Darwin Building

criticizing movies I haven't seen yet

2012-01-28T12:47:00.003-05:00

So, it's Oscar time. And the nominees are named, and I hate most of them. Even though I haven't seen them yet. After the debacle of "The King's Speech" getting Best Picture for a story about an extremely wealthy man who had his life handed to him on a plate, well, I was hoping for more this year.

Let's look at what's going on:

The Artist: apparently the favorite. The strikes against it are
a) it's black-and-white
b) it's a silent film
c) it's about Hollywood.

Because of (c), it's going to win. That's because Hollywood is self-absorbed.

The Descendants
Apparently this is some kind of film with George Clooney. Hollywood loves George Clooney. I think he's pretty good, but you don't have to give him a nomination every year. Apparently the film is about how hard it is for a man to be a parent. Yawn.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
I'm really looking forward to 9/11 replacing the Holocaust as the best option for Oscar bait. After all, it was uber-tragic. Not just regularly tragic.
Tom Hanks dies. Deal with it. At least they didn't kill his dog (Turner & Hooch).

The Help:
Apparently black domestic women in the South have lessons for all of us. I'll pop in reruns of Good Times first.

Hugo:
It's OK to not nominate every single freakin' Scorcese film! It's too late, Hollywood. You dropped the ball with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. I don't even know what this one is about.

Midnight in Paris:
aka 6 p.m. on the East Coast. Owen Wilson plays a screenwriter. Please, screenwriters, stop writing films about screenwriters!!! Nobody else cares! There are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and like 43 of them are screenwriters. Surely you people can do a little legwork and write stories about other people!

Moneyball:
Yay, Billy Beane turned a last place team into a playoff contender that never won a post-season series. Worse, Jonah Hill got an Oscar nomination. Jonah Hill? What's up with that?

The Tree of Life:
I feel obliged to favor this film because the title mentions the subject of phylogeny, which paid my rent for a few years. OTOH, I ultimately found phylogeny to be not exciting enough to stay in. I bet the film isn't even about phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms!! Or, if it is, they probably like Neighbor Joining, like all the drones in computational biology who use an inferior algorithm just because it was published first. Read a book!

War Horse:
See Hugo, above, and replace Scorcese with Spielberg.

And they couldn't find a tenth film? Here's a suggestion: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe include Inception again and make up for 2011!

Two more films from Best Actress:

Albert Nobbs. Um, Glenn Close still looks like Glenn Close. She's got to do more than get a haircut to look like a man. For one thing, she's only 5'4.5" tall. For a guy, that's midget-sized. And she has the facial structure of a women. The sad thing is that Glenn Close really deserves an Oscar for something. But I think I'd giggle a lot if I went to see this film.

Iron Lady. Could we please stop worshiping right-wingers? In the past decade, we've seen a Best Actor go to an English King and a Best Actress go to an English Queen. Enough already! We've had the revolution. And Margaret Thatcher was a terrible PM. If the UK hadn't been lucky enough to find oil in the North Sea, her austerity measures would have succeeded in destroying the economy completely.

Oh, but she beat up Argentina. Wow. Enough wars already. Yes, Meryl Streep should have about five more Oscars by now. But not for this one.

I'm off to see a black-and-white silent film because apparently I live in 1926 and that's all the cinema has.

Best comment yet about the Paterno cover-up of the Sandusky child rapes

2011-11-09T21:37:00.003-05:00

"Nuke it from space to be sure."

- commenter at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, presumably referring to the town of State College, PA

a new attitude towards liberal thought

2011-11-07T23:07:00.004-05:00

Just something I'm thinking about, looking at the nearly-defunct DCDL list.

These are dark days for liberal idealists. After enduring 8 years of incompetent warmongering conservatism, many hopes were raised when Barack Obama was elected. After all, Tea Partiers told us he was ultra-liberal. He promised to close Gitmo! Maybe he would enforce laws!

Well, that didn't really work out, did it? The party establishment has, by now, made it clear that they are far more interested in the desires of their wealthy donors than the desires of their rank-and-file. Liberals are repeatedly patronized and told that certain political strategies are "unrealistic," or that the US is a "center-right" nation, or that everybody loves conservatives. Meanwhile, not only are conservative policies driving the country into a ditch, they are wildly unpopular!

So, what's the solution? A "SUPER-committee" to ensure that odious policies that everybody hates are forced through Congress with little debate, and in a manner such that each party will be able to blame the other.

Seriously? This is the opposite of democracy.

Well, the US of A is in the midst of a creeping type of global class warfare, as the drumbeats of austerity economics beat on, flying in the face of their repeated failures internationally. Because - god forbid somebody be a Keynesian! God forbid somebody show some kind of tolerance for inflation!

Anyway, I was going to riff on the topic of the defeated liberals. Many liberals suffer from a delusion of living in an Enlightened State. By this I mean that they thing they have achieved some sort of Perfect Understanding of Human Nature and that all they need to do is Educate the Masses. Part of my inspiration here was from seeing the abandonment of DCDL, but part of it was from watching this:

MP@HB

(Yeah, Terry Gilliam is a wee bit un-PC there, isn't he.)

Anyway, if you approach liberal philosophy as an educational task to be conducted in earnest, you're probably going to burn out at a young age. The problem is that, a basic level, people suck. So trying to educate people to stop sucking so much is not something that's going to work.

And by "people suck" I mean, namely, that trying to convince the population of the virtues of an altruistic pursuit is hopeless. This kind of goal is a bad way to sell liberalism, as conservatives will smirk, and patronize, and lecture you about how young people with big hearts are liberals while wiser, older people become conservatives.

Liberal institutions and thought exist not because they satisfy some masturbatory need for people to feel good about themselves. They exist because they have fitness in an evolutionary sense. Keynesian economics exists because it was the only system that worked when free market capitalism brought the world economy to a screeching halt.

So, the key to selling liberal policies are that they work. Also, they are fair. And they have appeal to a broad base. Indeed, even the Republicans will pursue these kinds of policies when they need a boost in the polls. That's why the SUPER-DUPER-committee has been constructed in a way such that Obama will take the blame even as the government enacts right-wing policies.

That's enough for now.

Dreading 9/11

2011-09-05T16:33:00.003-04:00

OK, so next Sunday is 9/11/11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.

I'm dreading it.

Why? Well, there's the massive revisionism that has been going on for years, especially with regard to the real-time performance of President Bush. I remember how that day went down. Bush spent the day flying all over the country in search of a safe haven, leaving sub-ordinates to figure out what was going on. And then, after playing duck-and-cover for two days, he came out on TV and made a speech that exuded confusion and fear. In the years that have passed since then, Bush and his advisors have created a mythos portraying him as the "decider-in-chief" who stepped forward in a manly fashion and took charge of the situation. After all, he went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium!

A little-known fact: the National Geographic channel (NatGeo) is part of the Murdoch empire. So, small surprise, they've given Bush an interview in which he can tell his side of what actually happened that day. "I felt fear, grief, ..and determination" or some such nonsense.

But that's really only the half of it. What really gets me is this effort to turn 9/11 into some kind of holy day, along with the "Ground Zero" part of Lower Manhattan into a shrine. It seems grotesque to me how people embrace their own victimhood, especially citizens of the richest country in history. This narcissism, this feeling that we are uniquely betrayed by the evil of others is mind-boggling.

Our electorate refuses to come to grips with the violence we export. Mind you, I don't have a problem with commemorating the victims of 9/11. But really, well over a hundred thousand people were killed by our invasion of Iraq. And we still don't have a good explanation for why we did that!!

At its core, American exceptionalism is nothing more than narcissism. It's a very popular cultural movement (Who dares speak against national self-love!?) but it's been quite destructive over the past decade. So when the same people who endorse "pre-emptive" air attacks against Iran, who cheered on when our drones started falling in Libya, and who basically root for the expression of American force as the answer to all of our international problems - when these people weep about our victimhood on 9/11, it's hard to swallow.

City of Champions

2011-06-16T11:40:00.004-04:00

This championship surprised me about as much as the first Patriots' Super Bowl win. I still don't think the Bruins are the best team in the NHL. But that doesn't matter - the best team is not always the champion. (See, for example, Super Bowl XLII.)

In the regular season, I thought the Bruins were clearly behind the Caps and the Penguins - well, at least the Penguins before they got all their injuries. And the there are so many elite Western Conference teams that look great: not only the Canucks but the Sharks, Red Wings, Ducks, and Preds are all arguably serious Stanley Cup contenders. And that doesn't include the defending champs in Chicago.

And then the Bs lost their first two games in the playoffs. Home games. To the despised Habs. At the time this meant a 6-game playoff losing streak to the two most despised teams (including the collapse to Philly last year). It really felt like another Spring of nothing for the Bs.

But then, remarkably, the Bs went to Montreal and improbably won two road games! And there was the series of incredible OT wins, and suddenly they've got the Flyers in Round 2. Which the Flyers never showed up for.

Once the Penguins collapsed under the weight of their injuries I thought the Caps were the clear favorites in the East. I still don't know what happened to them in their series against Tampa. I refer the interested reader to Minions.

And then the Bs were embarrassed in Game 1 by the red-hot Lightning, at which point Landru predicted a Tampa sweep. Again, the Bs dug deep and recovered. In retrospect, the series against the Lightning was tougher than the Finals. I can see why Landru hates those guys. They are pesky, but I'll give them credit: they all showed up to play, ever game.

By the time the Finals rolled around, Thomas was so hot I thought he could beat anybody. Luongo kept up the pace on his home ice, and the Canucks went up 2-0, at which point the usual crowd of idiots started saying things like "Is this this series over?" Um, well, didn't you just see the Bruins keep things essentially even for two road games?

When I saw Luongo flounder in Game 3, I knew the Bruins could win this series. I don't think I've ever seen a champion team play as poorly as the Canucks did in Game 3. Also, the Sedin brothers remained absent. Meanwhile, Thomas was lights out and the D was solid with Chara and Seidenberg leading the way. Guys like Brad Marchand I didn't know from Adam three months ago were suddenly playing like all-stars. (OK, who thought Marchand would be the rookie who led the Bruins, not Seguin? Seguin had one great game against Tampa, but Marchand was playing like a veteran by the time the Finals finished. )

So, the make a long story short, Luongo collapsed and Thomas never did, even when he easily could have after the Bruins went down 0-2 on a dreadful overtime goal. There are many recipes for winning the Cup, and Boston took one of the tried and true paths: ride the coattails of a hot goalie.

Does this bode well for next year? I don't know and don't really care. Thomas is 37 and already had a down year in 2009-10 when he lost the starting job to Tuuka Rask. Aside from Mark Recchi, the team should be sticking together for a while, and Marchand and Seguin can only get better.

It's time to just enjoy the moment. Boston's first cup since '72, when I was barely sentient and G. Gordon Liddy was considering an invasion of a suite of rooms at the Watergate Hotel.

the Mandate

2011-02-01T22:54:00.001-05:00

Inspired by Ezra Klein's usual indecisve musings.

I find the arguments regarding the mandate to be really quite odd. I'm liberal on most issues, but there are things about the arguments being used to justify that mandate that strike me as being quite wrong.

For example:
'This judge is a textbook case of judicial activism if I've ever seen one. The decision not to purchase health insurance is not an "inactive decision" at all. It's very much an active decision to not purchase insurance and it's one that threatens the national health care system and a paying member's premiums. Open and shut. Perfectly constitutional.'

No, it's not "an active decision" to not do something. You are standing common usage of language on its head. And I have no moral or constitutional obligation to buy insurance that I may or may not need solely to provide you with an economic benefit.

I find it amusing that such a large slice of the left have bought into the framing of this issue presented to us by Obama and the insurance companies.

"And you know what? If you don't want to buy the insurance, then you pay the tax. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable consequence for driving up my premium."

Again, boo-hoo. The relationship between you and your insurance carrier is your own business and not my concern.

The government is mandating that I participate in an industry that I may or may not want to support. There are many sound reasons why I might prefer to avoid health insurance. If I were independently wealthy, I wouldn't dream of wasting my money on insurance. On the flip side, if I have severe economic difficulties, health insurance might rationally be a cost I want to avoid.

In any case, what's happening here is that a private industry is calling upon the power of Congress and the Federal government to provide it with an increase in its customer base. What next? What industry will next convince the nation that it should be able to use the power of the government to gather in more customers?

And sadly, too many of the arguments about health care reform focus entirely on whether the person making the argument thinks that the mandate is a good idea, with absolutely no regard as to whether it's sensible to argue whether the law is actually _Constitutional_. I can think of all sorts of good laws that are not actually Constitutional.

The problem is that the Interstate Commerce Clause has been stretched far beyond its original intent. It's been abused in the past for purposes such as supporting a Federal ban on marijuana.

A mandate that I be forced to purchase a product from a private entity truly represents a new infringement on my liberty. People really need to think this through, in terms of the expansion of government power.

Life in the Big Easy

2010-12-28T00:38:00.002-05:00

Enjoying a week in Nawlins visiting Mama Whispers and her hubby. And the growly dog and the two nice cats who hide from the growly dog. Growly dog is an annoyance. I'm really not a dog person. They are far too demanding, and I really hate that subservience act. A species of passive-aggressive sycophants.

Dogs suck. Cats rule.

Just saw the Who Dats beat the Dirty Birds, in spite of Drew Brees's attempts to throw away the game in the 4th quarter. Meh. Falcons don't look like a championship team, even if they get the #1 seed, which they should. Would rate NFC teams in this order:

Eagles
Saints
Packers
Falcons
Bears

There will not be a 6th NFC team this year.

I'm not going to bother to list the AFC teams.

getting organized

2010-09-30T02:39:00.004-04:00

Told the good Frau Doktor I would update my blog sometime soon - this was two months ago. Well, I'll try to update anybody interested soon.

The biggest update of the past week was walking away from Mafia Wars. Facebook game was eating up perhaps as much as 20 hours per week. I'm still doing a few passive games (MouseHunt, Fishwrangler, Ghost Trappers) but it's nowhere near as much time. And with the complete lack of Diplomacy commitments, I have time now.

Sister visited last week, which was cool. Place feels a lot more alive when another person is about.

I wonder if I can whip up a decent post for my nascent science blog. I started a blog called Pineapples in Alaska. I wonder, though, if there's a lot for me to say. I'm not really a content producer by nature. I'm much more of a critic or reviewer. I like sucking in lots of information and comparing it a lot more than producing material creatively. Let's see what I can put up there this Wochenende.

If I were to go into something more journalistic, my talents would be more as an editor, I would think, than as a writer.

Where does that leave me as a blogger?

It seems weird to me that journalism these days has become a business interested more about producing volumes of product than of trying to see what impact the products have. Indeed, that seems to be the guiding light of our professional class.

Obama is really bumming me out. The blame-the-liberals game is getting old, and his penchant for creeping authoritarianism is unforgivable, as far as I'm concerned.

Good films seen recently: Inception, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Girl who Played with Fire. Of the latter two, I liked GDT more than GPF, simply because it fit the format of a feature film much better. The latter film was a bit hampered by the need to cram all sorts of stuff into a film. It didn't really fit.

I've been reading the associated books, and I've decided the reverse is true. The first book takes hella long to get started, while the excess information which drowned the second film fits quite easily into the second book. That brings up the question : do I see Wasp's Nest before I read it or vice versa?

Another film I saw recently which I really like was the Austrian film Das Weisse Band. (The White Ribbon, auf englisch.) It's a film set in rural Germany circa 1914, in a small town where deadly pranks keep happening. For example, right at the start of the film, the town doctor falls from his horse when they run into a wire strung across the entrance to his yard. The acting in this film is tremendous, and in particular they did a great job casting the large number of children's parts. In any case, it's a film far more interesting than 95% of the crap in RedBox.

It occurs to me that I probably should make note when I use a fake word like "hella". Das is nicht gutes Englisch.

Up way too late. Pessimistic about the Pats winning a road game against a good team. But at least Ginger is in great shape. Oh - I ran noch ein Halb-Marathon vor zwei Wochen. Next up: the Army Ten Miler.

Viel Spass noch!

What Digby said

2010-05-04T09:33:00.003-04:00

...another edition.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/hilarious-torture.html

Tasers have become a punch line. This will persist until somebody who is relatively innocent (i.e., not somebody armed and presenting a threat like this doofus at a sporting event) is killed by a taser.

People who think a taser shock is funny should ask themselves whether they they would respond the same way if five cops beat the offender with their billy clubs for ten minutes.

a post-mortem for the Caps

2010-04-28T21:39:00.003-04:00

After Game 1, I texted Landru the question "Why do the Caps suck in the playoffs?" Having just seen them be the first #1 seed in NHL history to blow a 3-1 lead and lose a 7-game series, this is a question the Caps need to address in a serious fashion.

The Caps simply do not consistently bring their best game. That is part of the problem. Another part is that they are a poor team defensively (at least when considered top elite teams) and even their excellent offense can be stopped by a hot goalie.

Clearly Halak is the hottest goalie around right now. But somehow the Caps have a knack of making a lot of goalies look goal.

I said before the season started that the Caps needed to improve their defense or they would not make a serious Stanley Cup wrong. After they won the President's Trophy for best record in the NHL, I thought that perhaps I was wrong. But after this debacle, I think it's a concept that has to be reconsidered.

But that wasn't the real problem. In at least two of the four losses, the Caps made a poor showing effort-wise. That was particularly inexcusable in Game 5.

What does a championship team do when it has just won three games in a row and has a chance to clinch at home? Well, they go and give a half-assed effort in Game 5.

The Caps have to figure out how to stay motivated and play hard to win all the time. Right now they look like a team built to prosper against weak teams, which cannot bear up under scrutiny in a 7-game series against a better team. Caps fans have to ask: if they couldn't beat the Canadiens, how could we think that they could beat the Penguins, Sharks, or Black Hawks? Is this a coaching problem? I don't know.

Best in Film of the Naughties: Villians

2010-01-23T17:58:00.011-05:00

I've been thinking to continue this series with a focus on animated films, but I'd been waiting until I can see "Up" at least, and maybe that one about Mr. Fox.

So I think I'll start with the villains instead. A good decade for bad people. I'm a bit loose with the word "villain". Some of the villains are the main characters in their respective films, and can be quite charismatic.

I'm not a huge fan of ranking artistic performance. But it's a common thing to do, and in some cases there are particular performances which really stand out. So, meh, people can live with it. Also, I'm constantly worrying that I have forgotten some performance which ought to stick out in my mind, which I enjoyed at the time but has fallen to the back of my mind.

Many villains could not make this list. Voldemort hasn't gotten enough screen time but Bellatrix Lestrange almost made it. The Bond series gave us a couple villains, but none that really stood out. Ian McKellan could easily have made the list as Magneto. Christian Bale nearly made the list for American Psycho. Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith, and Palpatine were characters continued from earlier decades who might have made the list for their work in the Naughties. Bill Nighy and Geoffrey Rush did admirable work in the Pirates series.

Sacha Baren-Cohen really could be on this list for Jean Gerard in Talladega Nights.

Going for 10 to 1...

10. Alan Ford as Bricktop in "Snatch".

(from IMDB)

Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.

Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?

Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".

Alan Ford managed to make an aging Brit with bad teeth and outrageous glasses into a man who was to be feared. For some reason American villains are always well-groomed (well, modulo Tony Soprano). Brick Top is just an old-school thug. And he's an eminently watchable villain in one of the few films that I find myself able to watch over and over and over without getting bored.

9. Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, Vol 1.

This list is dominated by male characters, and most of the characters who were close but didn't make it were also male. Let's face it - the big villains are almost always male. And the villainy of your typical female villain is often something pedestrian like using sex in a manipulative fashion (a la Sharon Stone). A good villain should be after power for the sake of power. And so we have Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii.

Another feature of a good villainous performance is that the actor (or actress) can be seen as more appealing than the good guy (chick). And with all due respect to Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu was fabulous as O-Ren.

8. John Malkovich as Ripley in Ripley's Game

There's a certain group of actors who are the usual suspects as villians: Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, and Jack Nicholson, for example. They show up and you cheer even before they say anything. Robert Shaw had it back in the day. But the only one of these guys who made this list is John Malkovich.

He only made this list because I saw Ripley's Game on cable TV. Actually, Ripley's Game was never released in the US, and I cannot understand why. The film is certainly good enough to have done well on the artsy circuit. Are American distributors so afraid of amoral characters? I don't quite get it.

Malkovich owns this character. His Ripley is insulted by a local man at a small social gathering, but he finds a way to get revenge when an old contact (played by Ray Winstone) needs a hitman. It's a great story, but what really makes it special is how smoothly Malkovich makes the transition from polite discussion to amoral sociopathy.

7. Andy Serkis as Gollum (and Smeagol) in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

My precious! The only CGI character to make this list. Gollum rocks!

6. Denzel Washington as Alonzo Harris in Training Day.

While we have a couple Oscar winners on this list, Denzel is unique for having won Best Actor (as opposed to Best Supporting Actor). Lt. Alonzo is the ultimate cop gone bad. His idea of law enforcement consists on counting the number of arrests made while overlooking pretty much everything else. He's the over-the-top king of the roost, in charge of who gets busted and what gets overlooked.

5. Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in Sexy Beast.

Oh yeah.
Don Logan is tasked with going to Spain to bring his old made Gal (Ray Winstone) out of retirement for a robbery in London. Problem is that Gal is comfortable in Spain and has promised his wife that he's retired for good. But Don cannot take "No" for an answer.

That gives us conversations like (courtesy IMDB.com)

Gal: I am going to have to turn this opportunity down.
Don: No, you are going to have to turn this opportunity yes!

and
Don: Shut up, cunt. You louse. You got some fuckin' neck ain't you. Retired? Fuck off, you're revolting. Look at your suntan, it's leather, it's like leather man, your skin. We could make a fucking suitcase out of you. Like a crocodile, fat crocodile, fat bastard. You look like fucking Idi Amin, you know what I mean? Stay here? You should be ashamed of yourself. Who do you think you are? King of the castle? Cock of the walk?
[He gut-punches Gal]
Don: What you think this is the wheel of fortune? You think you can make your dough and fuck off? Leave the table? Thanks Don, see you Don, off to sunny Spain now Don, fuck off Don. Lying in your pool like a fat blob laughing at me, you think I'm gonna have that? You really think I'm gonna have that, ya ponce. All right, I'll make it easy for you. God knows you're fucking trying. Are you gonna do the job? It's not a difficult question, are you gonna do the job, yes or no?

and...

Gal: No!
Don: Yes!
Gal: No!
Don: Yes!
Gal: No!
Don: Fat cunt!
Gal: No, No, No!
Don: Yes, Yes, Yes!

4. Christopher Waltz as Hans Landa in "Inglorious Basterds".

My theory about this film is that it is a sober, serious drama that was invaded by Brad Pitt who turns every scene he is in into a comedy. The opening scene with the French dairy farmer is devastating. Landa is on the hunt of a family of Jewish refugees who are hiding under the floor of the farmer's house. Landa gradually breaks down the farmer's confidence through a combination of politeness, chutzpah, and persistence.

But as the film progresses, his persistent charm gradually peels away to reveal a psychotic misogynistic sadistic personality. (How many other pop psych buzzwords can I toss around?)

3. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

Chigurh is a great psycho in a bad hair cut. He's on the hunt for Josh Brolin's character, who has walked away with a couple million dollars scavved from a mutual massacre of drug dealers in the Texas desert. Three things are particularly appealing about Chigurh's modus operandi. First, his weapon of choice is a gas-powered skull gun of the kind used by cattle ranchers to save on the cost of bullets. Second is his presence, his aura which radiates menace (in spite of the mop top). But what is truly chilling is his world view, in which is a kind of random nihilism where life or death can be decided by the toss of a coin.

Literally.

2. Heath Ledger as The Joker in Batman: the Dark Knight.

I first enjoyed the performance of Heath Ledger in The Knight's Tale, a light, enjoyable piece. Ledger was reasonable in Monster's Ball, but really came into his own in Brokeback Mountain. But as the Joker, Ledger really discovered a character. Historically, the Joker started as a maniacal goofball with a unique way to mix zaniness and homicide. Cesar Romero played him in an excellent campy fashion for the 60s TV show. Then, in the 80s, Jack Nicholson took over the character and heightened his capacity for evil, while maintaining a panache that only he can achieve.

Ledger did something completely different. He internalized the capacity for evil as a reflection of the Joker's negative feelings about all of humanity.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis as Billy the Butcher in Gangs of New York.

Not a great film, but a great performance by Day-Lewis as he steals the film. Billy the Butcher is the leader of the Nativists, who are violently hostile to the immigrant Irish moving into Hell's Kitchen. Billy has one eye (physical deformities always being a plus for a villain), loves a good knife fight, and uses his knowledge of anatomy to make knife fighting an art.

Day-Lewis completely steals this movie from Leonardo DiCaprio's indecisive Irish immigrant.

Truth be told, I could shuffle the top four characters in order and it would be equally valid.

a treat for a cold winter

2010-01-08T22:56:00.005-05:00

Featuring P^2 in a film most readers probably haven't seen.

I cannot honestly say that the film is all that great. I think it's the kind of film you could watch with the sound off and not miss much. Except that it's packed to the gills with product placements, which is kind of annoying.

empowering the stupid

2009-12-22T01:01:00.000-05:00

The problem with empowering the stupid, episode 234.

Best films of the decade - Collecting candidates

2009-11-17T21:20:00.005-05:00

As we aim for the last several weeks of 2009, it seems like as good a time as any to think about the best films of the 00 decade. (It'd be nice if we could include a Bond film to the list, and I think ultimately we can put Casino Royale on the list.) I don't have a preset idea of how long the list should be, and I don't think it's terribly meaningful. For example, the 150th best film of the 70s was certainly better than the 50th best film of the 90s.

I'm more inclined to try to sort the list by genre. But to start, I'll just look through the lists of awards from each year and include or exclude the best films from that year, with a bit of commentary.

2000:
Best Picture winner: Gladiator
other nominees: Chocolat; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Traffic
other notables: Requiem for a Dream, Shadow of the Vampire, Pollock, Almost Famous

Of the above listed, for me the only must-include film is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While I enjoyed Gladiator, it's little more than an action film with neat CGI. I've heard great things about Requiem for a Dream, but haven't had the stomach to face it.

p.s. Best In Show deserves mention in at least a couple categories.

2001:
Best Picture Winner: A Beatiful Mind
other nominees: Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The LotR: the Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
other notables: Shrek, Training Day, Mullholland Drive, Amelie, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Vanilla Sky, A Knight's Tale

You might expect me to automatically include the Nash biography, but I found its treatment of schizophrenia to be too magical for my tastes.
Shrek has to be included in any list of the decade's best animated films - at least the first of the three. The LotR trilogy certainly has to be included somehow. Moulin Rouge would definitely be on my list of the decade's best musicals (way ahead of Chicago). In the sci-fi category, I'd go against a lot of the sentiment at the time and exclude Memento as incoherent crap, while reserving judgment on Vanilla Sky. If only it didn't feature Tom Cruise, it'd be a lock!

Amelie is a lock, certainly. While Denzel was great in Training Day, I haven't felt that the film really has kept my interest well. OTOH, A Knight's Tale is certainly on my list of the best popcorn films of the decade.

One film from 2001 that has grown on me a lot over the past decade is The Royal Tenenbaums. This story of a dysfunctional family of geniuses initially frustrated me because it didn't seem to go anywhere, but now I think it's brilliant.

That leaves us with one more film, Gosford Park, which has been on my list since it came out. This Robert Altman-directed version of a British manor mystery is utterly delicious.

p.s. Donnie Darko.

2002:
Best Picture: Chicago
other nominees: Gangs of New York, The Hours, The LotR: the Two Towers, The Pianist
other notables: Spirited Away, Adaptation, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Far From Heaven, Bowling for Columbine

Even with a short list of musicals to choose from, I cannot include Chicago. The casting was terrible, by which I mean Renee Zellwegger. In fact, I find the entire Best Picture list to be weak.

Y Tu Mama Tambien is an amusing piece of soft porn masquerading as art. I could include it in a list of "best socially acceptable porn", I suppose.

Bowling for Columbine raises interesting questions about Michael Moore's documentaries. From a technical standpoint, they are not the best, but they cover the most important topics - topics that are conscientiously avoided by the rich and powerful studios.

The only unqualified entry from this year is Spirited Away, which not only soars to the top of the list of the decade's best animated films, but is surely on the list of best films overall.

Adaptation makes the cut. I'm a big Charlie Kaufman fan.

p.s. Bend it Like Beckham. Gonna mull over what to do with this one.

2003:
Best Picture: The LotR: the Return of the King
Other nominees: Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, Mystic River, Seabiscuit
other notables: Finding Nemo, Cold Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl, Whale Rider, The Barbarian Invasions

Already commented about The LotR trilogy. At the time, I was a huge fan of Mystic River. Has it held up? I'm unsure. Master and Commander and Seabiscuit are both simple, light fare.

Lost in Translation is definitely on the list.

The first installment of Pirates of the Caribbean is certainly on my list of best action films. I have a soft spot for Whale Rider. It'll fit in somehow.

2004:
Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby
other nominees: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Ray, Sideways
other notables: Hotel Rwanda, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, House of Flying Daggers, Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events, The Incredibles, Troy, Super Size Me

A good list for Best Picture. I'm a big fan of Million Dollar Baby, which makes the list for a number of reasons. The only nominee definitely not passing muster is The Aviator, but it's hard to say much about Finding Neverland since I've never seen it. Ray is on the list of best biopics. Amazing job by Jamie Foxx. And Sideways is also on the list, for a number of reasons.

In retrospect, it's hard to be happy with the process that left Hotel Rwanda off the Best Picture List. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has the top spot in my list of the best sci-fi films of the decade. The Incredibles has a spot on the list of the best animated films.

p.s. Der Untergang
p.p.s. I saw Land of Plenty (sort of) in France. I need to see it again because I fell asleep during the film. It was never released in the US.

2005:
Best Picture: Crash
other nominees: Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Good Night, and Good Luck; Munich
other notables: Howl's Moving Castle, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, Memoirs of a Geisha, King Kong, Pride and Prejudice

The obvious one here is Brokeback Mountain. At the time I liked Crash just as much, but Brokeback seems, in retrospect, to be the far greater film.

I liked Capote, but it's hurt by being in competition with Infamous, a film from 2006 covering pretty much exactly the same material.

While Howl's Moving Castle is not quite at the same level of Spirited Away, the previous film by master Hiyao Miyazaki, it definitely merits inclusion. Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit similarly deserves special acclaim. (That reminds me - I need to add Chicken Run from 2000.)

2005 was a big year for political films.
Syriana is an interesting film that may be just on the outside looking in. Good Night, and Good Luck is just a bit too preachy for my tastes, though I do appreciate its sentiments. The Constant Gardener definitely makes the cut. Does this inclusion show my weakness for Rachel Weisz? Perhaps - but I do think that inclusion of an intelligent, well-formed female character is a strong positive for any film.

There is probably some category for March of the Penguins.

p.s. The Forty-Year Old Virgin. On the list of best comedies.

p.p.s. The Proposition. And The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

2006:
Best Picture: The Departed
Other nominees: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen
Other notables: Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, Volver, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, The Illusionist, The Black Dahlia, The Prestige, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima,

Wow. This was quite a good year!

I've already blogged about how much I enjoyed The Departed. Among the long list of those films above, the ones that I think must be included somehow are

Volver: best foreign-language (not to mention best prosthetic ass)
Little Miss Sunshine: best performance by a kid
The Last King of Scotland: for a couple reasons
Children of Men: on the list for best sci-fi
Pan's Labyrinth: on best fantasy list
Notes on a Scandal might be on the main list. I really like the acting in this film. Same goes for Little Children.

I need to see the two Eastwood films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima at some point.

...and if I thought 2006 was good, here comes 2007, which has the film of the decade and a second film that would have been best of its year most years. The third-best
film is no slouch, either.

2007:
Best Picture: No Country For Old Men
other nominees: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood
other notables: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Ratatouille, Eastern Promises, Charlie Wilson's War, American Gangster, I'm Not There, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, Sicko, In the Valley of Elah

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. No Country for Old Men is my favorite film of the decade.

There Will Be Blood features Daniel Day-Lewis in what I think is the best performance by a single actor in the decade.
Most years, Michael Clayton would be a good candidate for best picture, but it's not close for 2007.

Among films that remained below the radar, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a great one.

I thought Sicko was better than Bowling for Columbine or Farenheit 9/11.

Juno will be on a list somehow, as will Eastern Promises. And Sunshine.

2008:
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Other nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader,
Other notables: The Dark Knight, Doubt, Iron Man

After 2006 and 2007, a relatively weak year. Slumdog Millionaire will at best be listed in a minor category. The year is most notable for the burst of super-hero films, especially The Dark Knight, which is currently listed as the 9th best film ever at IMDB.com, and is the all-time #2 on the list of domestic sales (after Titanic).

Well, there will be other kinds of categories. The Harry Potter films will need to be accounted for somehow.

Warum?

2009-11-13T21:51:00.003-05:00

The latest Snickers ad features a couple guys banishing their hunger by having a Snickers chocolate bar. They wonder where the hunger goes, and one speculates "Germany"?

At which point we are switched to a lonely man in Germany, eating away, who says

"Warum bin ich immer Hunger?"

This translates to "Why am I always hunger?"

It's a silly mistake with the two most commonly used German verbs
haben (to have) and sein (to be). I was taught that I should say
"Ich habe Hunger" but perhaps "Ich bin hungrig" is also allowed. But no matter how you slice it, "Ich bin Hunger" is dead wrong.

So...what process led to Snickers botching such a simple translation? Worse,
why is the ad still running, weeks later, as if there is no mistake?

Language skills are frowned upon in the US.

I'll try to make more amusing blog posts in the near future.

Last Chance Harvey

2009-11-13T19:19:00.003-05:00

One of the nice things of having cable and being essentially housebound with a cold is that you may stumble upon a film you'd never heard of featuring two of your favorite actors. So I've surfing around, having just rewatched the entirety of The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time, and I see a film featuring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson and, well, that's a Must-See.

It's called Last Chance Harvey. Dustin Hoffman is Harvey, a writer of jingles in London for his daughter's wedding. Emma Thompson works for the government taking surveys at Heathrow. The first time they meet he brushes her off because he's tired from the overnight flight.

His plan is to fly back after the wedding and before the reception because he's got a sales pitch to make. But he misses the flight back, finds out he's being fired, and that his daugher wants her stepfather to give him away, so...he hits the airport bar. And meets Emma Thompson.

I'm not sure there's all that much to this film. For me it hits a sweet spot with the images of an American in London. The dialogue is extremely intelligent. It is very difficult to show strangers overcoming the usual social barriers, but this film does it well. And watching two top actors at the top of their game, in a well-directed film with a great script - why had I not heard of this film before?

This film deals with fractured families, absent fathers, Americans in London, middle-aged people looking for a second chance - basically all sorts of themes smacking Whispers right in the face. Nicely done.

NFL 2009: NFC

2009-10-27T00:39:00.002-04:00

Um, it's a bit late to do this, but...recalling my thinking from the beginning of the
season.

NFC East: Giants, Eagles, Cowboys, Skins
NFC South: Falcons, Saints, Panthers, Bucs
NFC North: Vikings, Bears, Packers, Lions
NFC West: Cardinals, Seahawks, 49ers, Rams

Wildcards: Saints and Eagles.

From the current perspective I would flip the Falcons and Saints, but I won't
pretend I thought the Saints would start the season 6-0. Even though I thought
the Cutler trade was bad for the Bears, I didn't foresee their injuries on defense,
and they are now at best an also-ran, destined to finish behind the Packers and
Vikings.

NFL 2009: AFC

2009-09-06T09:48:00.003-04:00

Watching The Sports Reporters on ESPN, thinking on the upcoming season. I figure I'll make a few predictions.

AFC East

The Pats continue to reap the benefits of a weak division. When Parcells took over the Dolphins, I figured that they would eventually build an organization that might pass the Pats. But I don't see them repeating as division champions. It's a lot easier to go 11-5 against a last-place schedule than a first-place schedule. In any case, 11-5 won't be enough to win this division, unless Brady has another season-ending injury. The Pats have a soft schedule and should go 12-4 easily. The Dolphins finish second and the Bills and Jets are also-rans.

AFC North
A huge gap between the powerhouses and the also-rans here. We have no evidence from last season that would indicate that the Bengals and Browns can compete with the Ravens and Steelers. While both the Bengals and Browns have enough talent to pull off upsets, and I could even see one of the two teams going over .500, the easy pick here is to have the Ravens and Steelers both make the playoffs. I'll go with the Ravens winning the division, based on the problems the Steelers' O-Line has protecting Roethlisberger.

AFC South
Jeff Fisher continues to have problems converting his regular season behemoths into a franchise that can advance in the playoffs. I think it was clear that, by the time the playoffs rolled around last year, that the Titans had peaked too early.
The Colts are always the Colts, and I'll pick them to win the division, esp. considering that they didn't do so last year. The fates decree that they will play the Pats every season, and to do so in 2010, they'll have to win the division. The Titans will miss Albert Haynesworth, but they still have an excellent defense and running game, and that probably will be enough to get a playoff spot. The Texans are a popular pick to make the leap to contender. Andre Johnson is as good a WR as anybody, and the defense is solid. Sage Rosenfels has left town, but can Matt Schaub stay healthy? They are a team to watch. The Jaguars' vaunted running game collapsed completely last year as a rash of injuries took down their O-Line. Can they recover? Can David Garrard recover his Silky form, or are the hat and cane retired?

AFC West
Year Three of the Norv Turner Drive the Team into the Ground is with us. By all rights, the Chargers should have missed the playoffs last year, and Turner's job should already be in jeopardy, but thanks to an epic fail by Shanahan's Broncos, the Chargers weaseled their way into the playoffs. One would expect that this would be the season for the inevitable Turner collapse to kick in, but the problem is that the Broncos have effectively destroyed their own franchise in the off-season. I can understand Pat Bowden losing patience with Shanahan's weak defenses, but do we really think Josh McDaniels will do a better job? The early results are not auspicious. The Cutler trade is a disaster for the Broncos. Brandon Marshall has already quit on them. And their starting point was a defense that could be run on by anybody. And since the Chiefs are rebuilding and the Raiders continue to be awful, the Chargers should win this division by default.

It's hard to predict the playoffs this far in advance, since so much will depend on injuries. The six team I've picked include three recent Super Bowl champions (four, if you count the Ravens). Of course it's tempting to run with the Pats, but I have real questions about whether their D can handle very physical offenses. Their solution to that problem in recent years has been simply to outscore the opposition. I am not feeling good vibes about the Titans, and the Chargers are here only by default. Perhaps the Colts will show that their history of playoff failures was all Dungy's fault? Could be. But right now I'm feeling a vibe for the Ravens, if only to change things up a bit.

Minotaurs!

2009-08-29T12:31:00.002-04:00

Priceless video from the Onion.

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

I especially like how the "balanced" panel has three defenders of the minotaur and only one person objecting.

Hat tip to Brad DeLong.

today's anti-health care idiocy

2009-08-10T15:03:00.002-04:00

From the Investor's Business Daily:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

As Jay Bookman points out,

Of course, that same Stephen Hawking who wouldn’t have a chance in the United Kingdom was in fact born in the United Kingdom, has lived his entire life in the United Kingdom and lives there still today, at the ripe old age of 67. (He was in fact hospitalized earlier this month.) Hawking is, you might say, living, breathing proof that these people are first-class fools.

He's far too kind. They are simply soulless atavistic liars.

They really are sociopaths.

it shouldn't need to be said, but...

2009-08-05T10:51:00.002-04:00

part of the argument against any kind of torture policy is the simple idiocy of the people who have implemented it.

Andrew Sullivan's guest blogger Chris Bodenner points us to a horrific story:

Mowj Camp reports that a deaf and mute man was tortured in Evin prison for several days before he was released. “A detainee, who was suspected of pretending to be deaf and mute, was severely tortured for several days to make him speak until finally he was released after a doctor confirmed that he was really deaf and mute.”

I think this incident perfectly exemplifies the stupidity of torture.

Katzentreppe!

2009-07-14T20:20:00.002-04:00

Was pointed to this blog by somebody on Facebook.

I love this spiral one:

Lucy Liu films

2009-07-09T21:51:00.002-04:00

One to see:

Watching the Detectives

One to miss:

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Abandoned the latter 2/3 of the way through because the plot was just stupid. The former is a delight, featuring L^2 as a "borophobic" woman who just loves playing mind games.

Da Plan

2009-06-29T01:09:00.004-04:00

I understand that many people think I've been pursuing the Underpants Gnomes approach to job searching. And, to be fair, there is something to that criticism. Certainly the first six months of it resembled that kind of illogic and unfocused lack of goal orientation.

Anyway, here's the new plan. It's got three parts.

1) Long term
the long term plan is to find some kind of job that uses my field of applied mathematics (data mining, machine learning, analytics, whatever you want to call it) in a field among social sciences, economics, or politics.

The problem with trying to hit the long term plan immediately is, well, this plan doesn't appear to be getting much traction. I probably need to develop certain skills and/or figure out exactly where to work in this capacity. That leads us to...

2) Medium term
Medium term, based on the occasional good times I've had teaching, I think it'd be a good idea to get a teaching position for 2009-2010. At minimum, I'll substitute teach in MoCo, but I should be able to get a better position than that.

If I could get a teaching job that started tomorrow, I would do it. But that may not be as easily done as thought. (Not being Q, I cannot bend reality to my desires.)

3) short term
Contract work or temp work to pay bills through the summer.

Found a 5-week "science writer" position I applied for Thursday. There are probably other jobs like this.

A man. A plan. A canal. Pamana!

another word for nothing left to lose

2009-06-05T01:19:00.010-04:00

OK, so the NBA finals are on, and I really want the Lakers to lose and that means, given my inability to root for a winning team after the Celtics squeaked out of the first round, that the Magic are probably doomed.

Don't have much to say right now, but I thought I'd share some photos of the Freedom, who I saw with Landru last weekend.

Sonia Bompastor, our French visitor, takes a free kick.

Here Sonia chats with Cat Whitehall before another free kick.

And here she has a collision with somebody from FC Gold Pride. Looks painful. But our Sonia is tough. And yes, that's all-World Abby Wambach on the left.

Here they are during a quieter moment.

Sonia takes a corner kick.

And after the game...

test drive

2009-05-21T02:11:00.003-04:00

Found this via Landru. I'm hoping at some point Ginger will revert to her feline nature.

stupidity lacking self-awareness

2009-04-24T02:10:00.002-04:00

Watch Joe Barton, R-Texas, think he's posed a stumper to Nobel Prize Winner and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

What is shocking here is not just that Barton's question is so idiotic, but that he thinks he's stumped Dr. Chu! Indeed, Barton is the one who posted this to YouTube!

And that's the kind of ignorant arrogance that science has to deal with.

My new favorite Family Guy

2009-03-31T19:02:00.003-04:00

In "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven", Stewie kidnaps the cast of Star Trek: TNG, Meg becomes a born-again Christian, and Brian's atheism leads him to become the town pariah.

You can see it at Hulu.com here.

That Just Happened!

2009-03-31T18:57:00.001-04:00

Watchmen trailer!

2009-03-11T13:55:00.002-04:00

Found it at YouTube. I have no idea where it originally came from.

Bravo, Catholic Church of Brazil!

2009-03-06T01:39:00.003-05:00

I ordinarily don't say much about abortion issues. But my former church has gone and found the logical conclusion to their dogma. I would applaud them for their logical consistency, but their conclusion is so abhorrent that I think it would adequately serve as an example of why the church is morally bankrupt.

In any case, via PZ Myers, I bring you the story of a 9-year old rape victim in Brazil who is getting abortion because her pre-pubescent womb is the vessel for two fetuses.

If you really do feel that abortion=murder, you must think so in every single case, right? Otherwise, the implication is that you think abortion is OK as long as the woman doesn't somehow deserve a pregnancy as punishment for misbehavior.

The problem for the Catholic Church and, indeed, the problem for "Right-to-Lifers" in general is that most people who are anti-abortion do not, in fact, think that terminating a pregnacy is tantamount to murder. They do, in fact, view abortion as an occasional necessary evil, but want to see it banned anyway because women should not be promiscuous!

And that's about all I have to say about abortion.

The Catholic Church will likely not get off so lightly. It's not that I have a plan to pick on them, but I'm sure they'll find a way to get on my nerves.

Oscar time is coming

2009-02-08T18:07:00.003-05:00

OK, so the Oscars are coming, and I've been making an effort to see some films that I think/have thought might be recognized.

First, there's Gran Torino. This latest (and perhaps last) work by Clint Eastwood (director and lead actor) features the man himself playing a veteran of the Korean war living as a widower in an urban neighborhood that has seen better days. When the movie starts, he's a complete grouch, disgusted with his grandchildren, and suspicious of the Asian family that has moved in next door. Coincidentally, this family is missing a father figure, and the younger brother, Thao, in the family is facing troubled times, including bullying by a gang including one of his cousins. To impress the gang, Thao tries to steal Clint's 1973 Gran Torino, and fails when Clint interrupts him.

Well, you know where this is going. When the gang comes back to harrass Thao, Clint comes out with a rifle (shotgun?) and tells them "Get off my lawn!" Not much more of the plot needs to be said, but it's worth saying that the manner in which Clint warms up to the Asians is convincing. Particularly endearing is Ahney Her as the older sister Sue. Also playing a major role in the film is Christopher Carley as the local priest who's been tasked by Clint's late wife to look after him.

(BTW, Clint's character is named Walter Kowalski, but who cares?)

There are some great dialogues in this film and Clint manages to pull off the gruff curmudgeon reasonably well, in spite of the fact that this character type has been beaten to death over the years. (Walter Matthau played aging curmudgeons starting at the age of 28. Not a joke!) This film succeeds in spite of the fact that it lays on the patriarchy angle a bit thickly. It is worth seeing for the banter alone.

Next up: Slumdog Millionaire! This latest flick from Danny Boyle tells the story of a young Indian man named Jamal Malik on the cusp of winning the top prize from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The movie starts with him being taken by the police, beaten and electrocuted so he'll admit to having cheated. He has, at that point, reached the final stages of the show, and nobody can believe that a slumdog like Jamal could know all of the answers.

Most of the film is told in flashback, as Jamal slowly explains how he knows the answers, and in doing so, tells the story of his life. For example, the first question asks the name of the actor who starred in a certain film in the 70s. Jamal tells the story of how he, as a very young boy, got Amitabh Bachchan's autograph in spite of being locked in a latrine by his older brother Salim. He escaped the latrine by jumping out the bottom into the pile of shit, and made his way through the crowd. Jealous Salim then sold the autographed picture while Jamal was taking a bath.

We see the life of Jamal and Salim go from there - we see their mother slain during an anti-Muslim riot, and how they are exploited by an orphanage in a truly Dickensian manner. Along the way, the two of them join forces with a girl named Latika, who becomes to focus of Jamal's adoration.

Slumdog Millionaire has a lot of the elements that make a film enjoyable. For starters, it shows what life in India is like, and that is not something American audiences know a lot about. It has the story of spunky orphans turning to petty crime, and then we see how petty crime becomes much more serious. It has a love triangle of sorts, and the strength of the family ties between Jamal and Salim are shown as they are tested time and time again.

What I felt sets Slumdog Millionaire apart from so many films is that it tells an interesting story. So many films either recycle used plots are just sit there, saying very little of interest. Every scence of Slumdog shows me a new side of life in India, or develops the characters in an interesting way. By the end of the film, as Jamal struggles with the final few questions, I found myself nearly shouting out the answers at him, even for a question about cricket where I know as little as Jamal does. My only concern as the film moved forward was concern about how Danny Boyle films often lose focus towards the end. Trainspotting, Sunshine, and 28 Days Later all thrived for the first hour + and then lost a bit of their direction towards the end.

My concerns were unfounded. Slumdog is a very enjoyable film and, given the weakness of the competition this year, it's the odds-on favorite for Best Picture.

My final review of the day is about the Kate Winslet vehicle The Reader. It's become a bit of a joke that Kate Winslet has no Oscar yet. In recent years we've seen Oscars go to Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, and Hillary Swank (twice!), none of whom is in Winslet's league as an actress. She joked about this for the Ricky Gervais show Extras, in which she played a nun fighting the Nazis.

One gets the suspicion that Winslet decided to push all the buttons with The Reader to go for the gold. Not only is she playing a former Nazi guard in a Holocaust story, she's also (minor spoiler) an illiterate hiding her lack of literacy! The film details an affair her character had during the late 50s, as a woman in her 30s with a local teenaged boy. Lots of sex ensues, but it didn't feel sexy so much as awkward and bizarre. The film really never addressed the bizarre nature of the affair directly (or adequately, IMO). And once it seems like it might be headed down that path, as the boy (played by David Kross) starts to flirt with girls his own age, and Hanna (Kate) starts getting jealous, the film up and cuts the affair off.

We fast forward nearly a decade. The boy, Michael, is now a law student, and his class attends the trial of several guards from Auschwitz. Included among the six women is, to his great suprise and astonishment, Kate! Um, Hanna. Without getting too much into the details, Michael knows that Hanna is being set up by the other guards to be more culpable than is fair, and she hides her (relative) innocence when her illiteracy would have given her a defense.

The film is somewhat maddening. The characters certainly are, as their motivations remain obscure. Winslet does a good job playing an inscrutable woman, but let's face it, "inscrutable" is pretty easy to do from an acting standpoint. I thought Kross did a very good job, and then later Ralph Fiennes shows up to play the adult Michael, by which point the film is starting to get very boring.

Somehow The Reader has gotten a Best Picture nomination. Suspicion is laid at the feet of the Weinstein brothers, who have managed to get nominations for all sorts of crap (remember Shakespeare in Love?) Winslet might even win this year. She's done better work: I'm a bigger fan of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and of Little Children. It's kind of sad that she's playing the Holocaust card and the illiteracy card here. I cannot recommend paying much money to see this film. Yes, Winslet is nude a lot, but anybody who calls this "soft-core porn" doesn't fathom porn at all. Y Tu Mama Tambien was soft-core porn. The Reader has a lot of sex, and yet it isn't terribly titillating.

Summary: of the three, Slumdog is the one to see. Gran Torino is also good, esp. for Eastwood fans. Winslet has done better.

Whee!!!

2009-02-07T02:06:00.002-05:00

Look at this graph I purloined from Swampland:

I wonder when it will be considered "conventional wisdom" that this generation of Republican leaders is just a bunch of self-serving idiots?

Poor Hunter S. Thompson. He saw all of this clearly over twenty years ago, but despaired at the lack of justice in the world.

media death and the importance of blogging

2009-01-13T13:35:00.003-05:00

Was pointed by Atrios to this article by Jay Rosen about the way the mass media frames the boundaries of consensus and "legitimate debate". It's pretty good. I won't repeat what he says since you can just click through. But basically it's about the cognitive shortcomings of the press when they decide certain issues are part of the "consensus" mindset while other opinions are "extremist". This model explains how Howard Dean is portrayed as a lunatic extremist in 2004 for putting forth the same ideas about withdrawal from Iraq that are part of the national consensus (outside the corridors of power, of course) by 2008.

I also heard last night that the Christian Science Monitor is going to stop killing as many trees, and only go with a print edition once per week. My mom subscribed to this paper when I was a kid, and I always thought it did a decent job. They seemed to do a better job with foreign policy than almost every major newspaper did. While listening to the story of their demise, it occurred to me that the death of the daily newspaper is inevitable. I'm sure this is not a new idea, but it had never been made so clear to me.

Finally, I'll add a note about Mickey Edwards. I heard him on NPR last night and I was impressed. He's a Republican and former Bush supporter who, curiously, is one of the few people who is willing to talk about the constant and egregious violations of the law and Constitution that Bush has engaged in over the past 8 years. For some reason, the world of debate that the media has created simply refuses to allow for the idea that Bush has been consistently violating the law and abusing power for the past 8 years. From my standpoint, it's the most obvious thing to see, but the media don't even allow discussion along these lines to ever be aired.

And that is part of why the mainstream media are held in such contempt by so many people these days.

Bill James on the BCS

2009-01-08T13:57:00.004-05:00

More precisely, Bill James on the abomination known as the Bowl Championship Series.

James echoes the argument made by Hal S. Stern in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports against statisticians' participation in the sham known as the BCS.

Stern says:

That there is a profound lack of conceptual clarity about the goals of the method;
That there is no genuine interest here in using statistical analysis to figure out how the teams compare with one another. The real purpose is to create some gobbledygook math to endorse the coaches' and sportswriters' vote;
That the ground rules of the calculations are irrational and prevent the statisticians from making any meaningful contribution; and
That the existence of this system has the purpose of justifying a few rich conferences in hijacking the search for a national title, avoiding a postseason tournament that would be preferred by the overwhelming majority of fans.

James feels most strongly about 3), pointing out correctly that it makes no sense to involve statisticians when the purpose of their involvement is never defined. Are the rankings supposed to find the team that is most likely to win any head-to-head contest? Or the team that has been the most dominant over the course of the season?

Worse, as James points out, after 2001 any "computer rankings" used by the BCS have been prohibited from using data about the scoring margin when calculating rankings. The professed nobility of this decision was to keep teams (like Nebraska at the time) from running up the scores against weaker opponents.

From a learning theory standpoint (my field), this is breathtakingly stupid. Statisticians are instructed to ignore possibly the most interesting data from each and every contest. Information discarded can only make the resulting system weaker. Thus is, to choose a random example, Rutgers beats Va. Tech by 1 point while Maryland beats them by 55 points, the rating system is instructed to view each game only as "a win".

The decision to exclude margin of victory in any rankings reminds me of the decision of the IOC to ban site visits when deciding to choose the locations of future Olympics. Yes, there has been a lot of abuse of site visits, but the solution surely would have been to have more oversight and regulation of site visits, rather than jettisoning the practice entirely! How can a voter from Oceania decide between a site in Brazil and one in South Africa without being allowed to visit the locations? It's madness! Yes, it can be done, but it's silly to go down that path at all!

I would say that I'm participating in the "boycott" of the BCS, but it would be more honest to say simply that the way the system has been constructed has left me feeling that it's more of a PR exercise than a serious attempt to find out who the best team is. Regardless of who wins the Oklahoma-Florida game, you're going to be hard-pressed to convince me that the team in question is better than USC or Texas.

And that doesn't even bring up Utah, which has gone undefeated including an impressive bowl win over Alabama!

College football needed a playoff including all of the following teams: Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Penn State, Florida, and Alabama. If the ACC and Big East need to feel relevant, invite Cincinnati and Va. Tech. But really you shouldn't. You'd have been more justified inviting Boise State. Texas Tech is out for being blown out by Oklahoma.

If you are seriously interested in finding the "best" team, then at least the first seven teams should be invited. And yes, I know winning a tournament isn't the same as being the "best team" (see last year's NFL season, for example), but winning a tournament is surely better than winning a single game when participation in the game is based entirely on the arbitrary judgments of voters.

Gin-Gin in trouble!

2008-12-30T23:57:00.003-05:00

Oh no!

Here she is in her normal location, considering the problems of the world...

My letter from Citibank

2008-11-26T02:00:00.002-05:00

Dear Taxpayer,

As you have read in the latest news, our financial institution has undergone some tough times. Some may say that we have brought this upon ourselves with our aggressive, high-risk approach to banking. And it's true that we've needed the intervention of the Federal government to stay solvent.

Like in 1929.
And in 1982.
And in the 90s.
And, well, this week.

Since we are feeling a bit guilty about our repeated inability to police our own actions, and our constant need for taxpayer help, we've decided to give you, a Citibank credit card holder and American taxpayer, a 6-month interest holiday. Congratulations!

Sincerely,

Citibank

(OK, that's what I think they should write.)

So, on the day I read about Citigroup's gotten an infusion of $20 billion from the US government, as well as a guarantee backing hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans made by Citigroup, the following is an abridged version of the letter I've actually gotten from Citibank.

Notice of Change in Terms and Right to Opt Out

The Changes.
We are changing your Card Agreement. The changes will be effective for all billing periods beginning on or after December 3, 2008. The changes will be effective whether or not you receive a billing statement.

1. We are changing the following sections regarding APRs:

Default APR:
All your APRs (including promotional APRs) on all balances may automatically increase to the default APR if you

- do not make the minimum payment when due
- go over the credit line
- make a payment that is not honored

The default APR equals the greater of (1) the Prime Rate plus up to 23.99% or (2) up to 29.99%.
(snip)

I really find the timing of this mind-boggling. Back when I first got this card, it was literally illegal (I believe) for any credit card to have a rate over 19.99%.

Bankers run an industry that has not developed a new product in millenia. It's always just money, in one form or another. So how have they maintained the illusion of a growth industry? By perfecting the art of predatory practices. The subprime loans that helped scuttle the mortgage industry are one example, and the predatory practices of the credit card industry are another.

It seems to me that, if the taxpayers are going to be asked to foot the bill to cover all the mistakes made by banks in the past decade, the least they could offer in return would be a cessation of the predatory practices that turn credit card debt into a disaster for so many Americans.

We could have
- a hard limit on maximum interest rates that is much closer to the prime rate. It makes no sense to have the Fed continually dropping the prime rate while letting the big banks charge 25% or more on credit cards
- regulation on the practices of assigning punitive fees and jacking up rates on credit card holders in tough times

It seems very weird to me that when Citigroup makes bad decisions, I have to pay, but if I make bad decisions (hypothetically), I have to pay.

Can we get President Obama and our Democratic Congress to do something to help credit card holders as a quid pro quo for the fact that we're getting stuck with the bill for their bad loan decisions?

Details on Citigroup's history from an article by Annys Shin.

(Cross-posted as diary at DailyKos)

election predictions

2008-11-03T21:57:00.003-05:00

Well, it has become the fashion to publish predictions for the election. I just follow the news, but what the heck, seeing as I pick football games every weekend, why not do so for the election?

PRESIDENTIAL

Well, of course Obama wins. He's well ahead in many of the polls.

As to the State-by-State particulars...

for starters, Obama will probably win every Kerry state. The only one that might flip is New Hampshire. McCain has been putting a lot of effort into trying to make a dent in Pennsylvania, but it will be for naught. I even think that he might know that, but feels that he has to make the effort, or else it will be obvious that he's given up.

For poll details, I suggest FiveThirtyEight.com.

The Bush states where Obama has been leading in polls include
Iowa (+>10%), New Mexico (+8-17%), Colorado (+4-10%), Virginia (+4-9%), Ohio (-2-+9%), Nevada (+4-10%). These have been leads of a reasonably consistent margin.

Other possibilities include Florida and North Carolina, where Nate Silver's simulations tend to favor Obama. Next in line is Missouri, which is the nearest thing to a true toss-up we see.

Red states that might flip in a true landslide include Indiana, Georgia, Montana, and North Dakota.

When I add the states in the first group to Obama's column, his total rises to 311. If I put all the states in the last group into McCain's column, he's at 174.

I'm going to put NC in McCain's column, and FL and MO in Obama's column. The last two are a bit dicey, as both states are notorious for voter suppression. But, what the heck, eh?

If all of this happens, Obama will win 349-189.

PoD says Obama will get 326. He flips NC, FL, and MO from my picks.

Landru says the exact same, but informs me "I said so first".

OK, so now I've changed my mind and switched NC and MO. That would make it 353 for Obama, 185 for McCain.

I have nothing to add about the House or Senate races.

my new nightmare

2008-10-23T02:01:00.001-04:00

debate review

2008-09-27T02:14:00.002-04:00

Well, this one is easy. One candidate had a flag lapel pin. The other one didn't.

Makes it easy to decide who I'm voting for.

the delicious SS

2008-09-25T15:26:00.003-04:00

Check out Sarah Silverman's new ad.

For some reason, Ilse refuses to use her connections to make an introduction. Jimmy's out of the picture! SS would adore me!

Other People's Money

2008-09-20T14:35:00.003-04:00

or.. How The Oligarchy Threw Away Free Market Capitalism in Favor of Corporate Welfare

Something has been going on this week. Well, more correctly, something has been going on the past year or so. Ever since the real estate market (predictably!) went south, all sorts of lending institutions have had to deal with bad loans. First, there were the banks themselves. But since the banks had bundled their risky loans and sold them off to investment houses, the bad debts also hit the big investment houses. But that wasn't the end of it. The banks investment houses had gotten the loans insured and so some big insurance companies were in trouble to.

I don't want to rehash all the details here. There are better places to follow the story.

Anyhow, what's happening now? It appears that a lot of rich and powerful people who thought that it was fine and dandy to let people see their houses foreclosed are much less willing to let a bank fail, much less an insurance giant. So, the rich and powerful have decided that the only way out is for the American taxpayer bail them out.

To the tune of $700 billion.

What is shocking is not that Yet Another Bailout of Irresponsible Corporate Leaders has proposed. What is shocking is the instant consensus that This Must Be Done.

Fuck the rich. I get sick of their bullshit.

Anybody who supports this bailout should be required to never again talk about the virtues of "small government" or the need for tax cuts to "stimulate the economy", or any of that right-wing bullshit that has grabbed hold of the Baby Boomer mindset for the past two decades. More than anything else, I'm sick and tired of half-educated twits pretending to understand economics, and then whining about how "unexpected circumstances" led to their decisions to completely fuck over the American taxpayer.

Going back to the beginning: bundling high-risk loans never served to reduce the risk. Not really. One of the basic motivating ideas behind diversifying investments is that, when many high-risk investments are bundled together, the total risk is decreased. However, this theory depends on mutual independence of the risk involved. In the case of high-risk mortgages, it should have been patently obvious that the notion of independent risks was a facade. Indeed, all of the mortgage values depended on the state of the (bubbling!) real estate market, and when the market went down, all of the mortgages became bad debt.

But the really disappointing thing here is the complete acquiescence to the oligarchic view that it is the duty of American taxpayers to hand over $700 billion to the Treasury secretary, for him to use as he sees fit.

The new model for American crony capitalism is: risk whatever the hell you want. If the market bears the risk, you win big time. If it doesn't, and it looks like the industry is in trouble, well, you can just pass on the losses to the American taxpayer.

This isn't capitalism. It is a theory of economic structure that has taken the basic notion of "limited liability" to its obscene logical conclusion.

As usual, it seems the Glenn Greenwald is one of the only people who captures the obscenity of the practice adequately.

...whatever else is true, the events of the last week are the most momentous events of the Bush era in terms of defining what kind of country we are and how we function -- and before this week, the last eight years have been quite momentous, so that is saying a lot. Again, regardless of whether this nationalization/bailout scheme is "necessary" or makes utilitarian sense, it is a crime of the highest order -- not a "crime" in the legal sense but in a more meaningful sense.

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

More amazingly, they're free to walk away without having to disgorge their gains; at worst, they're just "forced" to walk away without any further stake in the gamble. How can these bailouts not at least be categorically conditioned on the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains from those who are responsible? The mere fact that shareholders might lose their stake going forward doesn't resolve that concern; why should those who so fantastically profited from these schemes they couldn't support walk away with their gains? This is "redistribution of wealth" and "government takeover of industry" on the grandest scale imaginable -- the buzzphrases that have been thrown around for decades to represent all that is evil and bad in the world. That's all this is; it's not an "investment" by the Government in any real sense but just a magical transfer of losses away from those who are responsible for these losses to those who aren't.

And all of this was both foreseeable as well as foreseen -- see the 2002 grave warnings from Warren Buffett on pages 14-15 of his shareholders letter (.pdf), among many other things -- and it's also happened before, when the Federal Government bailed out the S&L industry that (with John McCain's help) was able to gamble recklessly and then force the country to protect them from their losses. The people who did this have no fear of anything -- they completely lack the kind of healthy fear that impedes reckless behavior -- because they know how our Government works and that they control it and thus believe that their capacity to suffer is limited in the extreme. And they're right about that.

What's most vital to underscore is that the beneficiaries of this week's extraordinary Government schemes aren't just the coincidental recipients of largesse due to some random stroke of good luck. The people on whose behalf these schemes are being implemented -- the true beneficiaries -- are the very same people who have been running and owning our Government -- both parties -- for decades, which is why they have been able to do what they've been doing without interference. They were able to gamble without limit because they control the Government, and now they're having others bear the brunt of their collapse for the same reason -- because the Government is largely run for their benefit.

If there is any "pitchfork moment" -- an episode that understandably would send people into the streets in mass outrage -- it would be this. Nobody really even seems to know how much of these losses "the Government" -- meaning working people who had no part in the profits from these transactions -- is undertaking virtually overnight but it's at least a trillion dollars, an amount so vast it's hard to comprehend, let alone analyze in terms of consequences. The transactions are way too complex even for the most sophisticated financial analysts to understand, let alone value. Whatever else is true, generations of Americans are almost certainly going to be severely burdened in untold ways by the events of the last week -- ones that have been carried out largely without any debate and mostly in secret.

Final thought: $700 billion is a hell of a lot of money. Let me put this in perspective....usually I compare any spending proposal to the budget of the NIH, an organization I know well. In this case, we're off by an order of magnitude (or two).

How do I place $700 billion? Well....this is more than the defense budget of the United States of America for 2009.

This is highway robbery. Where is this money coming from? Of course, the government is simply increasing its debt ceiling.

Updated 9/25

Apparently a deal is in the works. Pelosi is quite content to fork over $700 billion to the Bush administration to bail out the reckless bank leaders.

This proposal has the support of something like 8-10% of the country! Why on earth are representatives going along with it? And the big concessions that Pelosi is trumpeting are

(a) she didn't go along with the original language, which would have allowed Paulson to write himself a check for $509 billion with no legal recourse whatsoever (duh!)

(b) There is going to be some provision to limit executive pay.

As a taxpayer, I could care less about (b). What I care about is the massive burden being placed on the taxpayer!

I am fairly certain that this is a simple "stick-up" by arrogant bankers with a wish list. "Give us $700 billion or...the world will blow up!"

I cannot support this step. I'm strongly considering re-registering as an Independent again.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

2008-09-11T00:26:00.002-04:00

That was the chant sung out at the Republican National Convention. The thinking is that, hey, if we just drill a bit more oil, we'll have enough time to adjust our economy to non-petroleum energy sources.

The lie implicit behind this argument is the notion that the amount of viable out there is in any way significant. Indeed, the person who signed the offshore drilling ban was none other than President George H.W. Bush.

If drilling offshore was such a panacea, why didn't the Republicans think of it back in 2001, when Republicans controlled all branches of government, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were instituting every government change requested by Cheney's energy task force?

There just isn't that much oil to be had any more. The naive attitude, so cheerfully articulated by Paris Hilton and John McCain, would have been appropriate, say, back in the late 70s.

Back when Jimmy Carter tried to get the country off the addiction of oil. And saw his policies laughed off the political stage by Ronald "Don't Worry, Be Happy" Reagan.

In any case, it is hard to discuss the oil issues, and more generally the energy issues, without discussing the relative low character of the filthy rich individuals involved.

Our latest example of the "Drill Baby Drill" mentality was exposed today when the Inspector General released a report about 13 employees of the Bush Department of the Interior who have taken the notion of "fraternizing with industry contacts" about as far as humanly possible.

These kinds of revelations, and the revelations about what we know Enron did back in 2001, make me laugh at the people who casually dismiss any talk of market manipulation in the oil futures market which may have led to the enormous increases in gas prices this year (up, what, 33% in a 12-month period?)

But, sure enough, prices will be down in time for the election.

Again.

Brady on IR

2008-09-08T15:28:00.001-04:00

From the Globe:

The Patriots just released the following statement regarding Tom Brady:

"After extensive tests this morning, it was revealed that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady's left knee, which was injured in the first quarter of yesterday's game, will require surgery. He will be placed on injured reserve and will miss the remainder of the 2008 season."

Hamlet 2 - Rock Me Sexy Jesus

2008-09-07T15:52:00.005-04:00

I saw Hamlet 2 yesterday, and it's pretty good.

Steve Coogan plays high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (pronounced 'Mar-sc-t-z' as a four-syllable word) who produces the high school play at a school in Tuscon every year. He is frustrated because he realizes his talent does not quite live up to his love of the craft, and he is beleagured by the harsh reviews in the local paper. The high school paper. Whose critic is a 14-year old boy, who seems to know more about drama than Dana does.

The current trimester opens with a bunch of new 'ethnic' students (the film's word, not mine) joining the two loyal drama geeks in Dana's one course, which is taught in the school cafeteria, where the lunch ladies are unpacking the food in the background. Following the advice of his critic, Dana decides to write his own play: Hamlet 2.

The thinking behind Hamlet 2 is that Hamlet is just a bit too sad. Dana finds it too sad that everybody is dead at the end of Hamlet. How do you fix that? With a time machine! And Jesus comes along to help! The plot starts in current day, where Jesus has a "swimmer's bod", hence "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus", the play's musical medley. And the play goes from there.

When Dana cuts down the lines of Laertes, who's played by his male drama geek, Rand (played by Skylar Astin) and also makes Laertes "bi-curious", this sets off a chain of events leading to the school banning the play. And that gets the attention of the local press. And that gets the attention of the ACLU.

At this point, the plot is clear, and it's what you expect from the film trailers. But the trailers are misleading: this is more than a film filled with offensive bits designed to tweak the Religious Right. I think the advertising for this film doesn't do it justice. Steve Coogan does a really good job making Dana Marschz into a consistent, believable character. The supporting cast is good, too, esp. the high school kids, and Elizabeth Shue has a nice bit in a supporting role playing herself (well, kind of).

Steve Coogan has been a big deal in the UK for quite some time. He's excellent at developing interesting, off-beat characters in comedy. He's had small roles in "Night at the Museum" and "Tropic Thunder", but he really presents a great work here. It's too bad that it's gotten drowned by a misguided advertising campaign and a reactionary ostrich campaign by the religious right, who completely overreact to the way Jesus plays a role in this film.

The film is more about bad art than about religion. It's a celebration of the idea that anybody can be creative, and about overcoming negative voices. (Actual human voices - not psychosis, as Dana explains.) Also, it's interesting watching Steve Coogan at work. With comedy, a lot of the value comes from expectation, and when comedy doesn't follow the lines that the audience expects, often people do not react well to it. Sometimes when I'm watching Steve Coogan, or Simon Pegg, or Ricky Gervais, or the ensemble comedy 'Green Wing', I'm confused by the feeling that I don't know where it is going. I pretty much never have that feeling with American comedies. At first this is disorienting, but I've really come to like it.

From box office returns, it looks like Hamlet 2 won't be in theaters long. I hope it will have a good life on cable and on DVD. It should be around for years on Comedy Central, like "Best in Show".

Stewart on GOP hypocrisy

2008-09-05T16:28:00.001-04:00

Enjoy.

Quick NFL picks

2008-09-04T19:06:00.003-04:00

AFC East:
Pats 12-4
Bills 8-8
Jets 6-10
Fins 3-13

AFC North
Steelers 10-6
Browns 9-7
Ravens 7-9
Bengals 4-12

AFC South
Colts 11-5
Jags 11-5
Titans 9-7
Texans 7-9

AFC West
Chargers 12-4
Broncos 8-8
Raiders 5-11
Chiefs 3-13

NFC East
Cowboys 12-4
Eagles 10-6
Giants 10-6
Redskins 6-10

NFC North
Packers 12-4
Vikings 10-6
Bears 6-10
Lions 4-12

NFC South
Bucs 10-6
Saints 8-8
Panthers 8-8
Falcons 5-11

NFC West
Seahawks 11-5
Cardinals 7-9
49ers 6-10
Rams 4-12

Wildcard weekend
Jags over Steelers
Colts over Browns

Vikings over Seahawks
Eagles over Bucs

Divisional
Pats over Colts
Chargers over Jags (just to mix things up)

Packers over Vikings
Eagles over Cowboys

Conf. championships
Eagles over Packers
Pats over Chargers

Super Bowl
Pats over Eagles

Yeah, I noticed while filling out the playoff bracket that I'm falling into the trap of picking last year's winners by and large. So I changed a tiebreaker to dump the Giants. :)

These will look like terrible picks by the end of the sesaon, I'm sure.

VP Palin?

2008-08-29T14:43:00.004-04:00

No, not this guy.

The word is that McCain is selecting Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, to be his running mate. Here she is:

She was a local politician until 2006, when she was elected Governor.

Given McCain's age, this is the person supposed to be a heartbeat from the Presidency?

And this is why, Landru's pessimism notwithstanding, I remain convinced Obama will win in November. Not because the Democrats are particularly well-organized. But McCain? He's a dopey candidate. He's low on funds, pisses off conservatives, and makes blunders like this one.

Well, at least Gov. Palin isn't pro-choice! Is that what the Republican party is saying? Mitt Romney would be far more qualified (even though he is a sleazeball) and if McCain wanted to pick a female governor, Jodi Rell of Connecticut is far more experienced and well-liked by people of both parties.

But the powers of the GOP won't allow that.

Proof

2008-08-22T12:11:00.003-04:00

that wackier people than I are out there.

Featuring our friends Jack Torrance and Tardy Turtle!

Favre joins Jets

2008-08-06T23:59:00.002-04:00

Fox Sports is reporting that Favre has been traded to the NY Jets.

I guess Assante Samuel picked a bad time to leave the AFC East.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

the anthrax attacks

2008-08-06T23:36:00.004-04:00

The FBI is apparently trying to make that case that recently-deceased Bruce Ivins was in fact the person responsible for the anthrax letters mailed in 2001. Glenn Greenwald has been discussing this topic for most of the week. See here and here and here.

At the time, there was a lot of propaganda to the effect that they represented another Al Qaeda attack, and it was further insinuated that the strain used contained a chemical, bentonite, that was a signature of Saddam Hussein's anthrax program (which was inert at the time, but what the hell, let's throw the accusation in).

At the time it was immediately clear that the anthrax was of a weapons-grade aerosol type that probably had been produced in the United States.

So...what kind of investigations have we had?

Well, for starters, the FBI directed its attention to Stephen Hatfill. But rather than bring him up on charges, they simply fed rumors about Hatfill to various media outlets, who then ran with them, insinuating that Hatfill was a prime suspect. After a couple years of this, Hatfill managed to clear his name.

Now another scientist, Bruce Ivins, is the new target of FBI/DoJ insinuation. Ivins has (apparently) done the FBI a favor by committing suicide. This might be a sign of a guilty conscience or it might be simply a side effect of suffering from a depressive illness.

We are supposed to believe that Ivins killed himself "as investigators closed in". See the AP version.
That raises the question of just how competently the FBI was "closing in", if Ivins knew about it.

From what we know of the FBI case, there is no direct linkage to the anthrax letters. It seems to all appearances that Ivins had access to anthrax, and was somewhat deranged. But did he actually sent the letters? We still have no reason to believe that he did.

Meryl Nass, another anthrax researcher, has raised some interesting questions. In particular, was Dr. Ivins in Central New Jersey on the dates the letters were mailed? This would presumably be an easy matter to investigate (and it surely would have been easier back in 2001, when the FBI started floundering around this case).

It doesn't make sense to me that Ivins would go to the trouble to drive to New Jersey to mail the threatening letters, only to use a strain of anthrax that could be directly traced to him, individually. It seems to me that another patsy has been set up.

I tend to be of the opinion that the anthrax letters were part of a psyop to push the US into war against Iraq. I don't have any evidence, but I think it is a theory that fits the data at least as well as the Ivins theory. The lettering used, the choice to mail the letters from New Jersey, and the followup hullabaloo - in particular the campaign to tie in bentonite, suggests that whoever was behind the anthrax attacks also wanted Iraq to be blamed.

Another possibility is that some second party independently decided to blame Iraq after the letters were sent. This issue could be resolved if ABC were to reveal the source for the bentonite story.

ABC has chosen to not do so thus far. Apparently the confidentiality of sources who lie to the American public in the pursuit of a possibly unpopular war is of paramount importance to ABC, at least more important than their credibility to the general public. Somebody lied to ABC - was it Ivins himself, or some other party?

I would think that if the source was Ivins himself, that ABC would come forward now, as it would dovetail neatly with the establishment story. (Indeed, I hesitate to suggest this possiblity, as ABC might decide to seize upon it. But of course, that would require ABC to read this blog.)

I suspect that the source for the bentonite story was not Ivins. But still, ABC won't reveal the source. Thanks for serving as a conduit for government-sponsored psyops against the citizenry of the United States, guys!

living in America

2008-08-02T00:30:00.003-04:00

Have we achieved the idiocracy yet?

I raise this question because crack reporter Amy Chozick of the Wall Street Journal, generally considered to be one of the most reputable print journals in the United States, if not the world, has asked the important and timely question: Is Barack Obama Too Fit to Be President?

Sadly No! has the best take on this absurdity here and here.

maintenance can pay off

2008-07-17T16:04:00.002-04:00

Hot damn.

Dame Helen does not make my mental list of Top Actresses of My Generation, for the obvious reason that she's a wee bit too old.

For the list, that is.

Hat tip to Salon.

Eastern Promises

2008-07-11T22:34:00.002-04:00

See it.

It's on Cinemax right now, which means if you have 'On Demand' you can see it for free whenever you want.

It's very good.

You probably know by now that Viggo Mortensen was nominated for Best Actor for his role as a Russian limo driver involved in the London Russian mafia. You may not know much more, other than Naomi Watts is in the film. Mortensen is excellent, but his work is not the only reason to see the film.

These days, most crime and mafia films glamorize crime excessively. This is something I've complained about before, even though I like films like "Ocean's Eleven".

Somebody needs to show crime in the proper light. "Eastern Promises" does a great job with that. Where films like "The Godfather" and any Scorcese film tend to present the mafia as flawed, but amusing and somewhat honorable, a more honest film like "Eastern Promises" doesn't waste time with that kind of glorification. Crime is simply sad, and organized crime is sadder still, since it does so much damage.

As for Naomi Watts, she'll be featured in my "best actresses of my generation" series, whenever I get it started.

George Carlin was an atheist (you schmucks!)

2008-07-02T14:32:00.003-04:00

While I'm mulling over three posts
- a roundtable forum on the value of appeasement, chaired by Neville Chamberlain
- a discussion of what randomness is and what it isn't, as an exercise in expository writing about math
- a discussion of the top 10 actresses of my generation. This is suffering a bit because (a) my top 8 choices are all non-American, and (b) it's damned hard to get to 10

Anyway, I was inspired by the latest cartoon by August J. Pollak, and so I link to it approvingly.

We've lost two of the greatest atheist voices in the world in the past year: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and George Carlin. It was no coincidence that both were very funny people. Humor is a great tonic.

FISA

2008-06-20T14:55:00.004-04:00

What I'm seeing today.

Für Deutsche die manchmal meinen Blog lesen, erkläre ich. Auf englisch "rot sehen" bedeutet "sehr verärgert sein". Ich weiss nicht, ob man das auch auf deutsch sagt.

Seventeen

2008-06-18T13:43:00.001-04:00

f*ck the NIH!

2008-06-17T14:34:00.003-04:00

During the 90s, there was a big push to increase NIH funding. Indeed, funding was doubled over the course of several years.

Well, the Bush administration has not only not kept up pace with the doubling, they've not even bothered to keep funding levels commensurate with the rate of inflation.

In other words: they are defunding the NIH.

Science Blogger DrugMonkey has the story.

A recent NEJM article shows how the recent spending cuts (and that's what freezing spending really is) have reversed the doubling to the point where the effect of the doubling years has effectively been undone. We are on target to revert back to the line of projected growth that the NIH would have been at had the doubling never occurred!

Brilliant!

(And I say this not only as a former employee of the NIH who might have been kept on had the hiring freeze been in place. But it's worth including that caveat.)

Don't call it a comeback!

2008-06-13T19:14:00.002-04:00

Not much to say about last night's NBA game other than IT WAS THE BIGGEST COMEBACK IN NBA HISTORY!

After trailing by 21 after 1 quarter and 18 at halftime, the Celtics outscored the Lakers by 24 in the second half to win by 6!

I don't think the Lakers can score enough when the Celtics are playing their best defense. In other words, I think the Celtics are better.

A little-known fact that Celtics fans might want to know: the first quarter deficit can all be laid at the feet of Databoy. Had he not wanted to play a second game of Thurn and Taxis, I would have been watching the game from the start (at Landru/Ilse's). Since it's clear that the Celtics' turnaround started when I was paying more attention to them, and they only really kicked in after Reno 911 was over, it's clear that me watching them is the key!

I'm not going to indulge in predictions. As I see it, one of two things will happen on Sunday. Either the Lakers will be so demoralized from the loss last night that they'll show up and lay a stink bomb, or they'll regroup and play their hearts out and win easily.

Or it'll be a close game. :)

I think I've covered all the bases here.

very cool news in evolution

2008-06-13T19:13:00.001-04:00

I'm going to be lazy and just link to another blog post.

fun with image searching

2008-06-11T12:43:00.004-04:00

OK, I'm copying Antje
!

It's no surprise, is it, that searching with Ginger's image finds an orangutan!

Ha ha ha! Ha ha!

Uh oh, she's giving me a dirty look.

If you want to do this with your own pics, look at Idee.

Celtics v Lakers

2008-06-05T12:28:00.004-04:00

OK, so the NBA got the finals that ABC has been wishing for. This could be the most-watched NBA finals since Jordan retired in '98. A lot of the conventional wisdom is that the Lakers should be favored. This seems curious to me, since

a) the Celtics had a lot more wins this season
b) the Celtics were 2-0 against the Lakers this season
c) the Celtics have home court advantage

I think people are judging the Cs poorly in light of their less-than-impressive performances against the Cavs and especially against the Hawks.

The Celtics are an older team. They do not match up well against young, athletic teams like the Hawks and Wizards. But...the Lakers are not a young, athletic team like the Hawks and Wizards.

As for the Cavs series, it is true that, if the Cs play as poorly against the Lakers as they did against the Cavs, they will lose. Kobe is at least as good as LeBron, and the rest of the Lakers are far better than the rest of the Cavs.

But with that in mind, we should note that the Cs played considerably better against the Pistons than they did in the first two rounds. I think that for Pierce, Allen, and Garnett, the big pressure on them was to actually make the Finals. All three had made the conference finals before, only to come up short.

It is hard to foresee how this will play out, because it's hard to figure out exactly how well various players will play. I think we can pencil in Kobe and KG for excellent performances. My gut feeling is that Pierce will have a solid series, and be dominant in at least two games. So it may come down to the less predictable players: Ray Allen, Lamar Odom, and Pau Gasol.

A lot has been written about how good Gasol is, but though he is smooth and quick, he is not a particularly physical center. I think Kendrick Perkins can hold his own, if he uses physical play to keep Gasol in check. As for Odom, I don't think that the Cs have to do much - whether he plays well or not seems to be random. And whether Ray Allen has shaken off his shooting slump remains to be seen, though his shooting in the last two games against the Pistons was excellent.

Bottom line: there appears to be a conventional wisdom that the NBA is an individual game, and whichever team has the best player is going to be the team that wins. This is at best a facile explanation. The Pistons never had the "best player", but they won twice in 89-90 and once a few years back. Michael Jordan never won a Finals by himself, nor did Magic, Bird, Shaq, or Dr. J. And really, if you want this theory debunked as thoroughly as possible, consider Wilt's career.

Consider the 1986 Celtics-Bulls series, when MJ lit up the Cs for 62 points, and the Bulls still lost. Bird described MJ as "God" at that point. MJ was clearly the best player in the series, and, again, the Bulls still lost.

I would give a slight edge to Kobe over KG as "the best player", but it's not a big advantage by any means.

I feel pretty sure the Celtics will win Game 1. We'll go from there. The odds are really stacked against the Lakers in the 2-3-2 format. They either have to win two games in Boston or win three in a row at home and at least one in Boston.

I would put the Cs as slight favorites here. Incredibly, considering they won 66 games, they are generally being underrated by the media.

defending those who have done wrong

2008-05-14T12:48:00.002-04:00

The events of the past few days have underscored in my mind the need for defense attorneys, even for people who are clearly guilty of something. It also reminds me of the Clinton impeachment.

With Bill Clinton and Bill Belichick, in both cases we had people who had clearly done something wrong. But the problem is that, once the wrongdoing is exposed, it's easy for more accusations to arise which may or may not be founded. In Clinton's case, the wrongdoing was the affair with Lewinsky. The evidence of dishonesty, however, has led to oodles of conspiracy theories as absurd as that he was behind the deaths of Vince Foster and/or Ron Brown.

In Belichick's case, the wrongdoing was illicitly taping signals of opposing coaches during games. The pile-on was the accusation that he had also taped the Rams' walk-through practice before the Super Bowl in 2001.

It is difficult to stand up and defend somebody who has already been exposed as a cheater. Indeed, it is much easier to pile on, since anybody who defended BB in the past few months was derided as a loyalist kool-aid drinker. But when I saw Belichick dismiss as absurd the notion that they taped the walk-through, it seemed true to me. Not because he seemed particularly honest at the time, but because the explanation was so mundane and dismissive. He said, basically, that it would be pointless to tape a walk-through because you would get no information out of it.

The fact that the original story in the Herald was unsourced and never was verified, and that the entire Patriots organization was so vehement about its falsity, convinced me that there was no tape out there. I wasn't convinced that there never had been a tape, but I figured BB was smart enough not to allow Bob Kraft to be so explicit if there was any chance he'd be exposed as a liar.

I figured in the worst case, Walsh would say that there had been a tape, but he didn't have a copy. But the news is even more favorable for the Pats: not only is there no tape, but everybody involved agrees that there never was a tape.

Shame on the Boston Herald for ruining the Super Bowl experience for all Patriots' fans. Publishing an unverified story two days before the Super Bowl was inexcusable. I know that the Patriots won't use this as an excuse, but I have to think that bit of hullaballoo hurt their ability to focus on the football that day.

celtics, hoyas, and media attention

2008-05-13T13:21:00.003-04:00

Watched the Cs lose their 5th straight road playoff game. The formula was the same: the starters played well, the bench was mediocre, and then they couldn't score in the 4th quarter.

Barkley and Magic talked about this on the post-game show. Where a lot of the media attention in the Hawks series was on the Cs' defense, the real story, imho, is how clunky their offense is. Barkley and Magic pointed out that the Cs cannot get easy baskets in a half-court offense. This is exactly the problem. Down the stretch in close games, they are throwing up absurd 3-pointers. That's a sure path to losing.

Hmm...who does this remind me of? Oh, right! The Hoyas! The Hoyas have always (well, most of the the time) been a great defensive team, but aside from Iverson, they've always had trouble scoring consistently against good teams. Like this version of the Celtics, they are in great shape when they pound weaker teams, but I don't trust them in close games.

Having said all of that, the media attention poured on the Celtics is really excessive. There are 4 conference semifinals going on. In the first 16 games, the home teams have gone 15-1. And yet the coverage would make you think that the Celtics are uniquely doomed, even though their regular season record has given them home court advantage as long as they stay in.

When asked point-blank whether the Celtics needed to win a road game to win the title, Barkley said point-blank 'no'. And then gave his "boy is that question stupid" look. I like Barkley as a commentator. He doesn't bother to buy into the idiotic narratives that the media create to kill time. Aka Shaughnessy hype.

Part of the problem right now is that this Celtic team appears to listen to the media noise. I miss the days of Bird, who never gave a rat's ass what anybody else thought.

I'm not convinced this team will win, but I am also not convinced they will lose. They are surely a better team than Cleveland. But right now I think the Lakers and Hornets are playing much better.

ignorant right-wing blowhardedness...a case example

2008-05-05T17:45:00.006-04:00

OK, on my gaming email list today, where political discussion is strictly against the rules, Ignorant Blowhard said today:

For fantasy and multi-power intrigues, I again direct your attention to
the New York Times, or to any pronouncement from the ---o--a-i- National
Committee (maintaining plausible deniability). Thank you. I remain ...

Numerous people objected to this comment. My reply was:

Just stop it already. It's not funny.

This bonehead had been told specifically in the past to not make political comments on this list. And yet he could not stop.

His reply?

No. You are correct. It is deeply sad, and has been for very many
years. Do you work for the Times? Are you a subscriber? Thank you. I
remain ...

Obtuse, supercilious, asinine.

I told him...

No, what's not funny are your ill-considered attempts to introduce "humor" to the list by
1) liberal-bashing
2) Democrat-bashing
3) NY Times bashing

The fact that you think all three are related suggests to me that you have not read the NY Times at all in the past 16 years. After all, which newspaper
a) pushed the Whitewater "scandal" incessantly for eight years
b) pushed Bush administration WMD bullshit for the 12 months leading to the invasion of Iraq
?

All of this is well-documented elsewhere. I suggest starting with Bob Sommerby.

You have already been told more than once that politics is absolutely verboten on this list, and have been steered to the appropriate list. Your cutesy games are, as () put it, passive-aggressive bullshit. We're tired of it.

You can rest assured that there are liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans and independents who all enjoy gaming and use this list to meet and discuss gaming. If we used this list to discuss politics, it would quickly degenerate into name-calling and flame wars. That's why we don't do it.

You are a relative newcomer to a list that's been around for over a half-dozen years now. The old-timers on the list are getting sick of your behavior. I don't give a damn if you're ten years older than me - as far as I'm concerned, that carries no weight whatsoever.

CUT. IT. OUT.

He continued to play the jackass at this point.

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Miss defender of righteousness and purity (but not,
conspicuously, freedom of speech). Methinks you doth protest too much.

First, I did not do 1 or 2, only 3. That you would see 1 and 2 (and
start to foam at the mouth) says much more about you than me.

Second, I did not say they were related; but you just did.

Third, I have not been told that politics is forbidden, as I have not
yet been political in this forum. I was once taken to task for
paraphrasing Dorothy Parker (which someone decided to take personally),
and now for a completely apolitical attack on the NYT for being
fantastic. Why must you assume that the NYT's antipathy for reality (or
my notice of that fact) is politically-based?

Fourth, why must you be so defense, aggressive, and profane?

Fifth, who is this "herd of independent minds" that you presume to speak
for? Do they know you are their leader?

Sixth, What has our ages got to do with anything?

Seventh, Do you overreact for a living, or is it just a hobby?

In short, you (and perhaps others) have taken a not particularly clever,
but also not particularly political cheap shot and have chosen to get
your panties in a bunch and blow this way out of proportion (and make it
much more political than it originally was). This brings us back to
point #4, above. Again, I apologize for any offense, it was not
intended. Sheesh! Thank you. I remain ...

I think that, if you look at what happened here, my anger was not at the original post. My anger was that, when confronted with rule-breaking, he just continued to act like an ass. I think he's a dope for ignoring the rules regarding the ettiquette of the list. But refusing to take polite advice and acting the clownish moron is quite another thing.

Time and again he refused to actually address the substance of anything I said. Anyway, here I go...

Now you are claiming that you did not criticize Democrats today.

Cut the horseshit and stop insulting people's intelligence. You definitely took a potshot at the Democratic National Committee as well as the NY Times. Deleting some letters and using the phrase "plausible deniability" doesn't give you any cover in this crowd.

We're not idiots, (). Stop treating us like idiots.

Another suggestion: if you use quotations, use them to actually, quote something. When you use the phrase "herd of independent minds" in quotes, you are falsely suggesting that I used such a phrase.

Calling me "Miss defender" of righteousness is another right-wing bs trick where you try to feminize anybody who disagrees with you. The phrase "panties in a bunch" is the same thing. I suppose I could escalate and ask you to wash the sand out of your vagina, but in general I disapprove of using misogynistic tactics in debate.

If you're wondering why you are pissing off so many people, maybe you ought to stop blaming the people you are pissing off. Nobody else has any problem obeying the basic ground rules regarding making cheap political shots on this list. I'm sure these jokes get chuckles and grins with the military crowd you hang out with, but in other crowds of people, they just make you look like a person hopelessly out of touch.

The reason why () identified you as right-wing solely because of a comment about the NY Times is because only right-wing extremists still cling to the idea that the NY Times is a red-wing rag filled with communist propaganda. That kind of thinking basically went out with Nixon, who, not coincidentally, was the person who also popularized the phrase "plausible deniability". Basically you are pushing a lot of right-wing buttons: belittling women, feminizing men, criticizing the NY Times, calling the DNC liars. From my standpoint, you are behaving like a caricature of weak right-wing thought.

I am not "foaming at the mouth". You are dealing with cold anger right now, not hot rage. Your failure to distinguish between the two does not serve you well. () and () are the ones who get angry quickly. I anger much more slowly, but you can rest assured that I am a far worse person to piss off than either of those two. I am far less forgiving.

You have been gently advised to remain non-political on this list. You've ignored that advice. Today, you made a smart-ass comment that pissed off a number of people. I gave you a less gentle advice. And now you're making it personal. I suggest you simply take the advice and not try to make this personal. It's not something you can win.

The issue here is not whether the original comment was offensive. The issue is how a person behaves when he is asked to adhere to the rules of the list. The person in question here
a) ignored previous requests to keep the list apolitical
b) obtusely pretended to not understand today's requests to keep the list apolitical
c) lied about how he injected political comments into an apolitical list
d) was abusive towards the people who tried to politely point out the problems with what he was doing
and...
e) made irrelevant complaints about free speech rights

I make this post not solely to detail the behavior of somebody I am increasingly viewing as an ass. I do it to highlight the utter idiocy of his original comment, linking the NY Times and the DNC.

Consider today's column by Glenn Greenwald. (This was coincidentally published today, but considering how egregious the Times has been in recent years, the coincidence is hardly noteworthy.)

Basically, what has been happening with the NY Times is recent years is that it has been a ready conduit for propaganda and misinformation put forth by neocons who want to continue and expand the wars in the Middle East.

A snippet:

As usual with Gordon's articles, nothing is done here other than uncritically repeating Bush administration claims under the cover of anonymity. Virtually every paragraph in this article is nothing more a mindless recitation of uncorroborated assertions which he copies from Bush officials and then weaves into a news narrative, with the phrase "American officials say" tacked on at the end or the phrase "according to officials" unobtrusively interspersed in the middle

In contrast, the DNC is run by Howard Dean, who was nearly unique in his willingness to publicly criticize the war in Iraq back in 2004.

How any thinking person could make a link between the NY Times and the DNC is truly mind-boggling in these times.

Update:
in case it's not clear in the font, I used parentheses '( )' where I deleted anybody's name. For some reason, it looks like the letter O.

Celtics advance

2008-05-05T09:41:00.002-04:00

After seeing the Celtics struggle in Atlanta three times, it was gratifying in a very belated way to see them blow away the inferior, sub-.500 Hawks yesterday.

The series raises questions that are still troubling. Why, after having gone stone cold in the second half twice in Atlanta, did they have exactly the same problems in Game 6? To be fair, I think their effort was a bit better in Game 6 than in Game 4. But they suffered because Pierce had bizarrely fouled out and Ray Allen was stone cold.

The game 7 thrashing was so complete it went past the point of being embarrassing for the Hawks to where it was embarrassing for the Celtics. Why, if they were so superior, did it take this long?

So, here come LeBron James and the Cavs. To put this in perspective: the Cavs, not the Pistons, are the defending Eastern Conference champions. Anybody who takes them lightly is a fool. (I'm looking at you, Gilbert Arenas.)

Iron Man rocks

2008-05-02T00:46:00.003-04:00

Robert Downey Jr. is excellent. The screenplay is good, and the action is tremendous.

Any fan of action films or comic book adaptations has to see this film - at least twice.

Jeff Bridges plays Tony Stark's partner. It's really weird seeing The Dude playing an arms merchant. Also weird seeing Gwyneth Paltrow playing the demure assistant type. But Bridges is much weirder.

Anybody who sees this needs to stay through the end of the credits for a neat cameo.

Mathematics in Popular Culture

2008-04-25T19:07:00.002-04:00

I have been thinking about this post for quite some time, and the impetus to do it right now is the season premiere of the Math/Crime drama ‘Numb3rs’. Also, I recently saw the Math/Gambling film 21, which somehow managed to bore me despite involving two of my favorite pursuits: mathematics and gambling.

‘Numb3rs’ is refreshing (despite the stupid title) because it is clear that they have mathematicians consulting for the show. Also, and more importantly, David Krumholz and Peter MacNicol do a great job portraying mathematicians as human beings. Far too often mathematicians are portrayed as freaks, or worse, as mentally unstable.

The list of films with this tendency is quite long: A Beautiful Mind is the most famous, but there is also Proof, Sneakers, and, bizarrely, Presumed Innocent. I’m forgetting some…

The Oscar-winning film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is forgiven for participating in this trend, at least somewhat. It is, after all based on a true story. I am using the word ‘based’ fairly loosely – anybody who has read the biography that the film is based on knows that Nash’s schizophrenia manifested itself in a way entirely different than as was shown in the film. In the film, his insanity manifests itself primarily through vivid hallucinations. In real life, he simply became a self-centered, anti-social ass. The film was correct that he underwent electro-shock therapy. But the film overstated his ability to deal with his mental illness simply by concentrating a lot. If only mental illness were so simple!

I haven’t seen ‘Proof’. Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow plays the daughter of Anthony Hopkins’ character, and both are brilliant mathematicians. Also, apparently she suffers from vivid hallucinations, too. (BTW, hallucinations are really a cheap cinematic trick- almost as loathsome as amnesia. But I digress.)

‘Sneakers’ is a fun film that deals with cryptography in a manner that, from the mathematician’s standpoint, is laughable. The film is about the pursuit of an algorithm that allegedly can ‘break all codes’, and it does so instantly. This notion is quite absurd.

To put it simply: it is quite conceivable that two different coding schemes would translate different messages into the same coded text. The idea that the coded text could be decoded without knowing the key, so to speak, is immediately seen to be impossible. Anyway, Ben Kingsley plays the maniac mathematician in this film, though, to be fair, Robert Redford is the good guy mathematician here.

‘Presumed Innocent’ is kind of funny in that Harrison Ford’s wife is the graduate student in math – a background character for most of the film. And then it turns out she killed off Great Scacchi out of insane jealousy.

Let’s see…checking IMDB.com
Ah, of course Good Will Hunting features a mathematician with serious psychological issues.
Little Man Tate – serious psychological issues, though not at the level of mania.

I’ll give credit to Michael Crichton – he has likable, sane mathematicians in both the Jurassic Park series and also Sphere. I’ll forgive him for a moment for being utterly insane when it comes to environmentalism.

Anyway, ‘Good Will Hunting’ is the one that was on the tip of my mind that I could not remember.

So, about ‘21’ – the film managed to get the “Monty Hall problem” correct. The “Monty Hall problem” is as follows: you are on “Let’s make a Deal!” and Monty offers you a choice of three doors. Two of the doors have goats, but one of the three has a new car! So you pick a door. The Monty opens one of the other two doors, which has a goat, and you are offered the chance to switch your pick. What should you do?

There are three choices: switch, stay, and it doesn’t matter. It’s pretty clear that ‘stay’ isn’t the correct answer, so it really comes down to the other two.

Superficially, it looks like you now have even odds of getting the car. Indeed, Marilyn vos Savant famously blundered her answer to this problem by insisting it didn’t matter if you changed or not: with two options, you have a 50-50 chance of getting the car.

But that’s not right. When you picked the door, you only had a 1/3 chance of getting the car. And nothing has changed to improve your initial odds. Regardless of whether you picked the car or not, Monty will be able to open a door showing a goat. So the odds that you picked the car are still 1/3. So…switch.

The film 21 babbles some mumbo-jumbo about changing the variables. But the real thing here is that Monty is not acting randomly. Indeed, if Monty were acting randomly, your odds would be 50-50 when the number of choices was reduced to two. Strange how the probability becomes a function of Monty’s thinking, eh?

Anyway, 21 got that right, but screwed up too many other things. In the middle of the film, they have a big to-do about cashing in chips after Lawrence Fishburne gets on their tail. At the end of the film, this difficulty in a similar situation is simply ignored. But most annoyingly, even more annoying than all the Hollywood twists, was the fact that, when the main guy was sitting on 19, and the dealer had 10, he was shouting “Monkey! Monkey!” In this context, a “Monkey” is a face card. Why would the player want the dealer to hit 20??? Pathetic.

Versus: worst sporting coverage ever

2008-04-21T15:01:00.005-04:00

So I'm watching the Boston Marathon on the Versus network. And the race is getting exciting - the two women in the lead have turned the corner, and are on "the last 800 meters" to the finish line. A few minutes behind, the men's leader is on a record pace. (The women finish before the men because the race organizers have a staggered start.)

And just as the women hit a point 400 meters out, the clock hits 12:00 and Versus switches to an infomerical for a gold club. No apology, no warning, nothing.

I wonder why Versus paid for the rights to air the race, if they were going to cut off right at the finish?

Edit: the women finished 2 seconds apart, in the closest finish in race history. The guy who won didn't beat his own record, but it would have been nice to see these things myself.

autism awareness day

2008-04-02T17:03:00.001-04:00

Read what Landru has to say.

and Andrew Sullivan, to boot

2008-03-21T20:40:00.003-04:00

His explanation as to why he was wrong on href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/what-i-got-wron.html">Iraq.

I was distracted by the internal American debate to the occlusion of the reality of Iraq.

Well, do you think that, before you start talking about invading a country, you might learn something about the country you are proposing to invade? Let's keep in mind that, before pretty much every invasion in history, the jingoists think that the war will be quick and easy. In some cases, like the American Civil War, both sides feel that way!

American foreign policy discussions are really conducted on a frighteningly childish level.

Condi Rice

2008-03-21T20:36:00.002-04:00

Well, we now see that after her disastrous tenure as National Security Advisor, which included the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil as well as horrible advice which led to the Iraq war, the costliest foreign policy debacle in American history, that she cannot even run the State Department in a way that keeps people from occasionally rifling through the files of Presidential candidates.

And people still talk about her reverentially? This is a woman who told bold-faced lies to Congress under oath.

Moral of the story: the Republicans are so desperate to have a token black woman they'll let Rice get away with incompetence time and time again.

celtics-pistons

2008-03-06T00:07:00.001-05:00

Not on TV at all. WTF?

Job hunting conundrum ii

2008-03-05T13:44:00.002-05:00

An example of a job that would seem pretty cool: Senior Director of Science Policy at the AACR.

Now how to get this job? It requires managerial experience that I do not have. So perhaps I should try to get some?

In the short term, I'm tempted to do a short-term (3-month) position at NESCENT at Duke.

Job hunting conundrum

2008-02-29T16:53:00.003-05:00

Thinking out loud...

The biggest problem I have in job hunting or, more generally, directing my career, is the question of what kind of work excites me while feeling relevant to the world as a whole.

Here are the constratints:

1) I have to be interested in the work
2) I have to feel that I bring relatively unique skills to the work
3) I have to feel that the work has a positive impact on the world
4) It has to pay the bills - rent, cat food, etc.

When I started college, I was a foreign service student. But I quickly decided it was stupid to try to work as a generic government wonk and leave my math skills out of the equation. Even if I'm passionate about an issue, I don't think I'll ever accomplish as much as I could if I bury myself in a job that doesn't use my talents and which other people can not only do just as well, but many people do much better. The prototypical type of job here would be "foreign service officer". I would be a passable diplomat, but many people would be better. It would be a waste.

An example of a kind of job I've seen along these lines is this position at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. I feel about as strongly about this particular issue as any. But do I want to be a policy advocate 40 hours/week? It just doesn't seem quite right.

So, now I'm adding the constraint "job uses math skills".

There are loads of academic jobs, but the downside there is
a) I'm not hugely excited by the reality of teaching.
b) I'm not hugely excited by the prospect of long work weeks, low pay, and constantly writing grant applications.
c) I think a lot of academic research is pointless.

I enjoy teaching when students are engaged in the topic. And in mathematics, that happens very rarely. One needs to way the small number of highly interested and motivated students against the vast number of people just taking calculus because it's required.

I don't mind the long work weeks that much, as long as I'm motivated by the work, but the entire grant application process seems bizarre as a model for a marketplace. As my advisor has said to me, a lot of academia consists of people providing each other with positive feedback loops. If person X studies topic A because person Y finds it interesting, and vice versa, that will not necessarily make it interesting to me. There is an infinite variety of complexity in the world of mathematics, but I have never found studying complexity and structure for its own sake to be all that rewarding.

So that knocks out academia - at least in the more traditional sense. I have a feeling I would prefer to end up in an academic setting anyway, but only in a way where I felt I was driving my own research and it was meaningful. Ziheng has the kind of position and drive that would serve as a model here, but the problem is that I am really not terribly interested in what he's working on.

So that leads to the conundrum: how do I apply the skills I have (math, cs, programming) to the kinds of problems I think are compelling. A near miss is "finance": finance requires a lot of sophisticated mathematics, but I fear that people in finance tend to be arrogant, self-interested bastards. Well, at least that's the stereotype.

A close cousin of finance is "economics", but the econ I saw when I looked into this issue back during grad school uses comically weak and inapt mathematics. Game theory is a good example of this. I love gaming, but I tend to arch my eyebrow in skepticism when I see its facile application to real-world problems. I should look again, though, more carefully.

An alternate approach is simply to focus on the kind of mathematics I like best, namely graphical modelling, and to see what kind of places use applications of this. That's probably what I should be doing these days. I've been lazy in terms of applying my thinking to the problem. Bad Whispers.

I'll revisit this issue again.

Oscar preview & There Will Be Blood

2008-02-24T18:46:00.004-05:00

Well, the Oscars start in a couple hours, so I finally got out to see There Will Be Blood to see how Daniel Day-Lewis did this time. When we last saw Mr. Day-Lewis in a film, he was stealing Gangs of New York from Leonardo DiCaprio (and everybody else) in a brilliant performance as Billy the Butcher. My hopes were high.

I have mixed feelings about There Will Be Blood. It's a Paul Thomas Anderson production and, on the whole, it's not his best movie. I don't think it's up at the level of Magnolia, or even Boogie Nights. The script is a bit weak in areas, and parts of it seem rather affected. For example, there isn't any dialogue at all for the first fifteen minutes of the film. That seems to me to be PTA showing off rather than doing the best thing to advance the film.

TWBB is an extended story about Daniel Planview, played by DD-L, a self-made oil man in California at the turn of the 20th century. About halfway through the film, I realized that this film was not going to be a dry, dispassionate study of the hard life in the oil business, but rather it was going to be entirely a long, drawn-out story about the conflict between materialism, as personified by Plainview, and religion, as personified by Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday. Eli's brother Paul, also played by Dano, is the one who alerts Plainview to the existence of a massive oil field under some overlooked land near the coast of California. Dano reminded me somewhat of Edward Norton, and I totally missed that he was the one who played the Graham Woodring character in Little Miss Sunshine.

The acting is tremendous, especially Day-Lewis and Dano. The problem is that the screenplay is plodding, wandering all over the place for no good reason. It's weird: many of the individual scenes work very well, but the film doesn't really hang together well as a whole. I still recommend it to any interested filmgoer, because every performance by Daniel Day-Lewis should be seen and enjoyed. Is he a bit over-the-top at times in this film? Perhaps. But many people in real life go over the top at times, too.

The general incoherence stands in stark contrast to what I think was hands down the best film of 2007: No Country for Old Men. No Country for Old Men has a clear structure to it, and everything in the film contributes to the underlying themes. I have been meaning to give this film its own post at some point, but I've been avoiding reality for the past week since Buffy died. And yeah, it's pretty bad if writing a film review is too close to reality.

Anyway, on to the predictions:

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
It's got the momentum and the cast and it's the best film I saw. I've managed to see four of the five nominees, only missing chick flick Atonement. While I enjoyed Michael Clayton, Juno, and There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men is simply better. By a lot.

Best Actor:
Well for starters we can rule out Viggo Morgenstern in a film nobody saw and Johnny Depp for his role in Sweeney Todd. George Clooney was very good in Michael Clayton, but not really up to the level of the other two nominees. I've already praised Tommy Lee Jones for his work in In the Valley of Elah on this blog. That might be the best work of the year. But he's got no hope going up against Daniel Day-Lewis. It would be a huge upset for anybody other than Day-Lewis to win here. This was a year where most of the best acting was in the Supporting Actor category.

Best Actress:
Of the five performances, the only one I've seen is Ellen Page in Juno. And she's not going to win, no matter how adorable she was in this film. I don't even know who the favorite is supposed to be. I doubt it will be Keira Knightley for Atonement. (checks) According to BoxOffficeMojo.com, the fans think Julie Christie will win for Away From Her. I've voted for Cate Blanchett for the second Elizabeth film, which I have yet to see, based on the idea that she's probably at least as good as she was in the first one.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, hands down. Anton Chigurgh is the best bad-ass character to come to film since Hannibal Lecter. I have a lot of fondness for Tom Wilkinson in this category, and I doubted I could see a better acting performance in a supporting role after seeing Michael Clayton, but Bardem just blows him and everybody else away.

Best Supporting Actress:
I only saw two of the five, and of the two, Ruby Dee in American Gangster is a non-entity. Consider this to be a lifetime achievement nomination. Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton is excellent in a central role of the film. Apparently this is a category that Blanchett might win?

Best Director:
Well, this often goes to the director of the Best Film winner, and I think this year will follow that logic. It'll go to Joel and/or Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men.

Best Original Screenplay:
Candidates include Juno, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, Lars and the Real Girl, and The Savages. The last two are also-rans. Ratatouile is reportedly excellent, but I haven't seen it. Given the choice between Juno and Michael Clayton, I would lean a bit to Juno for its rare ability to capture the essence of teenage life accurately. Note to screenwriters: teenagers don't talk in deep tones about their lives like the kids on 90210 did. Mostly they have strong opinions about some things and are completely clueless about a lot of things. Juno has an excellent screenplay, and I hope it wins here.

Best Adapted Screenplay:
No Country for Old Men should win this one, too. An excellent adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy story (novel? novella?)

Best Animated Film:
I suspect Ratatouille will win. Some have complained that The Simpsons Movie wasn't included. I think it should have been included just as a nod to the years of excellence for the TV series, but the film itself was hardly one of the better Simpsons' stories.

Best Documentary:
Sicko? As usual, I haven't seen most of these.

Time to play Civ IV for an hour and then watch the Oscars. Perhaps I'll get to bed before 3 a.m. tonight?

Buffy is seriously ill

2008-02-15T13:31:00.005-05:00

She did eat last night, but I'm very troubled by the fluid throughout her abdomen. This seems to suggest serious liver damage and/or cancer. I'm guessing she only has a few days left.

Fluid is not supposed to be in the abdominal cavity. Whatever has caused that to happen means something is seriously wrong. And I cannot go through and do not want to go through a two-month ordeal like I did with Pandora 6 years ago.

I love my red hooded sweatshirt!

2008-02-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

Since Bill Belichick has been taking a beating the past week, I thought I would show my support for him with an embedded video featuring Adam Sandler in the red hooded sweatshirt.

WWBE?

2008-02-08T15:55:00.001-05:00

What would Buffy eat?

She had a good 2007 because I discovered she would eat the Whiskas "Oh So Meaty/Oh So Fishy" gourmet food. Unfortunately, they don't have that in the US. The closest is "Purrfectly fishy", which I think she'll eat.

She used to eat Friskies, but she's turned her nose up to that recently. She's looking thinner than she did in France, and it's starting to worry me. The strange thing is that, when she turns her nose up to any particular food, Ginger does the same. And yet Ginger is not sickly and gaunt.

Hmmm....

Well, I've gotten them some Iams dry food, which should be healthier than the Meow Mix. But while Ginger is tearing into it, will Buffy eat it? The only way Buffy will really gain weight is if I find a dry food she'll eat.

Good news is that she did like the treats I gave her yesterday. Bad news is that each only has 1 calorie.

This post was written with the aid and assistance of Ginger sitting on my left hand.

Update: 2/14
Well, it turns out that Buffy is seriously ill. Her weight has dropped to 4 lbs. 4 oz, which means she's lost at least a pound and a half since returning from France. The vets are very pessimistic about her condition.

Super Bowl thoughts

2008-02-05T14:43:00.001-05:00

There's little to say that hasn't been said elsewhere. Some points I'd like to make:

1) People who complain that Belichick left the field with 1 second left on the clock need to first acknowledge that the clock had run to zero before time had been added, and that only later was a second added. Thinking that every possible action a person makes is a revelation about that person's black heart, thinking that every gesture or word is a sign of inner contempt: these kinds of things are more revelatory about the people making the "observations" than anything else.

I was hoping the Pats would win more to just shut up the sanctimonious critics than anything else. Now these mouthbreathers are going to be with us for a while.

2) Um, KSK? You guys really need to get a grip on your hate orgy.

3) The Pats Oline played like crap. But with that in mind, the Patriots' offense was more productive than people realize. What happened is that, in the second quarter, the Pats had two sacks in a row, and that kind of immediate reinforcement of a phenomenon makes it appear more significant that it really is. The Pats gave up 5 sacks on 69 plays. The Giants gave up 3 sacks on 63 plays. That's not as much of a difference as people are making it to be.

4) Luck played a huge role. Namely, the three fumbles lost were all recovered by the Giants. And the scrambling pass from Eli to Tyree has no business being successful. The Pats had no similar lucky plays.

5) Penalties played a huge role. The Pats made a lot of stupid penalties. The Giants made few, and also got away with a couple egregious ones, most notably when Toomer pushed his defender in the face to catch a ball.

With all that said, the Pats did not play well enough to deserve to win. The luck that had carried them against the Eagles and Ravens was not there. The coaching was suspect: the refusal to attempt a FG on 4th and 13, the abandonment of the running game, and the decision to cover Burress with Hobbs in single coverage on the biggest play of the game were all bad choices. McDaniels is a good offensive coordinator, but I don't like the decision to abandon the running game altogether in favor of the short passing game. Maroney ran well in the 3rd quarter, and then only one rushing play was called in the 4th.

Basically, everything went wrong. This does not mean "good defeated evil" or that the Patriots got their comeuppance for "running up the score" or that God hates a cheater or anything like that. (If the last theory were true, we wouldn't have had 8 years of W in the White House.) Problem is that it all happened at the wrong time.

People who think the Pats peaked too early must have forgotten the game against the Jaguars, which was easy as pie.

The Pats' D is starting to get old, which makes me fairly certain next season won't go as well as this one did, esp. if Assante Sammuel leaves. The idea of Hobbs and Gay being the starting CBs scares me. They need help at linebacker, too. The only upside for next season is that the schedule will be relatively light.

For people worried about the impact: I would say this rates about the level of the loss by the Celtics in the 1985 finals. It's nowhere near as bad as the really bad Sox losses in 1978, 2003, or esp. 1986. It's not as bad as the thumping the Pats took in Super Bowl XX. It's disappointing, but I'm not of the mind that the only way to enjoy a football season is if your team wins the Super Bowl.

One down, one to go

2008-01-16T19:33:00.001-05:00

So I've finished a draft of the mammal phylogeny paper and sent it off to the Z-man. Yay! Now he'll probably ignore it for a while and then read it and make comments about the charts and graphs or something like that. It needs more polish, for sure, but that part is not my job.

So I'm done with that and can move to the FastME paper with Olivier. I've got the protein alignments and their respective distance matrices, so it's time to build trees, trees, and more trees. This is pretty easy to automate.

On the job-seeking front, I had a meeting with a guy at State today who I know from my college buddy, let's call him Perv until he shows up with a different name. Perv is one of the big reasons I left Georgetown, namely because he's so much smarter when it comes to policy issues than I am. So I figured I had to outflank the wonks of the world by learning a little math.

I may have taken that strategy a wee bit too far. Huh huh huh.

Anyway, I got to meet a guy named Fernando at State which was good because it made it a bit more real to me that these jobs are out there. Unfortunately, not at State, at least not in the fashion of "knocking at the door". They only get their scientists through the AAAS fellowships, which I've applied for twice with no result. Well, it's just like running in a sense: the hardest thing is to start running - once you have a bit of momentum it's easier to keep moving.

Ginger on the wrist

2008-01-10T12:40:00.000-05:00

What does it say about me that I'm typing this with Ginger resting comfortably on my left wrist? I wish I could take a photo of this - I'm going to count on somebody with a digital camera doing this sometime in the near future, so blog readers can understand how much Ginger likes it when I type at the computer.

return of Ikea Boy

2008-01-10T12:32:00.000-05:00

So I made another trek down to College Park to get some storage furniture: a bookcase, some extra shelving, a bureau, and a TV stand so I can use my coffee table as a coffee table or whatever else I want to use it as.

The extra shelving possibilities were 80 cm or 40 cm. 40 seemed too short for the Ikea bookcases I already have, so I went with the larger size. But I got home and I think what I already have are 60 cm wide, so I'm going to have to find a saw somewhere or give up on this idea.

And let's face it: finding a saw would be more fun.

The divergence paper is close to done and I should finish the draft today or tomorrow, unless I'm really slacking. The FastME paper is nowhere near done, but I'll deal with that later.

And then there's job-hunting. Well, as they say, avoidance isn't only a river in Egypt. I did find a nice possibility at AAAS in Cambridge (Mass, not the poncy place in East Anglia). But I'll treat it as a long shot.

the importance of SSRIs (or 'Whispers comes out')

2007-12-20T13:33:00.000-05:00

I'm just saying that Tom Cruise is an idiot.

I can go months doing all the mental exercises in existence, work hard, exercise, eat right, and even swallow down St. John's Wort and still feel like crap. But a couple days back on citalopram and I'll be good as new.

SSRIs are not the end-all to avoiding depression. But having fought this battle for twenty years, both with meds and without, I think at this point, esp. as I get older, that the notion of trying to fight depression with taking meds makes about as much sense to me as a person trying to fight diabetes without insulin injections.

p.s. No, I'm not gay. I'm thin and single, but I'm not neat by any stretch of the imagination.

p.p.s. In case the p.s. seems obscure, it's a reference to a famous "Seinfeld" episode.

Ikea boy gets to work

2007-12-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

So, I'm facing a mostly-empty condo, with only a bed frame, a couple bookshelves, and a futon mattress hijacked from Landru which will probably turn into a pumpkin at some point. The girls are very happy that I'm back on a queen-sized mattress, instead of the tiny twin-sized sofa-bed I was sleeping on in Montpellier. Now they can both demand my attention simultaneously, rather than be forced to take turns. (And somehow, when they are forced to take turns, it is usually Ginger's turn.)

Anyway, I'm gradually furnishing this place. First I've dug out things from storage in MD and KS. I got a cheap 19" flat-screen TV at BestBuy early this week. And a couple days ago I made a run to Ikea on Route 1.

I swear, I really am the target audience for Ikea. I just love the place. Getting furniture that I build myself is so much fun! On this trip I decided to pick up what I need most, while leaving the more luxurious items for the next trip, and the general storage items for a trip after that one. (I could probably use a few more bookshelves, but really, that's a low priority.)

So, I've picked up a desk, which is the highest priority, and a chair to go with it. And a coffee table for the TV & VCR. And a comfortable chair to sit in while watching TV. But the only thing I've assembled so far is the nightstand.* What else do I need? Dining room set, sofa, another comfortable chair or two, a mattress set, storage, etc. The mattress set is next on the list, but I think I'll defer that until after Christmas.

*In German, "nightstand" is "Nachttisch" and this is a great word for testing the tendency of English-speakers to run the end of one consonant into the next consonant. The German word for dessert is "Nachtisch", which literally means "after table", i.e. after the meal, while "Nachttisch" literally means "night table". The thing to remember is that when saying "Nachtisch" you need to have clear separation between the syllables, "Nach tisch" (nawhk tisch) and avoid the temptation to use the 't' in the first syllable. If you do that, when you think you are ordering dessert in a German restaurant, they will wonder why you are ordering a small table to be put next to your bed.

close calls for the Pats

2007-12-06T22:44:00.000-05:00

I don't care.

OK, for starters, everybody who has doubts about the validity of the numerous penalty calls against the Ravens on fourth downs during the Patriots' last drive on Monday needs to watch the NFL network's rebroadcast of the game, and have the NFL's rules guru explain why it really is holding when Chris McAllister rides Randy Moss for the first 7 yards of his route, seeing as no contact at all is allowed beyond the 5-yard zone.

Anyway, the Pats are going to get the #1 seed and I don't really care if they go 16-0 or not.

Though it would be good to do so, if only to piss off Mercury Morris.

the streak

2007-11-15T05:30:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, October 16, the Cleveland Indians won Game 4 of the ALCS. Since then, none of the three major Boston franchises have lost.

- the Red Sox took the last three games of the ALCS, and then swept the World Series in four games.
- the Patriots have won three games in a row, as part of their 9-0 start to the season
- the Celtics have won their first 7 games of the NBA season

The latter is the most surprising. Apparently this is the best start since 1972-3.

Which is kinda weird, seeing as there was this guy named Bird who played on the team throughout the 80s, along with a few other pretty good guys.

I don't think this team is as good as the '86 Celtics. Of course, the entire league is flatter now - there are more teams and the average team is, IMO, worse. Individual players are better than they were in the 80s, but team play is a lost art.

The Celtics have the advantage of playing in the awful Eastern Conference. They won't play the Spurs or Suns until February. Of course the streak won't last that long, as they have a stretch in December where they play the Pistons and then go on a four-game West Coast road trip right after Christmas. The last game of the four is at the Lakers, and it's the second game in two days.

Of course, the Lakers might have gotten rid of Kobe by then, so who knows?

I'm talking about the Celtic's winning streak, which we all know isn't going to last, to avoid talking about another streak, which I don't want to jinx.

Tommy and Tom

2007-11-11T09:49:00.000-05:00

I had been mulling over a post entitled "Tom Wilkinson kicks ass" raving about his performance in "Michael Clayton". In this film, he has a supporting role as a lawyer who has a manic-depressive moment while interviewing a witness for a class action suit.

He strips naked and professes his devotion to one of the plaintiffs. (Thankfully, and with all due respect to Mr. Wilkinson, this happens off camera.) Problem is that his job is with the defendant's team.

Tom Wilkinson was "just another one of those British actors" before he really made an impression in "The Full Monty". Then he started getting more interesting roles. He really broke through with a masterful performance in "In the Bedroom" as the father of a boy who is murdered by a vengeful husband. He is still doing mostly supporting performances, as is typical for actors of his age, but he shines again in "Michael Clayton".

It is very easy to do a hack job playing a person with mental illness. Most actors just behave weirdly and illogically, and with excesses of anger and sadness, and that combination is supposed to represent mental illness. (BTW, Nicole Kidman did even worse than that in "The Hours" but because she had a fake nose on and had been jobbed for "Moulin Rouge", the film she deserved recognition for, she got an Oscar for "The Hours", even when she was the weak link in the trio of actresses in that film. But I digress. Well, not really since my point was about portraying mental illness.)

Anyway, Wilkinson is masterful at conveying the logic of a man undergoing a "moment of clarity" induced by going of his meds. He realizes that his job essentially consists of defending a rotten corporation that consciously did a cost-benefit analysis and decided to poison its customers. I think it is easy to play such a role incorrectly: to either be too righteous or too nutty. Wilkinson does a great job portraying a person aware of his own mental illness and struggling to decide which of his thoughts are valid and which are solely a result of manic depression. And under all of that is his own legal knowledge, which bursts through in a moment when he's discussing with George Clooney the firm's options in terms of trying to keep him quiet.

Or, to put it differently, Wilkinson is handed a very complex, realistic character and does a masterful job bringing him to screen. I really think he steals the film from George Clooney, who is no slouch in "Michael Clayton" by any means.

Based on what I've seen so far, I would put Wilkinson in the lead for any "Best Supporting Actor" consideration for 2007.

And that brings me to Tommy Lee Jones. I had last seen him in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada", where he did a fine job playing a bilingual rancher investigating the death of a Mexican who he'd worked with. In "In the Valley of Elah", Jones is again playing a man investigating a suspicious death, in this case the death of his son, Michael, a soldier recently returned from Iraq. "Elah" is an interesting film - it would be really easy to do a hack job of a film like this, stridently criticizing the war in Iraq and the concomitant dehumanization of everybody involved. Paul Haggis does a much better job than that. The story is well-balanced and, indeed, seems very friendly to the military perspective throughout. And a key to that angle is the great job Jones does playing a career military man.

"Elah" succeeds magnificently because it "keeps it real", depicting the soldiers with such detail and care that it is easy to imagine these people being people one knows in real life. The horror of the war zone is communicated mostly through videos Michael had recorded with his cell phone, that were damaged in fire and which we see only distorted scenes from. As more details come out about Michael's death, his father's feeling of confidence and of understanding the world are gradually beaten down, though he soldiers on throughout.

I don't know quite what to say about the film as a whole. I think the best anti-war movies and stories are the ones that simply show what happens when war is going on. With the ill-conceived war in Iraq, this should be fairly simple, and yet doing the simple is often very difficult, because the temptation for overt anger and grandstanding is so great. Well, "Elah" his the mark exactly right.

The film is bookended with two scenes where Jones is dealing with the American flag. At the beginning of the film, he sees a building with the flag upside down, and pulls over and finds the person in charge of the flag, a Salvadoran, and explains to him that the upside-down flag is a symbol of distress while they take the flag down and put it back up in the proper position. At the end of the film (is this a spoiler?) he drives by the same flagpost and puts up a flag from Iraq sent by his son, and specifically flies it upside-down, while using duct tape on the flagpost to keep it fixed in that position. The implication is a bit melodramatic, but people are melodrmatic from time to time, especially with symbols like flags.

Jones might get a Best Actor nomination, the film and the writing should. I would rate Jones' performance very highly, though still a notch below Philip Seymor Hoffman in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead". Hopefully one of the two will win, but more likely something awful will happen like Tom Cruise winning. (OK, I shouldn't prejudge "Lions for Lambs", but Cruise makes it so hard not to.)

In summary, I highly recommend both of these films. "Elah" is probably a better film, but I think Wilkinson does the better acting job.

Patriots 24, Colts 20

2007-11-05T13:27:00.000-05:00

Well, the Pats won the big football game and now have the inside track for the best record in the NFL and #1 seed in the playoffs.

And still, I'm not terribly pleased.

There are two things that really bothered me about the game: the penalties and the poor tackling.

The penalties were ridiculous. There was a combination of bad officiating and then the Pats starting committing stupid penalties, which made it harder to complain about the actual mistakes the officials made.

There were three pass interference calls on the Pats, two on defense, and one on offense.

There was one pass interference call on the Colts.

The first PI call on Assante Samuel seemed ticky-tack to me. The charge seemed to be that Sammuel grabbed the receiver by his jersey, which prevented the receiver from being able to catch the ball. At first glance, it seemed like the pass was uncatchable in any case. And any contact was minimal. But Sammuel did grab the jersey, so I can let this one pass.

The second PI, on Ellis Hobbs, was absolutely ridiculous. Hobbs was covering Reggie Wayne, and the pass was underthrow so Hobbs turned and went for the ball, while Wayne crashed into Hobbs while going for the ball. When I first saw the play, I thought Wayne had committed offensive PI. Hobbs had position and went for the ball. By the rulebook, that means that it's not PI when Wayne crashes into him.

The third PI was called on a Colt on a long pass to Randy Moss that he caught. Some commentators are citing this flag as evidence that the refereeing was fair. Um, guys? Don't you notice the difference between a PI flag thrown on an incomplete pass and a PI flag thrown on a completion? Let's not be children here.

And then there was the offensive PI called on Randy Moss which was completely ticky-tack, if that. Moss had one hand on the receiver but was not pushing him or moving him, and was whistled for OPI.

Some people argued that the PI calls did not change the game, but given Vinatieri's difficulty kicking the long FGs, I think it's hard to support that claim when the PIs give 37 and 40 yards respectively.

And then there was the tackling by the Patriots on Addai. God that was horrendous.

If this had been a playoff game, I would be happy with "survive and advance". But it was an ugly win and the bad officiating really tainted things.

I have to give credit to Randy Moss, who deserved the game ball. Once the Pats figured out in the 4th quarter to stop messing around and to go with their best weapon, they started moving the ball more efficiently. There was nobody on the Colts who could cover Moss, so the simple plan was the better one.

celebrating the World Series

2007-10-31T06:26:00.000-04:00

Yay! The Red Sox win! Yay!

*jig*

propaganda in American TV

2007-10-26T15:40:00.000-04:00

So, I've got an episode of NCIS on in the background, and I realize that the plot centers around something quite bizarre. Apparently there are Iranian secret service agents trying to buy weapons in the United States and are willing to commit murder to do so.

Wow. Just wow.

This is what passes for plausible plotting at CBS these days. I'm not going to bother to explain what's wrong with this.

p_min

2007-10-25T10:33:00.000-04:00

In discussing the "fine-tuned universe" argument at PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula, I tackle the usual fallacy regarding unlikelihood. In many arguments advanced by so-called Intelligent Design theorists, it is argued that the very low likelihood of some physical state forces the observer to concede the point that design has been involved.

Indeed, this argument-by-unlikelihood is the foundation of intelligent design.

It's crap. This is what I say
(original typos included for posterity's sake)

As a final note, this "fine-tuning" argument, like many arguments involving probability advanced by IDers, (not that I'm accusing steve of being one) is based on the implicit notion that events that are highly improbable could not possibly have happened by chance.

Whenever this kind of argument occurs, I have to ask: just what is the minimum p value for which something with probability p can happen by chance? People who make these kinds of arguments misunderstand the relationship of probability and statistics with science. All that probability and statistics can do is assign relative value to competing, well-form scientific hypotheses. Statistics alone cannot be used as a justification for an argument or theory. Even if somebody were to say "the probability of the universal constants being exactly what they are is 10^-425665327" I would say: "so what?" Setting aside for the moment the dubious premise that this probability can be well-defined and meaningful, it still doesn't mean a damned thing to describe the probability of an event when we already know that the event has happened.

Since we know the event has happened, and we know that there is no lower bound p_min which forms the mathematical boundary of chance, telling me that p[X] is really, really low for some event X for an event X that I observe does not imply, by itself, that the event X did not happen by chance.

As a demonstration of this principle: get a bag full of, say, 100 20-sided dice. Roll them in order, noting the number rolled on each. Whatever result you get, the odds of it having happened by chance is 20^-100. And that's a really, really small number! And yet, to all apperances, that result just happened by chance.

good morning!

2007-10-24T15:16:00.000-04:00

Somebody planted a camera in my bedroom!

Hat tip to Grrlscientist at ScienceBlogs.

Buffy is very much like this in mornings, though she is more likely to simply be loud and attack me with headbutts than to resort to more drastic measures.

where oh where is my camera?

2007-10-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

OK, so when I moved out of Harrow in August, I packed everything up and hit the road. I am certain that I had the camera before packing up, and I am nearly certain I packed it somewhere.

I thought it was in my suitcase or backpack that I was bringing to the States, but when I got to the US, it wasn't there. Then I thought "well, I must have left it in the bag in the office or in my desk", since I had stored some things there to pick up in September when I was to pick up the cats. So I wasn't too worried, until I got to London in September, and the camera was not in the office.

At this point, I'm wondering if it was posssible that I left it in the flat when I left. But I really don't think I did. I was throwing everything of value in bags, and leaving the camera out? Doesn't seem possible.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm fairly certain I threw the camera in the suitcase that was going with me to the States.

So now my theory is that it was stolen from my suitcase. But maybe it was stolen from the office?

Or maybe I was absent-minded and left it on the Tube? Nah - I never carried the camera around outside of the backpack.

So, if anybody has seen my camera, let me know. It's fairly obsolete as digital cameras go, seeing as it was made in 2000 and features a whopping 2.3 megapixels! I am pretty sure I could get a more powerful camera these days for $100 or possibly less.

I would include a photo of the camera, so you would be able to recognize it, but curiously, I do not have a photo of my camera.

(Yes, that last little bit was my entire motivation for this boring post.)

taxi to the dark side

2007-10-08T15:38:00.000-04:00

Rather than watch the Cold Case marathon on France 1 or 2, I decided to watch a documentary on Arte TV, a French-German network. It's a documentary by Alex Gibney discussing the torture policy implemented at Abu Ghraib and at Gitmo.

I don't want to say much about it because it's so depressing. But one thing that has struck me is how the "techniques" involved simply amounted to rationalized sadism. A person who has resisted interrogation for 8 months is not going to suddenly "crack" because the sadistic, perverse side of the interrogators has been given free reign.

And that doesn't address the question of just what kind of information can be obtained from a person who has already been detained for 8 months. Surely we're well beyond any "ticking time bomb" scenario at that time. Indeed, given the disconnect between the prisoner and Al Qaeda at that point, it's hard to imagine any valuable operational intel would be unearthed at that point.

OTOH, if you were engaged in the practice of trying to get people to confess to crimes to justify the detainment, I can see the desire to continue pressing with harder and harder techniques. This is, of course, the problem of moving backwards from the conclusion to the evidence. But if there is any common thread to the madness that has consumed a certain part of the US in recent years, it's the tendency to conflate "knowing" with feeling a strong prejudgment.

Oh, and when all is said and done, a good number of the people detained have yet to charged with anything and would presumably be considered innocent. And that leads to the title of the film, which concerns a taxi driver taken, tortured, and killed by American troops.

goddamn Blogger

2007-10-03T17:27:00.000-04:00

first it insists on giving me everything in French, and then it diches my edits to the review I was writing.

*sigh*

Now to finish the review for the THIRD TIME.

(message to be deleted when I'm less annoyed with Blogger)

an antidote to the glorification of crime in cinema

2007-10-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

In the distant past, back when the Rat Pack was walking the street, there was made a film called Ocean's Eleven. The film was basically an excuse for Sinatra and his buddies to be in Las Vegas for a few weeks and get paid while they were partying all night. The film is somewhat forgettable, and is only noteworthy today for the remake which was made a few years ago.

In the original Ocean's Eleven, the bad guys lose all the money at the end of the film. That ending was in line with the dominant moral philosophy of the time, which said that crime must not be shown to be lucrative in film. After all, every film must demonstrate the truth of the notion that crime doesn't pay.

The remake with Clooney, Pitt and the gang had a much different ending, as I'm sure everybody reading this knows. Indeed, in recent years films like the Oceans' Eleven series, Entrapment, the Italian Job remake, The Score, etc. Indeed, the fantasy theft caper is a booming genre in Hollywood these days.

So, I decided to see an English-language film in Montpellier, after sitting through Shoot 'Em Up in French a couple weekends past. (Oh, I'm sure I missed the subtleties of that film because of the language barrier!) This evening I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei.

I really liked this film. I recommend it highly to everybody. It is an antidote to the trend of glamorizing crime in films of recent years.

(minor spoilers follow)

This film concerns a robbery planned by a man named Andy, played by Hoffman, and his brother named Hank, played by Hawke. Andy and Hank are both short on cash, so they decide to rob a small jewelry store in a suburban strip mall, a "Mom and Pop" place. The film starts with the robbery, which goes horribly wrong when the robber, who is a third man, is shot by the old woman alone in the store. In retaliation he shoots her back, critically injuring her, before she shoots him again and he flies through the glass door of the store, startling Hank, who has been waiting outside in a car in a curious moustache, wig, hat and glasses disguise. Hank drives off, swearing.

The film is told from three points of view, those of Hank, Andy, and their father, Charles. The magnitude of the fiasco is slowly revealed.

First, we find out that the store was not just any "Mom and Pop" store. It turns out that the Mom and Pop were Charles and his wife, Nannette. The plan was to hit the store when the place was manned by a nearsighted employee, Doris.

Then it's revealed that it wasn't Doris there after all.

As even more secrets become revealed, the fiasco slowly crushes all of the people involved. Decisions that seem initially innocuous ultimately turn out to have drastic implications.

I am a fan of realism in films, and the crime genre has been in need of a jolt of reality to the fantasy fare that audience have been gobbling up in recent years. What this film underscores is that crime is borne of selfishness and hatred, and the path taken can have severe consequences. Thankfully, this film does not fall into the opposite trap common in serial killer films (and much of TV crime), namely viewing life through a "good guys vs. bad guys" filter, where there are a certain number of "crazy" or "evil" people out there just waiting to prey on the weak and innocent. This other genre feeds the police state mentality, while the caper genre feeds the guilt-free capitalist mentality.

Come to papa!

2007-09-26T05:44:00.000-04:00

After 16 days, my Barclays' debit card, which my mother mailed via US priority mail from Loo-zee-anna to Paris to try to catch me before I left for Montpellier, has finally arrived chez ma souer.

Go go postal service!

Looks like this guy was in charge:

(And a hello to the new visitor, Jolene!)

In case anybody was wondering

2007-09-21T18:46:00.000-04:00

I have very little to say about the baseball situation, other than it was nice to wake up this morning, my fifth morning in Montpellier, and the first when I didn't check the scores to see that the Red Sox lost and the Yankees won.

Of course, neither played yesterday. But I'll take what I can get.

In a very real sense, it hardly matters now whether the Sox win the playoffs or not. The Yankees have so clearly been the better team for the past two months that I really have low expectations for the playoffs. With the best four hitters on the Red Sox all injured and the bullpen running out of steam, it could get ugly.

That will be my only comment for a while, as my German readers don't want to read about baseball.

Talk like a pirate day!

2007-09-18T15:27:00.002-04:00

Garrh! Avast ye maties!

Some resources for your pirate inclined.

The homepage, your handy Talk Like a Pirate Day translator, and a YouTube clip featuring everybody's favorite movie pirate!

No, not Captain Jack Sparrow! It's Steve the Pirate!