Anyway, the subject was always something different but the argument was always the same. The nerd would start out thinking he could set the guy straight with facts and figures. The lout would grow frustrated that the nerd didn’t realize he was there to grovel, not make the same mistake a second time. This is phase called “one boy is afraid to fight and the other is glad of it” as we used to say. At this point it is the crowds job to try to help by shouting encouragement to one or the other in the hope that he will have an irrational surge in confidence and throw the first punch. Somebody would get called a fag and depending on how secure the person on the receiving end of that bon mot was in his sexuality, an actual fight would sometimes break out. Eventually someone in authority would arrive to break up the fight. If this happens before anybody gets hit, then the audience disperses to decide who was the bigger coward.
So that’s the campaign season in a nutshell. It rarely comes to blows but other than that…
And that’s why I don’t write about politics unless I’m addressing some purely wrong idea. And even then, the campaign brings it into sharp relief that most people aren’t listening and a whole lot of people are just rooting for their side to throw a punch. Doesn’t matter who’s right.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
abbreviated post this morning because I’m in away from home.
Cool tech thingie- an ink-jet printer for concrete buildings.
An article at the NEW YORK TIMES website where Peter Leeson (in their Freakanomics column, and if you haven’t read the book go to Amazon or your local library and do so right now) realizes that UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings statistically occur in the same states. (bonus surprise, none of them is below the Mason-Dixon line). This either means that (a) UFOs are actually looking for bigfoot, (b) wookies are piloting UFOs, or (c) this should be a three dimensional (or three-dementia-onal) graph where the third axis is alcohol consumption.
In a UFO thread on FARK I was the only person to get a song lyric challenge.
And yet more astronauts are saying that the government has been covering up UFO contact. (And shame on Discovery.com for not having a dateline on the story.)
Cool tech thingie- an ink-jet printer for concrete buildings.
An article at the NEW YORK TIMES website where Peter Leeson (in their Freakanomics column, and if you haven’t read the book go to Amazon or your local library and do so right now) realizes that UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings statistically occur in the same states. (bonus surprise, none of them is below the Mason-Dixon line). This either means that (a) UFOs are actually looking for bigfoot, (b) wookies are piloting UFOs, or (c) this should be a three dimensional (or three-dementia-onal) graph where the third axis is alcohol consumption.
In a UFO thread on FARK I was the only person to get a song lyric challenge.
And yet more astronauts are saying that the government has been covering up UFO contact. (And shame on Discovery.com for not having a dateline on the story.)
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
POLITICS- The Answer to Hurricanes is More Offshore Drilling
This morning, in the wake of Gustav hitting the LA coast, President Bush is calling for increased offshore drilling.
Do I have to even point out why this doesn’t make sense?
Seems that you can sum up the Bush presidency in two ways. The story of a guy born on third base who thinks he hit a triple. And “give a kid a hammer and everything becomes a nail”.
Do I have to even point out why this doesn’t make sense?
Seems that you can sum up the Bush presidency in two ways. The story of a guy born on third base who thinks he hit a triple. And “give a kid a hammer and everything becomes a nail”.
Monday, September 1, 2008
POLITICS- U.S. attack on Iran?
Hope it’s not true. But as Lily Tomlin used to joke, “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.”
Any why? In case you think its because they are some sort of threat to us…
Any why? In case you think its because they are some sort of threat to us…
Sunday, August 31, 2008
RELIGION- Mork calling Orson Scott Card
I’ve been a fan of Orson Scott Card since 1980. That year he was the keynote speaker at a dinner hosted by the company I was working for at the time. I’ve probably given out a dozen copies of his most famous work, ENDER’S GAME, to friends who hadn’t read it and I own probably two dozen of his works- including a cherished 20 year old cassette tape of a speech he did called the Secular Humanist Revival Meeting, railing against the religious right intruding into government.
Which is why I’m even more surprised that the gay marriage issue has caused him to decide to be the latest poster child for the idea that no one is so smart that they don’t have some stupid ideas.
His latest article in The Mormon Times makes it look like he’s been saving up his stupid over the last few decades in order to have a giant stupidgasm. Right out of the shoot he says something dumb even though I’m certain he knows better.
“The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to "gay marriage," is that it marks the end of democracy in America.
“These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.”
Now I’m sure that Mr. Card realizes that (a) equality for all people is guaranteed in the constitution of both these states and also our country and (b) democratic process has nothing to do with it. This idea is exactly what was used to justify slavery for so many years- most people think it’s fine. And, just as it’s ironic that blacks are overwhelmingly against equal rights for homosexuals, it’s even more ironic that a Mormon would think that marriage mores should be decided by referendum. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the Mormon church’s own history of bucking the majority’s concept of marriage. It would be easy to be snarky and say that it was pretty convenient that when Utah wanted statehood God changed his mind about the whole plural marriage thing, but truthfully I think it was sort of a black spot in the history of the US that the Mormons were run out of the country for it in the first place. In a country founded on both personal and religious freedom, that this was a condition for statehood is ridiculous. The government simply has no place in decisions of marriage. Period. For a state to say who you are allowed to marry based on sex (or color as many states did) is an affront to the very principles on which the nation was founded.
“it is absurd to claim that these constitutions require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past 15 years… It is such an obvious overreach by judges…”
No it’s not and no, it’s not. The role of a judge is to provide a check on legislation that is unconstitutional. And the historical argument is bollocks. You could use the same point to defend any practice which is historical and yet abhorrent. Again, slavery and plural marriage are the immediate precedents that come to mind. To say that freedoms can’t be expanded because they were prohibited before is to say that no progress should ever be made in human society. Democracy was a radical idea with scant historical backing in 1776.
“At first, it was only early abortions; within a few years, though, any abortion up to the killing of a viable baby in mid-birth was made legal.”
This is just wrong and I think Mr. Card knows it. But wait, it gets better.
“Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show "gay marriages" as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory -- and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?”
Hopefully sooner than it took for schools to stop reinforcing racial stereotypes in textbooks.
“A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as "mentally ill"?”
I would think that Mr. Card would be more worried that the term misogyny would become a diagnosis, considering his church’s teachings about women. People in glass temples shouldn’t throw stones.
“When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the '70s and '80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.
“It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.”
Those uppity gays, give ‘em an inch and they’ll start demanding to be treated like everybody else.
“Here's the irony: There is no branch of government with the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is older than government. Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue.
“The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on.”
Here’s the irony: that’s all the gay marriage thing is trying to do. Being gay is older than government too, BTW. its history is also universal. And oddly for those who think it’s a societal thing, it seems to be spread pretty evenly in all cultures. As to the idea that it’s more prevalent in more permissive societies, I have some Muslim and Christian friends who would disagree. Repression of human behavior seems to inspire more hypocrisy than it does conformity. (Insert the name of the loudmouthed preacher of your choice caught, literally, with his pants down in the last few years.)
“If a court declared that from now on, "blind" and "sighted" would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?
“No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman.
“This is a permanent fact of nature.”
STRAW MAN alert. No one is trying to make a gay marriage the same as a heterosexual one. They are just trying to deal with those pesky legal issues that were mentioned as the reason for government to be involved in this stuff to start with. And don’t forget that there will always be and always has been homosexuality. It also is a “fact of nature”.
“That a few individuals suffer from tragic genetic mixups does not affect the differences between genetically distinct males and females.”
So why are you so upset? I didn’t quote all the “gays can’t have children because of legislation” nonsense because it’s another straw man and ignores all the hetero marriages which do not result in offspring. News flash Orson, if your wife is past child bearing age (which I assume she is) you are still married.
Oh the "tragic genetic mixups" thing is both a giveaway about the prejudice that is motivating this normally reasonable man, and a slap in the face of his infallible deity which would offend me if I thought He was real.
“We need the same public protection of marriage that we have of property.”
That the man could write this and not realize how medieval it sounds is evidence that he’s not thinking rationally. Still, for the next several paragraphs he goes on to admit that the problems with heterosexual marriage have nothing to do with granting the same rights to homosexuals. And that, in fact, the institution of marriage is already so devalued that many hetero couples don’t even bother anymore. This leads him to wonder why gays would want to bother. I call this the “shitting where you eat so no one will steal your food” defense.
“Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.”
Now we’re getting to it. Be patient.
“Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?”
So government sanction of marriage isn’t encouraging heterosexuals to get married, but it makes people gay. That’s a pretty neat trick. Look Orson, if your children are gay, they’re gay. Whether they can share insurance or not. 100% of gay people are born from heterosexual relationships. It’s genes, not judges causing it.
“How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”
And there it is. Did you catch that? Card is advocating open rebellion against the government if they allow people he doesn’t know to do something that’s none of his business. Or since we’ve been talking about historical precedent, if you let those people have equal rights then we’re gonna start a war.
This is why many Christians and non-believers alike fear the increasingly militant religious right. You don’t see homosexuals threatening armed rebellion in order to obtain the rights they feel they are entitled to. But for all the inane yapping the right does about how much they love this country, as soon as patriotism and dogma part company, here come the threats. I’ve got news for Orson Card. When a religious theocracy is established in America, it’s going to be right back to all that Carthage, Illinois nastiness for the Mormons. The other fundies don’t think much better of his religion than they do the gays.
(BTW, the reason Joseph Smith was taken from Nauvoo to Carthage for questioning isn’t mentioned in the link. It was because he had led a band to destroy the printing presses of a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor that was printing anti-plural marriage articles. The more things change…)
I know I’ve beat the slavery metaphor to death but those are exactly the terms in which I see the gay rights debate. I’m no more gay than I am black, but I’m able to realize that freedom for anyone must include freedom for everyone. And I can’t help but remember that in the Secular Humanist Revival Meeting speech Mr. Card made the point that, when they are in the minority, religious groups all cry for relief from oppression yet as soon as they garner power they set about to use it to force everyone else to follow their standards. Considering the persecution that the early Mormons suffered you would think that would be something they would remember. But unfortunately, they’ve never been on the vanguard of this equality thing. It wasn’t until 1979 (no not 1879- they were still fighting for their right to marry more than one woman back then) that his church decided to allow black men to hold the priesthood that every adult male in their church is expected to hold. And without it, blacks couldn’t be married in their temples. So, in spite of the irony that they didn’t grant equal marriage rights to blacks until 30 years ago, here they are trying to tell another group that “real” marriage is for them only.
Seems like another good time for one of those convenient revelations from God. Perhaps this time he’ll just say something like “Look, you guys have gotten this wrong twice now. I think you should check the connection.” Well, maybe in another hundred years.
God is far to fond of irony. Orson Scott Card, OTOH, is oblivious to it.
Which is why I’m even more surprised that the gay marriage issue has caused him to decide to be the latest poster child for the idea that no one is so smart that they don’t have some stupid ideas.
His latest article in The Mormon Times makes it look like he’s been saving up his stupid over the last few decades in order to have a giant stupidgasm. Right out of the shoot he says something dumb even though I’m certain he knows better.
“The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to "gay marriage," is that it marks the end of democracy in America.
“These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.”
Now I’m sure that Mr. Card realizes that (a) equality for all people is guaranteed in the constitution of both these states and also our country and (b) democratic process has nothing to do with it. This idea is exactly what was used to justify slavery for so many years- most people think it’s fine. And, just as it’s ironic that blacks are overwhelmingly against equal rights for homosexuals, it’s even more ironic that a Mormon would think that marriage mores should be decided by referendum. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the Mormon church’s own history of bucking the majority’s concept of marriage. It would be easy to be snarky and say that it was pretty convenient that when Utah wanted statehood God changed his mind about the whole plural marriage thing, but truthfully I think it was sort of a black spot in the history of the US that the Mormons were run out of the country for it in the first place. In a country founded on both personal and religious freedom, that this was a condition for statehood is ridiculous. The government simply has no place in decisions of marriage. Period. For a state to say who you are allowed to marry based on sex (or color as many states did) is an affront to the very principles on which the nation was founded.
“it is absurd to claim that these constitutions require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past 15 years… It is such an obvious overreach by judges…”
No it’s not and no, it’s not. The role of a judge is to provide a check on legislation that is unconstitutional. And the historical argument is bollocks. You could use the same point to defend any practice which is historical and yet abhorrent. Again, slavery and plural marriage are the immediate precedents that come to mind. To say that freedoms can’t be expanded because they were prohibited before is to say that no progress should ever be made in human society. Democracy was a radical idea with scant historical backing in 1776.
“At first, it was only early abortions; within a few years, though, any abortion up to the killing of a viable baby in mid-birth was made legal.”
This is just wrong and I think Mr. Card knows it. But wait, it gets better.
“Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show "gay marriages" as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory -- and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?”
Hopefully sooner than it took for schools to stop reinforcing racial stereotypes in textbooks.
“A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as "mentally ill"?”
I would think that Mr. Card would be more worried that the term misogyny would become a diagnosis, considering his church’s teachings about women. People in glass temples shouldn’t throw stones.
“When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the '70s and '80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.
“It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.”
Those uppity gays, give ‘em an inch and they’ll start demanding to be treated like everybody else.
“Here's the irony: There is no branch of government with the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is older than government. Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue.
“The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on.”
Here’s the irony: that’s all the gay marriage thing is trying to do. Being gay is older than government too, BTW. its history is also universal. And oddly for those who think it’s a societal thing, it seems to be spread pretty evenly in all cultures. As to the idea that it’s more prevalent in more permissive societies, I have some Muslim and Christian friends who would disagree. Repression of human behavior seems to inspire more hypocrisy than it does conformity. (Insert the name of the loudmouthed preacher of your choice caught, literally, with his pants down in the last few years.)
“If a court declared that from now on, "blind" and "sighted" would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?
“No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman.
“This is a permanent fact of nature.”
STRAW MAN alert. No one is trying to make a gay marriage the same as a heterosexual one. They are just trying to deal with those pesky legal issues that were mentioned as the reason for government to be involved in this stuff to start with. And don’t forget that there will always be and always has been homosexuality. It also is a “fact of nature”.
“That a few individuals suffer from tragic genetic mixups does not affect the differences between genetically distinct males and females.”
So why are you so upset? I didn’t quote all the “gays can’t have children because of legislation” nonsense because it’s another straw man and ignores all the hetero marriages which do not result in offspring. News flash Orson, if your wife is past child bearing age (which I assume she is) you are still married.
Oh the "tragic genetic mixups" thing is both a giveaway about the prejudice that is motivating this normally reasonable man, and a slap in the face of his infallible deity which would offend me if I thought He was real.
“We need the same public protection of marriage that we have of property.”
That the man could write this and not realize how medieval it sounds is evidence that he’s not thinking rationally. Still, for the next several paragraphs he goes on to admit that the problems with heterosexual marriage have nothing to do with granting the same rights to homosexuals. And that, in fact, the institution of marriage is already so devalued that many hetero couples don’t even bother anymore. This leads him to wonder why gays would want to bother. I call this the “shitting where you eat so no one will steal your food” defense.
“Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.”
Now we’re getting to it. Be patient.
“Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?”
So government sanction of marriage isn’t encouraging heterosexuals to get married, but it makes people gay. That’s a pretty neat trick. Look Orson, if your children are gay, they’re gay. Whether they can share insurance or not. 100% of gay people are born from heterosexual relationships. It’s genes, not judges causing it.
“How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”
And there it is. Did you catch that? Card is advocating open rebellion against the government if they allow people he doesn’t know to do something that’s none of his business. Or since we’ve been talking about historical precedent, if you let those people have equal rights then we’re gonna start a war.
This is why many Christians and non-believers alike fear the increasingly militant religious right. You don’t see homosexuals threatening armed rebellion in order to obtain the rights they feel they are entitled to. But for all the inane yapping the right does about how much they love this country, as soon as patriotism and dogma part company, here come the threats. I’ve got news for Orson Card. When a religious theocracy is established in America, it’s going to be right back to all that Carthage, Illinois nastiness for the Mormons. The other fundies don’t think much better of his religion than they do the gays.
(BTW, the reason Joseph Smith was taken from Nauvoo to Carthage for questioning isn’t mentioned in the link. It was because he had led a band to destroy the printing presses of a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor that was printing anti-plural marriage articles. The more things change…)
I know I’ve beat the slavery metaphor to death but those are exactly the terms in which I see the gay rights debate. I’m no more gay than I am black, but I’m able to realize that freedom for anyone must include freedom for everyone. And I can’t help but remember that in the Secular Humanist Revival Meeting speech Mr. Card made the point that, when they are in the minority, religious groups all cry for relief from oppression yet as soon as they garner power they set about to use it to force everyone else to follow their standards. Considering the persecution that the early Mormons suffered you would think that would be something they would remember. But unfortunately, they’ve never been on the vanguard of this equality thing. It wasn’t until 1979 (no not 1879- they were still fighting for their right to marry more than one woman back then) that his church decided to allow black men to hold the priesthood that every adult male in their church is expected to hold. And without it, blacks couldn’t be married in their temples. So, in spite of the irony that they didn’t grant equal marriage rights to blacks until 30 years ago, here they are trying to tell another group that “real” marriage is for them only.
Seems like another good time for one of those convenient revelations from God. Perhaps this time he’ll just say something like “Look, you guys have gotten this wrong twice now. I think you should check the connection.” Well, maybe in another hundred years.
God is far to fond of irony. Orson Scott Card, OTOH, is oblivious to it.
Friday, August 29, 2008
MOVIES- Smart People do the Craziest Things
SMART PEOPLE is a movie about how “smart” people are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life and are no better equipped to deal with them than anyone else. To give you an idea of how this works I’m going to break with tradition and give you a short synopsis.
Lawrence is a literature professor who is falling apart after the death of his wife. He is having trouble getting published, angling to become head of the English department, and universally thought of as a jerk. He can’t remember the names of his students (a silly notion considering that he seems to lecture to large groups in auditoriums) and he parks his car with wild disregard for convention. This last trait lands his car in the college impound lot where, after a nasty exchange with the lot attendant (an ex-student), he winds up giving himself a concussion trying to retrieve the manuscript of his unsold book from the car. Waking in the Emergency Room of the local hospital he finds himself being treated by an attractive (?) female doctor (yet another ex-student who harbors a crush after all these years). Calls are placed to his home, where his daughter is too busy studying for the SATs to rescue him and his wayward half-brother, who has landed in his crib because he has no where else to go, is too stoned to care. Eventually the daughter picks him up and the rest of the movie is comprised of the daughter’s hesitance to allow another woman into the house, her attraction to the half-brother (who seems to be the first person of either sex to have ever paid any attention to her), and her father’s troubled courtship of the ER physician who turned to medicine when he gave her research paper a “C”. As the plot thickens, the ER physician finds out that she is pregnant, the romance is off, the daughter is rebuffed by the half-brother, and Lawrence takes himself out of the running for Department Head after his book is “edited” into another self-help monstrosity fit only for the kind of people who find Oprah profound. In spite of all this everything winds up tied in a little bow during the credits when we find out that, well, everybody lived happily ever after. It is a Hollywood movie, after all, even if people talk about the poetry of William Carlos Williams while waiting for the happy ending.
(The poem the characters refer to is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It’s a wonderful poem and though it’s only 15 words in 5 stanzas, it paints an indelible mental picture. However the poem is a striking example of how biographical criticism (as literary criticism of any type should) illuminates the work of an author. It is said that Williams poem was written when he (a physician) found himself in a situation where all his medical skills could not save a young patient. As the patient lay dying he looked across the bed and out the window, seeing the image caught in the few words and lines of his famous poem. Given the background, the poem is a microcosm of the movies themes- no matter how smart you are there are going to be losses in your life and there is nothing you can do about it but savor the days you have left.)
That author and screenwriter Mark Poirier would pick this poem in just one example of the careful screenwriting that is this movie’s best attribute. The dialog is clever and several times laugh out loud funny. But from there things start to go downhill-.not terribly, just enough to keep this good movie from being a great one.
Unfortunately while the script is good it is also one of the film’s faults. The plot is overwrought, combining too many contrivances (see above synopsis) and threads, some of which are pay off so quickly that you are left wondering if you missed something at the end. But that’s excusable in a character driven drama that has almost no action. A minor annoyance that slightly harms the movie’s impact.
The cast is another minor disappointment. In spite of having actors whose work I generally enjoy, I found the performances a little too subdued. Again this may just be the nature of talking-head character drama, but no one seems to show any emotion. Thomas Haden Church plays a goof with undertones of intelligence well (he should, it’s becoming his trademark), and gives the best performance of the movie. Sarah Jessica Parker is adequate and says her lines clearly. Ellen Page acts like a smart-assed 16 year old Mr. Spock just like she did in Juno. The performances aren’t bad, just uninspired.
That is, except for Dennis Quaid. Whoever thought of casting Quaid as a literature professor who can’t get laid must have been thinking that it was a stretch that he could pull off. He tries. He pooches out his belly and draws up his shoulders in a sort of caricature of an academic. He limits the grinning that usually suffices for his acting repertoire. But he just doesn’t have the acting chops for the role. As a result the lead character in a movie called SMART PEOPLE never really gives you the impression that he’s very smart.
The other problem is the directing. I was also underwhelmed by the direction but again was willing to just chalk it up to the type of movie this is. However even with that in mind it’s still lackluster. First time director Noam Murro moves the camera little and frames a succession of medium shots, making the movie seem even more tedious than it should have been. Again, this isn’t a glaring problem, just another little difficulty that hurts the movie slightly.
My apathy for the director was increased during the supplemental audio track, which he shares with the writer. Frankly, he comes off as a jerk. I only listened to about the first 15 minutes of it (which is unusual for me) because not only did he not seem to have anything interesting to say, he also seemed determined to stop Mr. Poirier from saying anything interesting either. At one point when Poirier is about to tell a story about Sarah Jessica Parker’s driving skill, Murro actually cuts him off in mid sentence implying that it’s inappropriate! I guess he hasn’t listened to a disc commentary before. He sounded presumptuous and condescending and I was rooting for Poirier to remind him that he wasn’t directing anymore so he could relax.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie. It’s sometimes brave. There is a definite ‘Ewwww” factor here for just about everyone. Whether it’s incest, pedophilia, or the point where I had to look away from the screen- middle aged Dennis Quaid and Sarah Parker in bed. The movie tries to deal with the uncomfortable parts of life. There is one scene that stands out for me. When Ellen Page asks a party girl how it feels to be stupid. The scene alone is worth watching the movie. For both geeks and mundanes to understand each other.
In spite of all this, SMART PEOPLE is a good movie, still worth seeing because the dialogue is sharp and there are a couple of scenes that save it. But I’m left with the feeling that with a little script doctoring (lose the son’s plot line- it never goes anywhere), a different lead (William Hurt or James Woods come to mind), and better direction it could have been a lot better.
Lawrence is a literature professor who is falling apart after the death of his wife. He is having trouble getting published, angling to become head of the English department, and universally thought of as a jerk. He can’t remember the names of his students (a silly notion considering that he seems to lecture to large groups in auditoriums) and he parks his car with wild disregard for convention. This last trait lands his car in the college impound lot where, after a nasty exchange with the lot attendant (an ex-student), he winds up giving himself a concussion trying to retrieve the manuscript of his unsold book from the car. Waking in the Emergency Room of the local hospital he finds himself being treated by an attractive (?) female doctor (yet another ex-student who harbors a crush after all these years). Calls are placed to his home, where his daughter is too busy studying for the SATs to rescue him and his wayward half-brother, who has landed in his crib because he has no where else to go, is too stoned to care. Eventually the daughter picks him up and the rest of the movie is comprised of the daughter’s hesitance to allow another woman into the house, her attraction to the half-brother (who seems to be the first person of either sex to have ever paid any attention to her), and her father’s troubled courtship of the ER physician who turned to medicine when he gave her research paper a “C”. As the plot thickens, the ER physician finds out that she is pregnant, the romance is off, the daughter is rebuffed by the half-brother, and Lawrence takes himself out of the running for Department Head after his book is “edited” into another self-help monstrosity fit only for the kind of people who find Oprah profound. In spite of all this everything winds up tied in a little bow during the credits when we find out that, well, everybody lived happily ever after. It is a Hollywood movie, after all, even if people talk about the poetry of William Carlos Williams while waiting for the happy ending.
(The poem the characters refer to is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It’s a wonderful poem and though it’s only 15 words in 5 stanzas, it paints an indelible mental picture. However the poem is a striking example of how biographical criticism (as literary criticism of any type should) illuminates the work of an author. It is said that Williams poem was written when he (a physician) found himself in a situation where all his medical skills could not save a young patient. As the patient lay dying he looked across the bed and out the window, seeing the image caught in the few words and lines of his famous poem. Given the background, the poem is a microcosm of the movies themes- no matter how smart you are there are going to be losses in your life and there is nothing you can do about it but savor the days you have left.)
That author and screenwriter Mark Poirier would pick this poem in just one example of the careful screenwriting that is this movie’s best attribute. The dialog is clever and several times laugh out loud funny. But from there things start to go downhill-.not terribly, just enough to keep this good movie from being a great one.
Unfortunately while the script is good it is also one of the film’s faults. The plot is overwrought, combining too many contrivances (see above synopsis) and threads, some of which are pay off so quickly that you are left wondering if you missed something at the end. But that’s excusable in a character driven drama that has almost no action. A minor annoyance that slightly harms the movie’s impact.
The cast is another minor disappointment. In spite of having actors whose work I generally enjoy, I found the performances a little too subdued. Again this may just be the nature of talking-head character drama, but no one seems to show any emotion. Thomas Haden Church plays a goof with undertones of intelligence well (he should, it’s becoming his trademark), and gives the best performance of the movie. Sarah Jessica Parker is adequate and says her lines clearly. Ellen Page acts like a smart-assed 16 year old Mr. Spock just like she did in Juno. The performances aren’t bad, just uninspired.
That is, except for Dennis Quaid. Whoever thought of casting Quaid as a literature professor who can’t get laid must have been thinking that it was a stretch that he could pull off. He tries. He pooches out his belly and draws up his shoulders in a sort of caricature of an academic. He limits the grinning that usually suffices for his acting repertoire. But he just doesn’t have the acting chops for the role. As a result the lead character in a movie called SMART PEOPLE never really gives you the impression that he’s very smart.
The other problem is the directing. I was also underwhelmed by the direction but again was willing to just chalk it up to the type of movie this is. However even with that in mind it’s still lackluster. First time director Noam Murro moves the camera little and frames a succession of medium shots, making the movie seem even more tedious than it should have been. Again, this isn’t a glaring problem, just another little difficulty that hurts the movie slightly.
My apathy for the director was increased during the supplemental audio track, which he shares with the writer. Frankly, he comes off as a jerk. I only listened to about the first 15 minutes of it (which is unusual for me) because not only did he not seem to have anything interesting to say, he also seemed determined to stop Mr. Poirier from saying anything interesting either. At one point when Poirier is about to tell a story about Sarah Jessica Parker’s driving skill, Murro actually cuts him off in mid sentence implying that it’s inappropriate! I guess he hasn’t listened to a disc commentary before. He sounded presumptuous and condescending and I was rooting for Poirier to remind him that he wasn’t directing anymore so he could relax.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie. It’s sometimes brave. There is a definite ‘Ewwww” factor here for just about everyone. Whether it’s incest, pedophilia, or the point where I had to look away from the screen- middle aged Dennis Quaid and Sarah Parker in bed. The movie tries to deal with the uncomfortable parts of life. There is one scene that stands out for me. When Ellen Page asks a party girl how it feels to be stupid. The scene alone is worth watching the movie. For both geeks and mundanes to understand each other.
In spite of all this, SMART PEOPLE is a good movie, still worth seeing because the dialogue is sharp and there are a couple of scenes that save it. But I’m left with the feeling that with a little script doctoring (lose the son’s plot line- it never goes anywhere), a different lead (William Hurt or James Woods come to mind), and better direction it could have been a lot better.
POLITICS- Friday morning out picking VPs
Hot on the heels of the end of the DNC convention the talk is all about who McCain is going to pick for VP. Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, is the dark horse in the media this morning because there was a flight chartered from Anchorage to Ohio last night. If she is the pick it shows just how desperate the GOP is to grab the disgruntled Hillary voters. Palin has been governor for only two years, she has no foreign policy experience, and nobody in the country knows her. Frankly I think this is the media making a mountain out of a molehill. The idea of Biden mopping the floor with this relative neophyte during a debate has got to be more important to the GOP than reaching out to the women in the Democratic party who are acting like petulant children (and risk not only screwing up the election for the Democrats but giving ammunition to misogynists everywhere).
Frankly I’m going with the conventional wisdom that Romney is going to be the VP pick. It seems to follow the choices McCain’s campaign have made so far- misreading their own base. They seem to think that Romney will have both the experience in administration (so far 3 for 4 are legislators rather than executives) that is lacking so far and appeal to the religious fundamentalists who have become their core constituency. They don’t realize that the first doesn’t really matter and the second is just plain wrong. Thinking the fundamentalists identify with Mormonism would be the biggest mistake of the whole campaign so far.
But we still have several weeks for somebody to top it.
Tom Ridge- nobody really knows who he is so it would be a uphill climb but it isn't impossible. However, considering that it would be putting a person who has never been elected to office a heartbeat away from the presidency sort of eviscerates their no experience meme.
Leiberman- bwaww-ha-ha-ha. He may be butthole buddies with MickyKane but nobody trusted Benedict Arnold afterwards and nobody trusts Joe. It would be worth doing to see the riots at the RNC convention.
Frankly I’m going with the conventional wisdom that Romney is going to be the VP pick. It seems to follow the choices McCain’s campaign have made so far- misreading their own base. They seem to think that Romney will have both the experience in administration (so far 3 for 4 are legislators rather than executives) that is lacking so far and appeal to the religious fundamentalists who have become their core constituency. They don’t realize that the first doesn’t really matter and the second is just plain wrong. Thinking the fundamentalists identify with Mormonism would be the biggest mistake of the whole campaign so far.
But we still have several weeks for somebody to top it.
Tom Ridge- nobody really knows who he is so it would be a uphill climb but it isn't impossible. However, considering that it would be putting a person who has never been elected to office a heartbeat away from the presidency sort of eviscerates their no experience meme.
Leiberman- bwaww-ha-ha-ha. He may be butthole buddies with MickyKane but nobody trusted Benedict Arnold afterwards and nobody trusts Joe. It would be worth doing to see the riots at the RNC convention.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
POLITICS- The Democrats Are Having a Convention
For those of you who missed Obama’s entrance at the convention in Denver last night, here it is.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
HEALTH- STDs: Sexually Transmitted Demons
Back in the day the worst sexually transmitted disease you could get would only make you blind and insane. Then one developed that would give you a lingering death over many years. Now the newest threat to playas everywhere- DEMON POSSESSION!
Fr. Jeremy Davies warns us that we can catch demons from all sorts of other things. You can pick them up at your yoga class, or from your acupuncturist. You can even get them off the newspaper while you are reading your horoscope. Like cooties!
Actually the interesting thing about this is that because he’s a priest it’s taken seriously. What would otherwise be the raving of an old man suddenly becomes sage spiritual wisdom. Now THAT’S the power of religion for you.
Fr. Jeremy Davies warns us that we can catch demons from all sorts of other things. You can pick them up at your yoga class, or from your acupuncturist. You can even get them off the newspaper while you are reading your horoscope. Like cooties!
Actually the interesting thing about this is that because he’s a priest it’s taken seriously. What would otherwise be the raving of an old man suddenly becomes sage spiritual wisdom. Now THAT’S the power of religion for you.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
ADVERTISING- Burger King Strikes Again
When I made fun of Burger King’s last television marketing campaign several months ago I was just pointing out some possible alternate messages that the consumer could arguably take from the ads. Now sombody over at Idea-Sandbox has noticed another ad that once again has some strong less-than-overt communication.
Sort of like what Animal Farm might have been like had Orwell used flora rather than fauna to make his point.
Sort of like what Animal Farm might have been like had Orwell used flora rather than fauna to make his point.
WEIRD- The End is Near
I have a confession to make. While I consider myself a person devoted to reason and rational observation of the universe I don’t believe such a mindset precludes belief in a deity. I’ve been secretly harboring a dread that the fundamentalists may be on to something with all this “end of the world” talk.
I think this has to be a “sign”.
I think this has to be a “sign”.
Monday, July 21, 2008
MOVIES- Dark Knight
So, the question was going to be is DARK KNIGHT the best comic book movie ever made?
But it seems that the real question is whether or not it is the best MOVIE ever made. As I’m writing this, IMDB says it is with an average score of 9.5 vs. THE GODFATHER’s 9.1!
Well, it’s certainly the most ambitious comic book movie ever made. The movie runs two and a half hours and yet there are edits that seem jarring and transitions that are inelegant. Clearly Nolan was having a hard time putting all the movie he wanted into the film. The film never slows down. Many buildings blow up, there are a couple of car chases, numerous fights, daring rescues, and even a couple of shots of Batman standing on some architecturally improbable perch while brooding down at the city. But it’s not all action. No, far from it. In addition to the large supporting cast from the first movie, two major characters and a few minor ones are introduced, Gordon gets an enhanced role, there are several subplots all going at once and everyone gets a character arc. It’s been said that this isn’t just a good comic book movie, it’s a good movie PERIOD. That much is true. As a movie, it’s the best comic book movie ever made.
But that doesn’t really answer the question of whether it’s the best comic book movie.
Thematically, it’s certainly a very ambitious movie of any genre. Just as HEROES has introduced the mainstream television audience to some of the structural aspects of comic storytelling, here Nolan has introduced modern comic thematic sensibility to the mainstream movie audience. Thematically the film deals with chaos vs. order, the law of unintended consequences, the politics of affecting change even when it’s change for the better, and perhaps more than anything the idea that how you deal with adversity is the essence of your character. Ironically, heavy themes fit comic book movies. Since the characters are iconic and representational, they easily become avatars for larger ideas. Each character has had a disastrous event in his life, every character is deeply scarred, all have dealt with this in different ways.
The movie is about testing each the resolve of each way of dealing with tragedy. Each character is understood through his or her personal concept of morality and what rules they subscribe to. In this view, the Joker becomes both control group and experimenter, testing the rules of the other characters while apparently subscribing to no rules himself. Batman is his direct counterpart. There is no other character less likely to change or break his rules. Like the Joker, Batman’s rulebook has no respect for society’s mores but are instead completely internally derived. He cannot disobey them because they ARE him. Lucius Fox is almost as imperturbable, being willing to lose his job without regret for doing what he thinks is right. Gordon is a cop willing to break cop rules in order to avoid changing his ideas about right and wrong as well, but he has other concerns. Rachael thinks the legal system gets to make the rules for people. And Dent is the most labile both in that he is a believer in chance as a prime motivator and by being bi-polar himself, thus having two sets of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.
Where each of these people draw the line, and whether they will cross that line, is what this movie is all about. Nolan knows that this is the essence of drama; the human heart in conflict with itself. The movie is shot as a stylized police procedural. The motivations and conflicts take center stage. There just happens to be a guy in a flying rodent suit, and the ultimate scary clown running around in it.
The movie is long. And I mean LONG. I don’t think a comic book movie has ever gone over two hours before and this one’s a long-for-any-damn-movie two and a half hours. But even at that, it feels rushed in a couple areas. It also has an obvious second-act feel. (To paraphrase William Goldman, the second act is when you get your characters into as much trouble as you can.) You walk out of this movie with a feeling of melancholy the way you left THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The movie was great but the ending was kind of a downer. There are more conflicts at the end of this movie than there are at the beginning and while both of the major antagonists are in custody they very much alive. This implies a third movie that would actually continue the story of the Joker and Harvey Dent. Unfortunately, the death of Heath Ledger precludes our ever seeing what he would have done with another go at the role. I wonder if this will derail the storyline or if they will recast? It’s going to be a hard act to follow, but they recast Rachael so it’s not unprecedented.
What is there left to say about Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker? There’s been talk about a posthumous Oscar nomination, which is very possible, but I don’t think he’ll win. Johnny Depp should have one for the first PIRATES movie and didn’t for the same reason. Hollywood just isn’t ready to hand out best actor to such an unconventional part. But just like Depp in PIRATES, Ledger is mesmerizing. When he’s on the screen you can’t look at anyone else. In latter day comic style, he takes a character and re-imagines him as something recognizable but unique. Here the Joker is the ultimate mad scientist, if you consider psychology a science. To him, everyone is just a lab rat. So he devises little tests- blow up one or the other, save one or the other, unmask or be responsible for countless deaths. At one point he makes a deal with organized crime in Gotham for half their assets, then burns the money in front of them just to see their reaction. But Ledger doesn’t play it clinically at all, Instead his Joker is true lunacy. You never know exactly what he is going to be. One instant menacing and the next almost pitiable. Ledger’s performance alone would make the movie worth seeing- astonishingly nuanced and frightening. And like no other Heath Ledger performance I’ve ever seen before.
Purists may fault the lack of an origin story for the Joker but that’s actually the way the Joker was introduced in the comics. The origin story came later. In fact it’s a nice inside running joke that the Joker tells everybody a different story about how he got his scars. And you have to admit that when Nolan recons something he puts some thought into it. Likewise, it seems far more likely that the Joker’s cheeks were cut to simulate a permanent smile than that being dropped in acid would freeze your face that way. The only other real retcons are small, Gordon’s promotion and bringing Dent closer into the supporting cast.
And that supporting cast is as excellent as we would expect. In addition to Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, this movie adds Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent and Maggie Gyllenhall as the absent Kate Holmes as Rachael Dawes. Nothing to detract from the overall excellence here.
So is it the best movie or comic book movie or is it the reinvention of cinema? I don’t know if it’s any of those. But it is the most ambitious movie, comic or otherwise, of the year so far. And as soon as I post this I’m going to go see it again.
But it seems that the real question is whether or not it is the best MOVIE ever made. As I’m writing this, IMDB says it is with an average score of 9.5 vs. THE GODFATHER’s 9.1!
Well, it’s certainly the most ambitious comic book movie ever made. The movie runs two and a half hours and yet there are edits that seem jarring and transitions that are inelegant. Clearly Nolan was having a hard time putting all the movie he wanted into the film. The film never slows down. Many buildings blow up, there are a couple of car chases, numerous fights, daring rescues, and even a couple of shots of Batman standing on some architecturally improbable perch while brooding down at the city. But it’s not all action. No, far from it. In addition to the large supporting cast from the first movie, two major characters and a few minor ones are introduced, Gordon gets an enhanced role, there are several subplots all going at once and everyone gets a character arc. It’s been said that this isn’t just a good comic book movie, it’s a good movie PERIOD. That much is true. As a movie, it’s the best comic book movie ever made.
But that doesn’t really answer the question of whether it’s the best comic book movie.
Thematically, it’s certainly a very ambitious movie of any genre. Just as HEROES has introduced the mainstream television audience to some of the structural aspects of comic storytelling, here Nolan has introduced modern comic thematic sensibility to the mainstream movie audience. Thematically the film deals with chaos vs. order, the law of unintended consequences, the politics of affecting change even when it’s change for the better, and perhaps more than anything the idea that how you deal with adversity is the essence of your character. Ironically, heavy themes fit comic book movies. Since the characters are iconic and representational, they easily become avatars for larger ideas. Each character has had a disastrous event in his life, every character is deeply scarred, all have dealt with this in different ways.
The movie is about testing each the resolve of each way of dealing with tragedy. Each character is understood through his or her personal concept of morality and what rules they subscribe to. In this view, the Joker becomes both control group and experimenter, testing the rules of the other characters while apparently subscribing to no rules himself. Batman is his direct counterpart. There is no other character less likely to change or break his rules. Like the Joker, Batman’s rulebook has no respect for society’s mores but are instead completely internally derived. He cannot disobey them because they ARE him. Lucius Fox is almost as imperturbable, being willing to lose his job without regret for doing what he thinks is right. Gordon is a cop willing to break cop rules in order to avoid changing his ideas about right and wrong as well, but he has other concerns. Rachael thinks the legal system gets to make the rules for people. And Dent is the most labile both in that he is a believer in chance as a prime motivator and by being bi-polar himself, thus having two sets of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.
Where each of these people draw the line, and whether they will cross that line, is what this movie is all about. Nolan knows that this is the essence of drama; the human heart in conflict with itself. The movie is shot as a stylized police procedural. The motivations and conflicts take center stage. There just happens to be a guy in a flying rodent suit, and the ultimate scary clown running around in it.
The movie is long. And I mean LONG. I don’t think a comic book movie has ever gone over two hours before and this one’s a long-for-any-damn-movie two and a half hours. But even at that, it feels rushed in a couple areas. It also has an obvious second-act feel. (To paraphrase William Goldman, the second act is when you get your characters into as much trouble as you can.) You walk out of this movie with a feeling of melancholy the way you left THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The movie was great but the ending was kind of a downer. There are more conflicts at the end of this movie than there are at the beginning and while both of the major antagonists are in custody they very much alive. This implies a third movie that would actually continue the story of the Joker and Harvey Dent. Unfortunately, the death of Heath Ledger precludes our ever seeing what he would have done with another go at the role. I wonder if this will derail the storyline or if they will recast? It’s going to be a hard act to follow, but they recast Rachael so it’s not unprecedented.
What is there left to say about Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker? There’s been talk about a posthumous Oscar nomination, which is very possible, but I don’t think he’ll win. Johnny Depp should have one for the first PIRATES movie and didn’t for the same reason. Hollywood just isn’t ready to hand out best actor to such an unconventional part. But just like Depp in PIRATES, Ledger is mesmerizing. When he’s on the screen you can’t look at anyone else. In latter day comic style, he takes a character and re-imagines him as something recognizable but unique. Here the Joker is the ultimate mad scientist, if you consider psychology a science. To him, everyone is just a lab rat. So he devises little tests- blow up one or the other, save one or the other, unmask or be responsible for countless deaths. At one point he makes a deal with organized crime in Gotham for half their assets, then burns the money in front of them just to see their reaction. But Ledger doesn’t play it clinically at all, Instead his Joker is true lunacy. You never know exactly what he is going to be. One instant menacing and the next almost pitiable. Ledger’s performance alone would make the movie worth seeing- astonishingly nuanced and frightening. And like no other Heath Ledger performance I’ve ever seen before.
Purists may fault the lack of an origin story for the Joker but that’s actually the way the Joker was introduced in the comics. The origin story came later. In fact it’s a nice inside running joke that the Joker tells everybody a different story about how he got his scars. And you have to admit that when Nolan recons something he puts some thought into it. Likewise, it seems far more likely that the Joker’s cheeks were cut to simulate a permanent smile than that being dropped in acid would freeze your face that way. The only other real retcons are small, Gordon’s promotion and bringing Dent closer into the supporting cast.
And that supporting cast is as excellent as we would expect. In addition to Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, this movie adds Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent and Maggie Gyllenhall as the absent Kate Holmes as Rachael Dawes. Nothing to detract from the overall excellence here.
So is it the best movie or comic book movie or is it the reinvention of cinema? I don’t know if it’s any of those. But it is the most ambitious movie, comic or otherwise, of the year so far. And as soon as I post this I’m going to go see it again.
Friday, July 18, 2008
SCIENCE- Last weekend's Tanker Spill on I-40
Over the weekend we had a semi crash a couple dozen miles from here which closed down I-40 for over a day. I thought I’d put on my Mr. Science cap and explain what all the hub-bub was about.
The tanker was full of a substance called Titanium Tetracloride. This is a liquid metal that’s used in an intermediary step in making solid titanium metal of the type you find expensive cell phones, I-devices, and laptop computers (as well as aircraft parts and medical implants). Titanium has the highest strength to weight ratio of any metal and is corrosion resistant, even to hydrochloric acid (more about that later).
A little basic chemistry explains why this is so dangerous that TDOT had to close the interstate down for a day. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible because I find chemistry to be a little like algebra- we all had to do it once, but that was long ago and far away. Also because chemistry is one of those things that get real deep pretty fast.
Basically Titanium Tetrachloride or TiCl4 (pronounced “tickle” and a lot easier than spelling it out) is primarily used to make titanium metal and pigments. It used to be used for skywriting and smoke screens but isn’t much anymore for exactly the same reasons you don’t want a tanker of it busting all over your interstate. It’s odd because it’s a liquid metal at room temperature. This is a property of the way it to bonds to the chlorine to form a polymer. Vanadium Tetrachloride is similar. Both these molecules have the same arrangement of 4 (or sometimes 3) Chloride atoms around a metal center. Titanium has 2 electrons in it’s outer shell and Chloride has seven. Now I know what you’re thinking. The most stable arrangement is 8 electrons in the outer shell. This means Ti wants 6 and Cl wants one. Aren't chloride bonds supposed to be more like NaCl, where Sodium has 1 electron and Chlorine wants one? And the answer is yes. That’s what makes this stuff so dangerous. It can lose that chlorine very easily. When you want to make titanium metal out of this stuff you just pass some magnesium (Mg) through it and you wind up with magnesium dichloride and titanium. And Magnesium also has only 2 electrons in it’s outermost shell, so it’s hardly a great match. But give that chloride something that really suits it and it’s going to bug out in a hurry. Like hydrogen, for instance, which has one electron, making it a perfect match. And lets say that hydrogen is attached to some oxygen, which with 6 electrons in it’s outer ring is a perfect match to pair with the titanium and fill both their outer shells with 8 electrons.
Did I mention it was raining Saturday?
This is exactly what they do to make titanium oxide for dyes. In a factory that’s fine. But all at once, out in the open?
The worst case scenerio, I guess, is an explosion with hydrochloric acid clouds and acid rain. Titanium and Chlorine are so anxious to pair with Oxygen and Hydrogen that the result is a chemical bomb. After the explosion what you have is titanium oxide (harmless enough but bad for the enviroment if dumped on the ground in tanker loads), and HCl which is usually incorrectly referred to as hydrochloric acid. HCl has to combine with water to actually form hydrochloric acid. Of course if there were any water in the vicinity the HCl would rapidly dissolve in it.
Did I mention it was raining Saturday?
So there you have the reason, chemically, that having the interstate access from Nashville to Knoxville all day long on Saturday and evacuating 164 homes and businesses and thousands of people was a good idea. All because of some simple chemistry.
The tanker was full of a substance called Titanium Tetracloride. This is a liquid metal that’s used in an intermediary step in making solid titanium metal of the type you find expensive cell phones, I-devices, and laptop computers (as well as aircraft parts and medical implants). Titanium has the highest strength to weight ratio of any metal and is corrosion resistant, even to hydrochloric acid (more about that later).
A little basic chemistry explains why this is so dangerous that TDOT had to close the interstate down for a day. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible because I find chemistry to be a little like algebra- we all had to do it once, but that was long ago and far away. Also because chemistry is one of those things that get real deep pretty fast.
Basically Titanium Tetrachloride or TiCl4 (pronounced “tickle” and a lot easier than spelling it out) is primarily used to make titanium metal and pigments. It used to be used for skywriting and smoke screens but isn’t much anymore for exactly the same reasons you don’t want a tanker of it busting all over your interstate. It’s odd because it’s a liquid metal at room temperature. This is a property of the way it to bonds to the chlorine to form a polymer. Vanadium Tetrachloride is similar. Both these molecules have the same arrangement of 4 (or sometimes 3) Chloride atoms around a metal center. Titanium has 2 electrons in it’s outer shell and Chloride has seven. Now I know what you’re thinking. The most stable arrangement is 8 electrons in the outer shell. This means Ti wants 6 and Cl wants one. Aren't chloride bonds supposed to be more like NaCl, where Sodium has 1 electron and Chlorine wants one? And the answer is yes. That’s what makes this stuff so dangerous. It can lose that chlorine very easily. When you want to make titanium metal out of this stuff you just pass some magnesium (Mg) through it and you wind up with magnesium dichloride and titanium. And Magnesium also has only 2 electrons in it’s outermost shell, so it’s hardly a great match. But give that chloride something that really suits it and it’s going to bug out in a hurry. Like hydrogen, for instance, which has one electron, making it a perfect match. And lets say that hydrogen is attached to some oxygen, which with 6 electrons in it’s outer ring is a perfect match to pair with the titanium and fill both their outer shells with 8 electrons.
Did I mention it was raining Saturday?
This is exactly what they do to make titanium oxide for dyes. In a factory that’s fine. But all at once, out in the open?
The worst case scenerio, I guess, is an explosion with hydrochloric acid clouds and acid rain. Titanium and Chlorine are so anxious to pair with Oxygen and Hydrogen that the result is a chemical bomb. After the explosion what you have is titanium oxide (harmless enough but bad for the enviroment if dumped on the ground in tanker loads), and HCl which is usually incorrectly referred to as hydrochloric acid. HCl has to combine with water to actually form hydrochloric acid. Of course if there were any water in the vicinity the HCl would rapidly dissolve in it.
Did I mention it was raining Saturday?
So there you have the reason, chemically, that having the interstate access from Nashville to Knoxville all day long on Saturday and evacuating 164 homes and businesses and thousands of people was a good idea. All because of some simple chemistry.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
BOOKS- The Anthology at the End of the Universe
Douglas Noel Adams died about six months before the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. It would have been interesting to see what effect that event and subsequent related events would have had on his writing. But we’ll never know. As it is, we were left with the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, a couple of Dirk Gently novels and THE MEANING OF LIFF (a book explaining strange place names) as his legacy. These books are mostly rooted in the world and politics of the 1970s and 80s.
But, you say, those books are Science Fiction.
Or, you say, those books are comedic.
Or, you say, who is Douglas Adams? (In which case you should just stop reading right now, dust off your internet surfing eyeballs, put on some pants, get in your car, and go directly to your closest bookstore to buy everything ever written by the man. The COMPLETE HITCHIKER’S GUIDE is a recommended omnibus edition which includes all five novels, a short story starring Zaphod Beeblebrox, comes with a nice leather binding- no doubt made from the skin of sentient cows that feel there is no greater use their integument could be put to- and is the approximate size and heft of a concrete block.)
It’s strange that there isn’t more humorous science fiction. When at their best both disciplines hold a funhouse mirror up to reality to let you see aspects that are usually tucked away from superficial examination. But both disciplines are notoriously difficult, making the fusion of the two at least difficult squared. Attempts had been made prior to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and since. Asimov tried comedy in a SF setting a couple of times. Fredrick Poul and Cyril Kornbluth made it a staple. Neil Gaiman has tried it and Terry Prachett has made a career out of it. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who could find as much comedy, pathos, insight, prescience, commentary, or downright laugh out loud humor per page as Douglas Adams.
The BenBella SmartPop book THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE reminds us of this. It also reminds us just how much of a genius Doug Adams was. In one of the introductions to a Harlan Ellison anthology, Stephen King complements Harlan by saying that his voice is so strong that after reading Ellison’s work he has to be careful not to write like Harlan. The analogy he makes is that he’s like cottage cheese placed too close to something stronger in the fridge. The cottage cheese takes on the smell and taste of the strong odor it has come in contact with. It’s not that King is so malleable, it’s that Harlan’s voice is so strong that it overpowers the reader. I understand this since I have to be careful not to draw like Neal Adams after I’ve been looking at Neal’s work. His vision is so strong that it starts to superimpose itself on my own view of the world after being around it. Likewise Douglas Adams. Easily half the essays in the BenBella book SOUND like Doug Adams. I don’t even know if it’s conscious on the part of the writers. I hope it’s not, since if the writing is intended as pastiche it’s kind of lame. I think it’s actually that after re-reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide these writers are simply taking on the smell and taste of a stronger voice they have sat too close to for too long in the fridge.
Ironically, this happens more in the first half of the book and the more enjoyable essays are in the first half of the book. Right off the bat Mike Byrne nails the prescient yet completely relevant nature of much of Adams’ humor. He sights a passage by Adams where the evolution of radio controls develops from buttons and knobs to being controlled by mere gestures- requiring the listener to sit stone still while listening to avoid changing the program. Byrne is especially aware of this phenomenon because he is a PhD in psychology specializing in ergonomics. He immediately follows up this fictional situation with two real world scenarios that came years after it was written but that verify its veracity. First he mentions car stereos that have remote controls not because the face of the unit is out of reach but because the faceplate is so complex as to defy navigation in a moving car. Then he relates an experience with an early text editor that had such an arcane command structure that typing “edit” at certain points would delete the entire document (E-edit, D-delete, I-insert, T-the letter “t” which made the one level undo command superfluous). Anyone who lived through the transition to Windows 95, which moved the MINIMIZE, MAXIMIZE, and CLOSE to the upper right hand title bar of a window knows what I’m talking about. Adams had glommed onto a basic tenant of modern life a good dozen years early- that as systems become more complex, their usefulness seems to diminish. Any user of a piece of software through numerous generations is familiar with the idea that with each iteration new features are added yet old problems are never fixed. Byrne explains this as well.
Explanations abound in this book. Explanations of the significance of the number 42 (but none of why it is only 6x9 in base 13- an affront to basic number theory and bilateral symmetry at the same time), how quantum foam and loop-surfaces and semiotic (semi-odd? Ick!) explanations for towels can jibe in Einsteinian four-space, how Adams influenced computer science for two generations, why Wikipedia was an outgrowth of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, why you can read both the holy trinity and Zen Buddhism into the books, how everything you need to know you can learn from the trilogy (quintology?), why the human race is anything but “mostly harmless”, why it’s a bad idea for a woman to wear a transparent tee-shirt that says “Don’t Panic” on the front (mind you this was published before Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is little that mammals will panic over more than exposed mammary glands), why Adams’ writing is mired in an era that rejected 17 years of Labor party rule in Great Britain for the Margaret Thatcher/Ronny Raygun paradigm, and the most re-told joke in the whole volume:
“You know,” said Arthur, “It’s times like these, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t listen.”
THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE is one of the best of the BenBella SmartPop books in spite of the fact that it falls flat half way through. I’ve said before that the worth of these books is directly proportional to the worth of the subjects covered and here is the exception that proofs the rule. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a soaring pinnacle in humorous SF and a rarely equaled accomplishment in either genre separately. But even half a book dedicated to such a worthy tome is better than a whole book dedicated to a lesser accomplishment. This book stands at the top of the SmartPop heap with BATMAN UNAUTHORIZED so far.
But, you say, those books are Science Fiction.
Or, you say, those books are comedic.
Or, you say, who is Douglas Adams? (In which case you should just stop reading right now, dust off your internet surfing eyeballs, put on some pants, get in your car, and go directly to your closest bookstore to buy everything ever written by the man. The COMPLETE HITCHIKER’S GUIDE is a recommended omnibus edition which includes all five novels, a short story starring Zaphod Beeblebrox, comes with a nice leather binding- no doubt made from the skin of sentient cows that feel there is no greater use their integument could be put to- and is the approximate size and heft of a concrete block.)
It’s strange that there isn’t more humorous science fiction. When at their best both disciplines hold a funhouse mirror up to reality to let you see aspects that are usually tucked away from superficial examination. But both disciplines are notoriously difficult, making the fusion of the two at least difficult squared. Attempts had been made prior to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and since. Asimov tried comedy in a SF setting a couple of times. Fredrick Poul and Cyril Kornbluth made it a staple. Neil Gaiman has tried it and Terry Prachett has made a career out of it. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who could find as much comedy, pathos, insight, prescience, commentary, or downright laugh out loud humor per page as Douglas Adams.
The BenBella SmartPop book THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE reminds us of this. It also reminds us just how much of a genius Doug Adams was. In one of the introductions to a Harlan Ellison anthology, Stephen King complements Harlan by saying that his voice is so strong that after reading Ellison’s work he has to be careful not to write like Harlan. The analogy he makes is that he’s like cottage cheese placed too close to something stronger in the fridge. The cottage cheese takes on the smell and taste of the strong odor it has come in contact with. It’s not that King is so malleable, it’s that Harlan’s voice is so strong that it overpowers the reader. I understand this since I have to be careful not to draw like Neal Adams after I’ve been looking at Neal’s work. His vision is so strong that it starts to superimpose itself on my own view of the world after being around it. Likewise Douglas Adams. Easily half the essays in the BenBella book SOUND like Doug Adams. I don’t even know if it’s conscious on the part of the writers. I hope it’s not, since if the writing is intended as pastiche it’s kind of lame. I think it’s actually that after re-reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide these writers are simply taking on the smell and taste of a stronger voice they have sat too close to for too long in the fridge.
Ironically, this happens more in the first half of the book and the more enjoyable essays are in the first half of the book. Right off the bat Mike Byrne nails the prescient yet completely relevant nature of much of Adams’ humor. He sights a passage by Adams where the evolution of radio controls develops from buttons and knobs to being controlled by mere gestures- requiring the listener to sit stone still while listening to avoid changing the program. Byrne is especially aware of this phenomenon because he is a PhD in psychology specializing in ergonomics. He immediately follows up this fictional situation with two real world scenarios that came years after it was written but that verify its veracity. First he mentions car stereos that have remote controls not because the face of the unit is out of reach but because the faceplate is so complex as to defy navigation in a moving car. Then he relates an experience with an early text editor that had such an arcane command structure that typing “edit” at certain points would delete the entire document (E-edit, D-delete, I-insert, T-the letter “t” which made the one level undo command superfluous). Anyone who lived through the transition to Windows 95, which moved the MINIMIZE, MAXIMIZE, and CLOSE to the upper right hand title bar of a window knows what I’m talking about. Adams had glommed onto a basic tenant of modern life a good dozen years early- that as systems become more complex, their usefulness seems to diminish. Any user of a piece of software through numerous generations is familiar with the idea that with each iteration new features are added yet old problems are never fixed. Byrne explains this as well.
Explanations abound in this book. Explanations of the significance of the number 42 (but none of why it is only 6x9 in base 13- an affront to basic number theory and bilateral symmetry at the same time), how quantum foam and loop-surfaces and semiotic (semi-odd? Ick!) explanations for towels can jibe in Einsteinian four-space, how Adams influenced computer science for two generations, why Wikipedia was an outgrowth of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, why you can read both the holy trinity and Zen Buddhism into the books, how everything you need to know you can learn from the trilogy (quintology?), why the human race is anything but “mostly harmless”, why it’s a bad idea for a woman to wear a transparent tee-shirt that says “Don’t Panic” on the front (mind you this was published before Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is little that mammals will panic over more than exposed mammary glands), why Adams’ writing is mired in an era that rejected 17 years of Labor party rule in Great Britain for the Margaret Thatcher/Ronny Raygun paradigm, and the most re-told joke in the whole volume:
“You know,” said Arthur, “It’s times like these, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t listen.”
THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE is one of the best of the BenBella SmartPop books in spite of the fact that it falls flat half way through. I’ve said before that the worth of these books is directly proportional to the worth of the subjects covered and here is the exception that proofs the rule. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a soaring pinnacle in humorous SF and a rarely equaled accomplishment in either genre separately. But even half a book dedicated to such a worthy tome is better than a whole book dedicated to a lesser accomplishment. This book stands at the top of the SmartPop heap with BATMAN UNAUTHORIZED so far.
Monday, July 14, 2008
MOVIES- The Hurricane
THE HURRICANE (1999) has been playing on Universal’s High Definition channel. It’s an uplifting story about a man hounded by racism and unjustly framed for murders he didn’t commit, who bears his incarceration with dignity and eventually is given justice. Denzel Washington turns in one of the finest portrayals of his career as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a professional boxer who spent over twenty years in prison for murder. While the character is noble and charming, there is also a barely concealed froth of anger and bitterness, mercurial lability, and lethal danger. Washington also carries off the task of showing a man from his late teens to his 50s without difficulty (partly owning to a year of training prior to the role). The supporting cast do a fine job but this is Denzel’s movie every step of the way and the scenes without him seem like a framing device for the real drama that happens when he is on the screen. He was nominated for Best Actor for this role but lost to Kevin Spacey’s astounding performance in American Beauty.
In addition to Washington, the other hero of HURRICANE is the director, Norman Jewison. Jewison is that rare kind of Hollywood director who can do almost any type of material. Coppola bombed his attempts at a musical, Scorsese has only made one left handed attempt at comedy, Ivan Reitman found drama a bit of a stretch.* Yet Jewison has done successful movies in all these genres and several others. A partial list of his films gives you an idea: Other People’s Money, Moonstruck, The Russians are Coming The Russians are Coming, Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, And Justice for All, Agnes of God. Even the SF classic ROLLERBALL. HURRICANE isn’t really a departure for him, but just as Denzel Washington brought his best game, this is perhaps the finest job Jewison has ever done (he thought so). There are evocative scenes which rely purely on direction for their narrative force, such as the camera continually returning to the single naked light bulb in the hallway outside Carter’s cell in solitary or the numerous close ups on Washington’s eyes to allow us to read the actor’s emotion. Carter’s retreat into his internal dialogues to protect himself from the lack of human contact in solitary is plainly conveyed without any character ever having to explain it in blatant expositionary dialog. The fight scenes are brief but have a real veracity. In fact, Jewison is able to imbue the entire movie with a kind of verisimilitude that allows us to get involved with the story and the characters.
The writing is also fine, though short of excellent. Despite a little narrative jumble at the beginning, where the scenes jump between three time periods and places, the story is straightforward and the dialog is often witty. However, the script is also the biggest failing of the movie by far. As a rousing tale of a man who is dealt a bad hand by life and overcomes great hardship, it’s fine. As an actual biography of Rubin Carter, it’s full of terrible distortions and outright falsehoods. In their rush to canonize their title character, the writers reduce the tale from true drama to mere melodrama. In the movie, Carter escapes from his juvenile institution and joins the military. Years later he returns home as a veteran who has learned to box while in the service. He is wildly successful but has the World title stolen from him in a blatantly racist decision. He is arrested the night of the championship fight, at the top of his professional career, by a cop pursuing a personal vendetta against him. Never is the audience given any reason to doubt his innocence of the crime of which he was accused. He then spends 30 years behind bars, bending the prison to his will, before a group of advocates unearth evidence that proves the entire case against him was a frame-up.
The problem is that almost all of that is that it is outright lies. Carter escaped from Juvie, but was returned when he was dishonorably discharged from the military after four courts martial in his first 23 months. His loss to Joey Giordello for the title was not even considered to be close by most observers of the fight, let alone a racist robbery (Giordello won a suit for defamation against the filmmakers). And it happened over a year before the arrest. In the time between that title bout and the murders Carter had lost almost half of his fights was no longer considered a contender. The movie makes Carter’s innocence a given, but he was found with a shotgun and pistol in his trunk that matched the weapons used in the crime. The movie goes on to show that he was convicted twice but omits that he was released for four years prior to the second trial and that there were black jurists who voted for his conviction the second time. Or that several people who had testified for him in the first trial recanted their testimony and said that Carter had convinced them to lie. Or that Carter had failed a polygraph prior to the first trial and refused to retake the test prior to the second trial.
Roger Ebert was asked about the incongruity of making a biopic of a possible killer into THE HURRICANE. He reportedly replied that if you wanted to learn about a man’s life from a movie about him you would be just as well to ask his grandmother. Both sources are biased. This is nothing short of the kind of cop-out that allows Hollywood to go on making shitty movies by saying that they are Hollywood and don’t have to bother to get it right. It’s the same kind of arrogance that allows a producer to buy the rights to a classic like I, Robot and then use that title and the author’s name to guild the steaming pile of shit they produced rather than adapting the source material. But that’s just the movie industry’s disdain for the consumer and the fiction they bastardize. Here they are dealing with real people and real events and instead of doing something meaningful they make it into a children’s story.
The ambiguity of real life is lost. Never are the good guys allowed to be anything but good and noble, or the villains anything but evil racists. This has nothing to do with “adapting for the screen”. It’s easy to imagine that the movie would have been far better if the audience had been allowed to make their own judgments about the guilt of Ruben Carter. Denzel Washington tried to bring the ambiguity of the character into his portrayal but that was subverted by the writers attempt to make a simpleminded morality tale rather than an actual biography. Go ahead. Make that movie. But don’t use real people’s names and real events. Any biography, yes- even when it’s a movie, has a certain responsibility to be factual. Just because everything is for sale in Hollywood doesn’t mean that reality is a whore to be purchased and used however you want. Go ahead and see THE HURRICANE, enjoy Denzel’s masterful performance, revel in it’s life affirming message of justice, and then remember that it’s all bullshit and that the only way to be given a fair shake in this world (whether you are guilty or not) is to be a cause celeb of the people with money and power and to fit their agenda. That is the real lesson of THE HURRICANE.
*For those of you wondering. Coppola did ONE FROM THE HEART, Scorsese did THE KING OF COMEDY, and Reitman did LEGAL EAGLES. None of which set the box office or the critics aflame.
In addition to Washington, the other hero of HURRICANE is the director, Norman Jewison. Jewison is that rare kind of Hollywood director who can do almost any type of material. Coppola bombed his attempts at a musical, Scorsese has only made one left handed attempt at comedy, Ivan Reitman found drama a bit of a stretch.* Yet Jewison has done successful movies in all these genres and several others. A partial list of his films gives you an idea: Other People’s Money, Moonstruck, The Russians are Coming The Russians are Coming, Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, And Justice for All, Agnes of God. Even the SF classic ROLLERBALL. HURRICANE isn’t really a departure for him, but just as Denzel Washington brought his best game, this is perhaps the finest job Jewison has ever done (he thought so). There are evocative scenes which rely purely on direction for their narrative force, such as the camera continually returning to the single naked light bulb in the hallway outside Carter’s cell in solitary or the numerous close ups on Washington’s eyes to allow us to read the actor’s emotion. Carter’s retreat into his internal dialogues to protect himself from the lack of human contact in solitary is plainly conveyed without any character ever having to explain it in blatant expositionary dialog. The fight scenes are brief but have a real veracity. In fact, Jewison is able to imbue the entire movie with a kind of verisimilitude that allows us to get involved with the story and the characters.
The writing is also fine, though short of excellent. Despite a little narrative jumble at the beginning, where the scenes jump between three time periods and places, the story is straightforward and the dialog is often witty. However, the script is also the biggest failing of the movie by far. As a rousing tale of a man who is dealt a bad hand by life and overcomes great hardship, it’s fine. As an actual biography of Rubin Carter, it’s full of terrible distortions and outright falsehoods. In their rush to canonize their title character, the writers reduce the tale from true drama to mere melodrama. In the movie, Carter escapes from his juvenile institution and joins the military. Years later he returns home as a veteran who has learned to box while in the service. He is wildly successful but has the World title stolen from him in a blatantly racist decision. He is arrested the night of the championship fight, at the top of his professional career, by a cop pursuing a personal vendetta against him. Never is the audience given any reason to doubt his innocence of the crime of which he was accused. He then spends 30 years behind bars, bending the prison to his will, before a group of advocates unearth evidence that proves the entire case against him was a frame-up.
The problem is that almost all of that is that it is outright lies. Carter escaped from Juvie, but was returned when he was dishonorably discharged from the military after four courts martial in his first 23 months. His loss to Joey Giordello for the title was not even considered to be close by most observers of the fight, let alone a racist robbery (Giordello won a suit for defamation against the filmmakers). And it happened over a year before the arrest. In the time between that title bout and the murders Carter had lost almost half of his fights was no longer considered a contender. The movie makes Carter’s innocence a given, but he was found with a shotgun and pistol in his trunk that matched the weapons used in the crime. The movie goes on to show that he was convicted twice but omits that he was released for four years prior to the second trial and that there were black jurists who voted for his conviction the second time. Or that several people who had testified for him in the first trial recanted their testimony and said that Carter had convinced them to lie. Or that Carter had failed a polygraph prior to the first trial and refused to retake the test prior to the second trial.
Roger Ebert was asked about the incongruity of making a biopic of a possible killer into THE HURRICANE. He reportedly replied that if you wanted to learn about a man’s life from a movie about him you would be just as well to ask his grandmother. Both sources are biased. This is nothing short of the kind of cop-out that allows Hollywood to go on making shitty movies by saying that they are Hollywood and don’t have to bother to get it right. It’s the same kind of arrogance that allows a producer to buy the rights to a classic like I, Robot and then use that title and the author’s name to guild the steaming pile of shit they produced rather than adapting the source material. But that’s just the movie industry’s disdain for the consumer and the fiction they bastardize. Here they are dealing with real people and real events and instead of doing something meaningful they make it into a children’s story.
The ambiguity of real life is lost. Never are the good guys allowed to be anything but good and noble, or the villains anything but evil racists. This has nothing to do with “adapting for the screen”. It’s easy to imagine that the movie would have been far better if the audience had been allowed to make their own judgments about the guilt of Ruben Carter. Denzel Washington tried to bring the ambiguity of the character into his portrayal but that was subverted by the writers attempt to make a simpleminded morality tale rather than an actual biography. Go ahead. Make that movie. But don’t use real people’s names and real events. Any biography, yes- even when it’s a movie, has a certain responsibility to be factual. Just because everything is for sale in Hollywood doesn’t mean that reality is a whore to be purchased and used however you want. Go ahead and see THE HURRICANE, enjoy Denzel’s masterful performance, revel in it’s life affirming message of justice, and then remember that it’s all bullshit and that the only way to be given a fair shake in this world (whether you are guilty or not) is to be a cause celeb of the people with money and power and to fit their agenda. That is the real lesson of THE HURRICANE.
*For those of you wondering. Coppola did ONE FROM THE HEART, Scorsese did THE KING OF COMEDY, and Reitman did LEGAL EAGLES. None of which set the box office or the critics aflame.
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