Third Annual Thanksgiving Sorkinbration!
These two clips are my permanent, annual Thanksgiving tradition.
Enjoy.
Enjoy.
November 22nd, 2012
November 18th, 2012
Farewell, and I thank you, Mandy the Bear-Shaped Dog
In March of 2004, my wife and I moved into our current home in Pepperell, Massachusetts. As homeowners for the first time in our lives, rather than apartment dwellers, I was eager to get a dog. We spent some time discussing it, but by the summer, Cindy had agreed, and I began scanning various pet adoption and humane society web-sites looking for a rescue dog to adopt.
I was clear that I wanted an adult dog -- puppies are much more likely to find homes, so adopting an adult is much more likely to be literally saving a life -- and preferred a mixed breed. After a few weeks, on the web site of the New Hampshire SPCA, I saw this listing:
That amazing, regal, ursine face looked out of the web page, right into my soul, and I knew I had to go meet that dog, and that, unless there were real problems, she was going to be mine.
The following weekend, I took the two-hour drive, and discovered that, while Mandy (already her name: Changing the name of a dog who already has one seems to me to be disrespectful) had been there for weeks, nobody had even asked to meet her. The young ladies were very excited that I had.
She was shy, but very sweet-natured, and I ponied up some bucks and brought her home. Even on the drive back, it was clear we were bonding. When I'd stop to go to the restroom, according to my friend Toni, who waited in the minivan with her, Mandy would be focused entirely on me. She'd watch me walk, and stare at any door I disappeared through until I was back in sight.
She was an amazing, beautiful, sweet, affectionate, quiet, happy dog:
From then until now, she's been my best friend, my baby, my companion and my joy.
She had several years of terrible problems with allergies, but in the last couple of years, the right dietary balance was struck, and, having lost much of her hair and being miserable, she reclaimed her Bear-Shaped mojo in all its Bear-Shaped glory.
In recent months, she lost her hearing, which made me sad. I was concerned that she didn't realize she was deaf, and thought I was no longer talking to her. Her joints began to pain her more and more, and she ate less and less. I knew that the end was coming, and that every moment with her was fleeting and precious. About three weeks ago, when I wasn't feeling well, she came to visit me, and I lifted her up on the bed -- she could no longer make it on her own -- and we had a historically epic cuddle:
That memory will have to sustain me, because last night, a little after midnight, she suddenly began barking in alarm. I found her in pain, and looking up symptoms, discovered that she was almost certainly experiencing something called "Canine Bloat." In a young, healthy dog, this is fatal unless immediate veterinary care is received. But Mandy was neither young nor healthy, and, on a Saturday night, her veterinarian was unavailable. (There is, relatively local, a veterinary emergency room, but the cost of even a casual visit there is hundreds of dollars. Any care received brings us easily into thousands. I can say, and it's true, that Mandy was worth more to us than any amount of money, but that doesn't give us that money, and so she had to go without care.)
I stayed with her, and being petted seemed to comfort her, and eventually, she seemed to go to sleep, and so did I, setting an alarm to call my vet's office at seven AM, in hopes of catching someone in feeding the animals. At seven, she was still with us, but very weak, and I was unable to reach the vet. I brought Mandy back to the bedroom, laid her on the bed, and Cindy and I stroked and loved on her as she passed away.
We are, of course, heartbroken. She was my pal, my baby, my darling, my sweetest Bear, and my life will seem so empty without her.
Goodbye, Mandy, the Bear-Shaped Dog. Thank you for making the last 8 years of my life so much more wonderful. I don't know what I'll do without you.
I was clear that I wanted an adult dog -- puppies are much more likely to find homes, so adopting an adult is much more likely to be literally saving a life -- and preferred a mixed breed. After a few weeks, on the web site of the New Hampshire SPCA, I saw this listing:
That amazing, regal, ursine face looked out of the web page, right into my soul, and I knew I had to go meet that dog, and that, unless there were real problems, she was going to be mine.
The following weekend, I took the two-hour drive, and discovered that, while Mandy (already her name: Changing the name of a dog who already has one seems to me to be disrespectful) had been there for weeks, nobody had even asked to meet her. The young ladies were very excited that I had.
She was shy, but very sweet-natured, and I ponied up some bucks and brought her home. Even on the drive back, it was clear we were bonding. When I'd stop to go to the restroom, according to my friend Toni, who waited in the minivan with her, Mandy would be focused entirely on me. She'd watch me walk, and stare at any door I disappeared through until I was back in sight.
She was an amazing, beautiful, sweet, affectionate, quiet, happy dog:
From then until now, she's been my best friend, my baby, my companion and my joy.
She had several years of terrible problems with allergies, but in the last couple of years, the right dietary balance was struck, and, having lost much of her hair and being miserable, she reclaimed her Bear-Shaped mojo in all its Bear-Shaped glory.
In recent months, she lost her hearing, which made me sad. I was concerned that she didn't realize she was deaf, and thought I was no longer talking to her. Her joints began to pain her more and more, and she ate less and less. I knew that the end was coming, and that every moment with her was fleeting and precious. About three weeks ago, when I wasn't feeling well, she came to visit me, and I lifted her up on the bed -- she could no longer make it on her own -- and we had a historically epic cuddle:
That memory will have to sustain me, because last night, a little after midnight, she suddenly began barking in alarm. I found her in pain, and looking up symptoms, discovered that she was almost certainly experiencing something called "Canine Bloat." In a young, healthy dog, this is fatal unless immediate veterinary care is received. But Mandy was neither young nor healthy, and, on a Saturday night, her veterinarian was unavailable. (There is, relatively local, a veterinary emergency room, but the cost of even a casual visit there is hundreds of dollars. Any care received brings us easily into thousands. I can say, and it's true, that Mandy was worth more to us than any amount of money, but that doesn't give us that money, and so she had to go without care.)
I stayed with her, and being petted seemed to comfort her, and eventually, she seemed to go to sleep, and so did I, setting an alarm to call my vet's office at seven AM, in hopes of catching someone in feeding the animals. At seven, she was still with us, but very weak, and I was unable to reach the vet. I brought Mandy back to the bedroom, laid her on the bed, and Cindy and I stroked and loved on her as she passed away.
We are, of course, heartbroken. She was my pal, my baby, my darling, my sweetest Bear, and my life will seem so empty without her.
Goodbye, Mandy, the Bear-Shaped Dog. Thank you for making the last 8 years of my life so much more wonderful. I don't know what I'll do without you.
November 16th, 2012
Rough Truth for the Republican party...
I miss the United States of America having a Loyal Opposition. I miss a conservative party of intelligent, constructive ideas, many of which I, of course, disagreed with.
I don't think any of the punditocracy really understands what's happened to the Republican party, and I don't think they've really got an understanding of the fatal flaws of the Romney campaign.
The problem with the former is, quite simply, the Teabaggers.
First of all, right out of the gate, no, I won't call them "the Tea Party." The reason is simple: Despite what they now try to tell us, "Teabaggers" isn't a crude pejorative applied to them by us nasty liberals. It's the term with which they first labeled themselves, and "Teabagging" their term for their political activities, selected, embraced, and publicized by them, none of them knowing it was already a term of crude sexual slang for an act with which they'd be loath to be identified. Going off half-cocked, without research or due diligence hung a name around their necks that is anathema to them, and that carelessness, that mental laziness, is too entirely emblematic of their movement as a whole for me to overlook. Teabaggers they began as, Teabaggers they coined themselves and, as long as they and I both exist, Teabaggers, in my discussions, they will remain.
You'll hear a lot from Teabaggers that they're a spontaneous grass-roots movement, individuals fed up with government over-reach who have stood up to be counted. It's a lie. They were a political-theater group created by big insurance companies to militate in any way possible against reforming our country's health-care system, which has been 28th in the world in terms of patient care, but a license to print money for insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Their success in gathering publicity made them look to the powers behind the Republican party like the solution to their new problem.
Their new problem was simply this: Lots more democrats were voting, and lots of independents, disgusted by the incredibly destructive behavior of the GOP-controlled government that had led to economic catastrophe in 2008, were voting, and voting for Democrats. The Republican party has long prided itself on its "Big Tent" philosophy, gathering together diverse strands of conservatives with different primary concerns -- abortion, social issues, international relations, economic, fiscal and monetary policies -- casting about for new warm bodies to bring into their Big Tent to try to get ahead again in their numbers race with Democrats, reached out to the vast and active pool of toxic right-wing crazies.
These, make no mistake, are the spiritual brothers of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. They believe that the United States Government is an occupying power, taking rightful supremacy away from "real" Americans, and by "real," they mean "white and Christian." They aren't a real natural fit with true patriots like John McCain, or even George W. Bush, who, for all his mental sloth, incurious attitude and simplistic policies, at least truly believed and believes in America. But, given a ballot with a "D" and an "R" on it, they're going to put their Check Mark beside the "R," so, in the far-too-limited vision of the Republican party leaders, these simple-minded, single-minded crazies seemed like perfectly acceptable foot-soldiers. Make them welcome in the party, encourage them to take part, and they will add to the votes for Republican candidates.
The problem, of course, with courting the racists, the anarchists, the "low information" libertarians (that is, those who don't understand that their taxes pay for roads and schools and police and fire departments, weather reporting and safe food and water and a communications infrastructure and so infinitely much more) -- in short, in courting the crazies -- is that they're crazy, and crazy can't be controlled. They swept in and overwhelmed much of the Republican party (Much like, in the early 1980s, followers of the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh gathered in the town of Antelope, Oregon, and took over the government, briefly renaming the town Rajneeshpuran) and created a situation where the only way to be nominated by the GOP to run for any position was to either be, or pretend to be, as crazy as they were. This can win nominations from a party dominated by lunatics, but it can't win elections.
The 2010 bellweathers should have been a warning to the GOP: Christine O'Donnell, who seriously thinks there are secret US Government labs where there are mice with fully-functioning human brains, and Sharon Angle, who was outraged that the press would ask her questions she hadn't fed them in advance, and suggested that a duly-elected congress that didn't toe a line drawn by a small-but-vocal minority would face "Second Amendment remedies" both fell in their elections. But enough Republicans won to blind the party to their peril -- and enough to alert the Democratic voters of the same.
Come 2012, the Republican party doubled down on crazy, and the GOP presidential primary campaign was well-described as a "Clown Car." It's telling that Mitt Romney, who was a transparent liar from the very beginning of his campaign -- remember that his first campaign commercial was a flat-out lie that was condemned far and wide (the "If we talk about the economy, we will lose" ad, in which the Romney campaign presented that snippet of a 2008 Obama campaign speech, while not admitting it was a direct, attributed quote by Barack Obama of a McCain advisor, talking about the Republican record of economic catastrophe) -- looked like Abraham Lincoln next to the bagful of crazy that was the rest of the field candidates.
Sadly -- and, even as a gleeful, gloating Democrat, I mean that honestly -- the Republican party seems not to have learned that lesson. So deep are they in their bubble, listening only to the voices in their own heads (How else do we explain a party that savagely attacked statisticians like Nate Silver, whose predictions, available for weeks and months before the election, proved out with uncanny accuracy, and then reels in shell-shock when its candidate loses, exactly as predicted?) that there seems to be a strong desire to double down again. "Romney wasn't conservative _enough_," we keep hearing. "He's a Massachusetts moderate who doesn't represent true conservative values."
There are glimmers of hope. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal excoriated the GOP for being "The party of dumbed-down conservatism" (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1
The above alludes to the second question, the important factor in Romney's stinging defeat that the press seems determined to ignore.
Willard Mitt Romney is an inveterate, unabashed, transparent liar. It was proved again and again from the beginning of his campaign ("If we talk about the economy...") to the end ("Chrysler is going to move its Jeep manufacturing to China.") One of his chief campaign advisers arrogantly told reporters during the Republican National Convention, “We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Somewhere along the way, the Party, having decided that a handsome man in a nice suit with a decent haircut, a manikin of presidential appearance, was preferable to the gesticulating lunatic asylum the Teabaggers had left them as the only alternative, whistled past the graveyard of its own integrity, and the knowledge that the most fundamental "Family Value" that even the most conservative American believes in is honesty.
Everybody knew that Romney was a liar. Everybody knew that his only core conviction was that he should be president, simply because it was the only "promotion" yet available to him in a long career of upward career mobility to the very top of the economic ladder. From week to week, from day to day, he would contradict himself, tailoring his statements to be red meat to whichever crowd he would speak to on any given day, as if unaware that statements made in any given place would be reported to the nation as a whole.
This is not about "flip-flopping," that most dishonest of political criticisms, which makes a virtue of inflexibility and a liability of the ability to learn, or to react in nuanced ways to complex situations. This is about transparent dishonesty, bare-faced dishonesty, about a candidate whose own campaign admitted again and again, from its arrogant dismissal when called out for that first, fraudulent, "If we talk about the economy" ad, through the infamous "Etch-a-Sketch" comment during the primaries, through the "...dictated by fact-checkers" statement to end where they began, repeating out-and-out lies about Chrysler offshoring Jeep production, and a party that somehow deluded itself that Americans wouldn't notice or wouldn't care, that lying would only be unpopular with voters if Democrats did it.
Why do all of those solemn discussions of "What went wrong for Romney?" ignore the simple fact that he both lied to us repeatedly, and did so so obviously and transparently that it amounted to calling every American voter stupid? Surely that was an important factor in his defeat!
I don't think any of the punditocracy really understands what's happened to the Republican party, and I don't think they've really got an understanding of the fatal flaws of the Romney campaign.
The problem with the former is, quite simply, the Teabaggers.
First of all, right out of the gate, no, I won't call them "the Tea Party." The reason is simple: Despite what they now try to tell us, "Teabaggers" isn't a crude pejorative applied to them by us nasty liberals. It's the term with which they first labeled themselves, and "Teabagging" their term for their political activities, selected, embraced, and publicized by them, none of them knowing it was already a term of crude sexual slang for an act with which they'd be loath to be identified. Going off half-cocked, without research or due diligence hung a name around their necks that is anathema to them, and that carelessness, that mental laziness, is too entirely emblematic of their movement as a whole for me to overlook. Teabaggers they began as, Teabaggers they coined themselves and, as long as they and I both exist, Teabaggers, in my discussions, they will remain.
You'll hear a lot from Teabaggers that they're a spontaneous grass-roots movement, individuals fed up with government over-reach who have stood up to be counted. It's a lie. They were a political-theater group created by big insurance companies to militate in any way possible against reforming our country's health-care system, which has been 28th in the world in terms of patient care, but a license to print money for insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Their success in gathering publicity made them look to the powers behind the Republican party like the solution to their new problem.
Their new problem was simply this: Lots more democrats were voting, and lots of independents, disgusted by the incredibly destructive behavior of the GOP-controlled government that had led to economic catastrophe in 2008, were voting, and voting for Democrats. The Republican party has long prided itself on its "Big Tent" philosophy, gathering together diverse strands of conservatives with different primary concerns -- abortion, social issues, international relations, economic, fiscal and monetary policies -- casting about for new warm bodies to bring into their Big Tent to try to get ahead again in their numbers race with Democrats, reached out to the vast and active pool of toxic right-wing crazies.
These, make no mistake, are the spiritual brothers of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. They believe that the United States Government is an occupying power, taking rightful supremacy away from "real" Americans, and by "real," they mean "white and Christian." They aren't a real natural fit with true patriots like John McCain, or even George W. Bush, who, for all his mental sloth, incurious attitude and simplistic policies, at least truly believed and believes in America. But, given a ballot with a "D" and an "R" on it, they're going to put their Check Mark beside the "R," so, in the far-too-limited vision of the Republican party leaders, these simple-minded, single-minded crazies seemed like perfectly acceptable foot-soldiers. Make them welcome in the party, encourage them to take part, and they will add to the votes for Republican candidates.
The problem, of course, with courting the racists, the anarchists, the "low information" libertarians (that is, those who don't understand that their taxes pay for roads and schools and police and fire departments, weather reporting and safe food and water and a communications infrastructure and so infinitely much more) -- in short, in courting the crazies -- is that they're crazy, and crazy can't be controlled. They swept in and overwhelmed much of the Republican party (Much like, in the early 1980s, followers of the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh gathered in the town of Antelope, Oregon, and took over the government, briefly renaming the town Rajneeshpuran) and created a situation where the only way to be nominated by the GOP to run for any position was to either be, or pretend to be, as crazy as they were. This can win nominations from a party dominated by lunatics, but it can't win elections.
The 2010 bellweathers should have been a warning to the GOP: Christine O'Donnell, who seriously thinks there are secret US Government labs where there are mice with fully-functioning human brains, and Sharon Angle, who was outraged that the press would ask her questions she hadn't fed them in advance, and suggested that a duly-elected congress that didn't toe a line drawn by a small-but-vocal minority would face "Second Amendment remedies" both fell in their elections. But enough Republicans won to blind the party to their peril -- and enough to alert the Democratic voters of the same.
Come 2012, the Republican party doubled down on crazy, and the GOP presidential primary campaign was well-described as a "Clown Car." It's telling that Mitt Romney, who was a transparent liar from the very beginning of his campaign -- remember that his first campaign commercial was a flat-out lie that was condemned far and wide (the "If we talk about the economy, we will lose" ad, in which the Romney campaign presented that snippet of a 2008 Obama campaign speech, while not admitting it was a direct, attributed quote by Barack Obama of a McCain advisor, talking about the Republican record of economic catastrophe) -- looked like Abraham Lincoln next to the bagful of crazy that was the rest of the field candidates.
Sadly -- and, even as a gleeful, gloating Democrat, I mean that honestly -- the Republican party seems not to have learned that lesson. So deep are they in their bubble, listening only to the voices in their own heads (How else do we explain a party that savagely attacked statisticians like Nate Silver, whose predictions, available for weeks and months before the election, proved out with uncanny accuracy, and then reels in shell-shock when its candidate loses, exactly as predicted?) that there seems to be a strong desire to double down again. "Romney wasn't conservative _enough_," we keep hearing. "He's a Massachusetts moderate who doesn't represent true conservative values."
There are glimmers of hope. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal excoriated the GOP for being "The party of dumbed-down conservatism" (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1
The above alludes to the second question, the important factor in Romney's stinging defeat that the press seems determined to ignore.
Willard Mitt Romney is an inveterate, unabashed, transparent liar. It was proved again and again from the beginning of his campaign ("If we talk about the economy...") to the end ("Chrysler is going to move its Jeep manufacturing to China.") One of his chief campaign advisers arrogantly told reporters during the Republican National Convention, “We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Somewhere along the way, the Party, having decided that a handsome man in a nice suit with a decent haircut, a manikin of presidential appearance, was preferable to the gesticulating lunatic asylum the Teabaggers had left them as the only alternative, whistled past the graveyard of its own integrity, and the knowledge that the most fundamental "Family Value" that even the most conservative American believes in is honesty.
Everybody knew that Romney was a liar. Everybody knew that his only core conviction was that he should be president, simply because it was the only "promotion" yet available to him in a long career of upward career mobility to the very top of the economic ladder. From week to week, from day to day, he would contradict himself, tailoring his statements to be red meat to whichever crowd he would speak to on any given day, as if unaware that statements made in any given place would be reported to the nation as a whole.
This is not about "flip-flopping," that most dishonest of political criticisms, which makes a virtue of inflexibility and a liability of the ability to learn, or to react in nuanced ways to complex situations. This is about transparent dishonesty, bare-faced dishonesty, about a candidate whose own campaign admitted again and again, from its arrogant dismissal when called out for that first, fraudulent, "If we talk about the economy" ad, through the infamous "Etch-a-Sketch" comment during the primaries, through the "...dictated by fact-checkers" statement to end where they began, repeating out-and-out lies about Chrysler offshoring Jeep production, and a party that somehow deluded itself that Americans wouldn't notice or wouldn't care, that lying would only be unpopular with voters if Democrats did it.
Why do all of those solemn discussions of "What went wrong for Romney?" ignore the simple fact that he both lied to us repeatedly, and did so so obviously and transparently that it amounted to calling every American voter stupid? Surely that was an important factor in his defeat!
November 13th, 2012
Guess the Party
Hey, boys and girls! It's time to play, "Guess the party!"
I'll describe a news story, provide a link to it, and you guess which American political party the subject of the story belongs to. In a comment, the reveal!
"Woman strikes husband with car, leaving him in critical condition, because he didn't vote."
http://politi.co/RUOz83
Guess the party!
I'll describe a news story, provide a link to it, and you guess which American political party the subject of the story belongs to. In a comment, the reveal!
"Woman strikes husband with car, leaving him in critical condition, because he didn't vote."
http://politi.co/RUOz83
Guess the party!
November 10th, 2012
"Skyfall"
"Skyfall:" There's a lot yet to process. I'm not pursuaded it was the best Bond movie ever, but I'm not ready to declare that it wasn't.
Putting the pieces in play for a manageable "Bond" series going forward felt "right," but that somewhat nettles me, as it sort of felt like, "See? We're fixing it," and I definitely don't think it was "broken."
I'm looking forward to where Bond goes from here... But wistful for what went before. That was inevitable since "Casino Royale" rebooted the Bond Movieverse, but it didn't feel like a closed door until now.
I guess it leaves me sort of melancholy.
Putting the pieces in play for a manageable "Bond" series going forward felt "right," but that somewhat nettles me, as it sort of felt like, "See? We're fixing it," and I definitely don't think it was "broken."
I'm looking forward to where Bond goes from here... But wistful for what went before. That was inevitable since "Casino Royale" rebooted the Bond Movieverse, but it didn't feel like a closed door until now.
I guess it leaves me sort of melancholy.
November 6th, 2012
Election Day
This is the most important truth of American elections:
Until a true third party has been built from the ground up -- until it can field a candidate who's earned national name recognition by rising through the ranks of that party -- a vote for a Third-Party candidate is a vote for the "mainstream" candidate you like the least.
If neither viable candidate really makes your nipples hard, surely one of them distresses, disgusts or just plain scares you more than the other. Your vote can either help stop him, or aid him. It does one or the other. Anything you do with your vote that doesn't bar him from office, works to _put_ him in office. And the only way your vote can help bar him from office is if it's cast for a candidate who can defeat him. Right now, there's only one of them.
Jill Stein, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, however much you may agree with them, are not going to win the presidency. Obama or Romney is. Which of them would your third-party no-hoper most oppose? That's who you're supporting when you vote Stein or Paul or Zagnut.
Don't come whining to me about how it's not true, how your Stein vote supports Stein. That's just not true. Your Stein vote supports Romney -- or, if you hate him more, Obama -- by not helping to defeat him.
That's the hard fact.
Until a true third party has been built from the ground up -- until it can field a candidate who's earned national name recognition by rising through the ranks of that party -- a vote for a Third-Party candidate is a vote for the "mainstream" candidate you like the least.
If neither viable candidate really makes your nipples hard, surely one of them distresses, disgusts or just plain scares you more than the other. Your vote can either help stop him, or aid him. It does one or the other. Anything you do with your vote that doesn't bar him from office, works to _put_ him in office. And the only way your vote can help bar him from office is if it's cast for a candidate who can defeat him. Right now, there's only one of them.
Jill Stein, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, however much you may agree with them, are not going to win the presidency. Obama or Romney is. Which of them would your third-party no-hoper most oppose? That's who you're supporting when you vote Stein or Paul or Zagnut.
Don't come whining to me about how it's not true, how your Stein vote supports Stein. That's just not true. Your Stein vote supports Romney -- or, if you hate him more, Obama -- by not helping to defeat him.
That's the hard fact.
October 7th, 2012
JK Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy"
So, just finished "The Casual Vacancy," JK Rowling's first Post-"Harry Potter" novel.
Reviewers have called it "satirical," but if you go into it thinking you'll be enjoying GK Chesterton-esque chuckles, you're in for some cognitive dissonance.
It's a very dark novel of dislikable, self-absorbed characters whose callousness and casual cruelty becomes ever more repellent -- in truth, this makes it something of a slog.
It climaxes, though, in an awful tragedy and its aftermath, and I, at least, wept real tears for characters I had no affection for, both in enormous tragedy, and in one or two tiny glimmerings of hope.
If you're easily depressed by a work of fiction, you should probably avoid it -- it's a major bummer! -- but it's an ambitious and insightful and savagely, unsentimentally honest novel, a vicious indictment of a society, no more British than American, that views its least fortunate members as refuse, disposable and unclean.
If you can take it, I recommend it, but don't blame me if you end up crying your eyes out.
Reviewers have called it "satirical," but if you go into it thinking you'll be enjoying GK Chesterton-esque chuckles, you're in for some cognitive dissonance.
It's a very dark novel of dislikable, self-absorbed characters whose callousness and casual cruelty becomes ever more repellent -- in truth, this makes it something of a slog.
It climaxes, though, in an awful tragedy and its aftermath, and I, at least, wept real tears for characters I had no affection for, both in enormous tragedy, and in one or two tiny glimmerings of hope.
If you're easily depressed by a work of fiction, you should probably avoid it -- it's a major bummer! -- but it's an ambitious and insightful and savagely, unsentimentally honest novel, a vicious indictment of a society, no more British than American, that views its least fortunate members as refuse, disposable and unclean.
If you can take it, I recommend it, but don't blame me if you end up crying your eyes out.
September 30th, 2012
A Godzilla movie I'd love to see
Remember the really silly 1970s Godzilla movies, with "aliens" in red rubber space suits who'd invade Japan with big silver flying saucers and Mecha Godzilla?
A modern, but still silly, version of that, with Jackie Chan as an agent of the UN's "Godzilla Force" who's assigned to protect the Twin Faeries of Mothra's Island. Picture him carrying their little wooden travel-box, and having chop-socky Kung Fu fights where he has to protect the box and keep it upright.
The red-rubber-suited aliens not only have Mecha Godzilla, but they've planted a brain-control device on Godzilla himself, and have a guy aboard their saucer driving him with a "Waldo"-type controls, and they've got both 'Zillas rampaging through Japan.
So Agent Jackie ends up infiltrating the saucer, fighting and beating the guy in the Waldo control and takes over Godzilla. Jackie controls Godzilla in a new fight against Mecha Godzilla, which is either shot with Jackie Chan actually wearing the Godzilla suit, or done with CGI and Motion Capture with Jackie performing while wearing bulky enough padding to to restrict his movements to Godzilla levels.
With Jackie's skills and Godzilla's power, Mecha Godzilla is destroyed and the aliens are routed.
I'd watch that!
A modern, but still silly, version of that, with Jackie Chan as an agent of the UN's "Godzilla Force" who's assigned to protect the Twin Faeries of Mothra's Island. Picture him carrying their little wooden travel-box, and having chop-socky Kung Fu fights where he has to protect the box and keep it upright.
The red-rubber-suited aliens not only have Mecha Godzilla, but they've planted a brain-control device on Godzilla himself, and have a guy aboard their saucer driving him with a "Waldo"-type controls, and they've got both 'Zillas rampaging through Japan.
So Agent Jackie ends up infiltrating the saucer, fighting and beating the guy in the Waldo control and takes over Godzilla. Jackie controls Godzilla in a new fight against Mecha Godzilla, which is either shot with Jackie Chan actually wearing the Godzilla suit, or done with CGI and Motion Capture with Jackie performing while wearing bulky enough padding to to restrict his movements to Godzilla levels.
With Jackie's skills and Godzilla's power, Mecha Godzilla is destroyed and the aliens are routed.
I'd watch that!
September 23rd, 2012
Y'know what sucks?
My desktop computer has been dead for a year or more.
As of this morning, my laptop seems to have joined it in the Great Hereafter. (Can't boot, read errors on the hard drive.)
Actually, I don't think it's dead, just comatose. I just don't know when I'll be able to afford to bring it in for medical attention.
Thank Ghu for my smartphone!
As of this morning, my laptop seems to have joined it in the Great Hereafter. (Can't boot, read errors on the hard drive.)
Actually, I don't think it's dead, just comatose. I just don't know when I'll be able to afford to bring it in for medical attention.
Thank Ghu for my smartphone!
August 25th, 2012
This is redundant. I don't care.
When I was a boy, there was a light in the sky. Pearly white, the apparent size of a coin, claimed to be made of green cheese.
The world's most brilliant minds envisioned unforgiving stone surfaces and jagged mountains like vicious shark's teeth trying futilely to savage the heavens.
But one day in July, a man swaddled in a comical, padded suit swayed slowly down a ladder, and hopped onto a soft land of grey dust and gently rolling hills. He was brilliant, courageous, skillful, and above all humble, carrying naturally the mantle of his achievement.
As he shuffled about, transmitted in ghostly gray images to televisions around the world, through gray dust againts grey mountains, he transformed a light in our sky into a _place._ Hills and dales and meadows of soft gray dust, where, if you wore that silly padded suit and golden- faced helmet, you could hop across the landscape like a kangaroo.
"God," the saying goes, "isn't making any more real estate." But with one small step, one giant leap, Neil Armstrong did. He transformed a light in the sky into a place.
Thank you Neil. You went in peace, for all mankind. I'll miss you.
The world's most brilliant minds envisioned unforgiving stone surfaces and jagged mountains like vicious shark's teeth trying futilely to savage the heavens.
But one day in July, a man swaddled in a comical, padded suit swayed slowly down a ladder, and hopped onto a soft land of grey dust and gently rolling hills. He was brilliant, courageous, skillful, and above all humble, carrying naturally the mantle of his achievement.
As he shuffled about, transmitted in ghostly gray images to televisions around the world, through gray dust againts grey mountains, he transformed a light in our sky into a _place._ Hills and dales and meadows of soft gray dust, where, if you wore that silly padded suit and golden- faced helmet, you could hop across the landscape like a kangaroo.
"God," the saying goes, "isn't making any more real estate." But with one small step, one giant leap, Neil Armstrong did. He transformed a light in the sky into a place.
Thank you Neil. You went in peace, for all mankind. I'll miss you.
I am devastated by the loss of the first human being to step onto the face of another world.
Thank you so much, Neil Armstrong.
Thank you so much, Neil Armstrong.
June 12th, 2012
May 18th, 2012
A lesson for people working in service
A lesson for people working in service:
I had a good relationship with the mechanic -- "Tom" -- at my local gas station. (Circle Citgo, in Pepprell, MA.) He was good, and he was honest, and I could trust him. He's left for other pastures, and I don't know where.
His spot at the local station was taken over by "Steve." Steve started off well for me, removing a nail from a tire treat and plugging the leak for an easy, friendly ten dollars. So far, so good. Well, last night, driving my wife to and from graduation, the "Check Engine" light went on in my car. This morning, I stopped by Steve's and asked him to scan for the code, and then clear it. I just wanted to know what the manufacturer intended that light to indicate.
"That code is meaningless," Steve told me. "What we do is we examine the car, find the problem, and give you an estimate."
"That's not what I want," I told him. "I just want the code, and then clear it, and we'll see if the light comes back on."
"That's the wrong way to do it."
Steve is no longer my mechanic. Steve thinks every time a light shows up on his customer's dashboard, it's his opportunity to make a boat payment.
I drove up the street to the next gas station, asked the mechanic if he could spend 30 seconds on getting and clearing my code. "That's a half-hour labor for my time."
I drove back, passed Steve, and stopped into a small mechanic who had taken over the space of my previous ("Pre-Tom") mechanic a few years ago, when he moved out of town. "Can you slap a scanner on for a Check Engine code without upselling?"
"Sure!" he scans, tells me the code and what it means, looks under the hood to see if the cause (The code means "Bank 1" of my car's V8 engine is "Running Lean") is easily visible, like a disintegrated vacuum hose. We chat a few minutes, and he suggests clearing the code to see if the light returns -- my original plan, remember -- and, when I ask him if ten bucks will cover his time -- which has been ten or fifteen minutes, what with chatting and going the extra mile under the hood -- he waves me off. "Don't even worry about it. Just let me know if the light comes back on."
Now, I haven't had him actually fix anything yet, and, of course, if when I do, I find the work or price unacceptable, I'll re-evaluate, but as of right this moment? I'm considering Jason Kozacka of JSK Automotive, in Pepperell, MA, to be my mechanic.
And that's my lesson to those who do any form of service for a living.
I had a good relationship with the mechanic -- "Tom" -- at my local gas station. (Circle Citgo, in Pepprell, MA.) He was good, and he was honest, and I could trust him. He's left for other pastures, and I don't know where.
His spot at the local station was taken over by "Steve." Steve started off well for me, removing a nail from a tire treat and plugging the leak for an easy, friendly ten dollars. So far, so good. Well, last night, driving my wife to and from graduation, the "Check Engine" light went on in my car. This morning, I stopped by Steve's and asked him to scan for the code, and then clear it. I just wanted to know what the manufacturer intended that light to indicate.
"That code is meaningless," Steve told me. "What we do is we examine the car, find the problem, and give you an estimate."
"That's not what I want," I told him. "I just want the code, and then clear it, and we'll see if the light comes back on."
"That's the wrong way to do it."
Steve is no longer my mechanic. Steve thinks every time a light shows up on his customer's dashboard, it's his opportunity to make a boat payment.
I drove up the street to the next gas station, asked the mechanic if he could spend 30 seconds on getting and clearing my code. "That's a half-hour labor for my time."
I drove back, passed Steve, and stopped into a small mechanic who had taken over the space of my previous ("Pre-Tom") mechanic a few years ago, when he moved out of town. "Can you slap a scanner on for a Check Engine code without upselling?"
"Sure!" he scans, tells me the code and what it means, looks under the hood to see if the cause (The code means "Bank 1" of my car's V8 engine is "Running Lean") is easily visible, like a disintegrated vacuum hose. We chat a few minutes, and he suggests clearing the code to see if the light returns -- my original plan, remember -- and, when I ask him if ten bucks will cover his time -- which has been ten or fifteen minutes, what with chatting and going the extra mile under the hood -- he waves me off. "Don't even worry about it. Just let me know if the light comes back on."
Now, I haven't had him actually fix anything yet, and, of course, if when I do, I find the work or price unacceptable, I'll re-evaluate, but as of right this moment? I'm considering Jason Kozacka of JSK Automotive, in Pepperell, MA, to be my mechanic.
And that's my lesson to those who do any form of service for a living.
May 15th, 2012
Let's Sork a little bit more!
Aaron Sorkin giving the commencement address at Syracuse University, May 13th, 2012
Man, this is the way to leave school and enter into the world!
Man, this is the way to leave school and enter into the world!
April 30th, 2012
April 14th, 2012
March 21st, 2012
THIS is why we invest in science. This.
For those on my flist who still stand behind the ill-informed notion that the space program ever was or now is a waste of money:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badast
http://tinyurl.com/6utohck
THIS is why we invest in science. This.
by Phil Plait
Every day — every single day, it seems — I see a note on Twitter, or get email, or hear someone on TV asking why we bother spending so much money on NASA. Billions of dollars! We should be spending that money right here on Earth!
This argument is wrong in every conceivable way. Ignoring that we do spend that money here on Earth, ignoring that NASA’s budget is far less than 1% of the national budget, ignoring that the amount we spend on NASA in a year is less than we spend on air conditioning tents in Afghanistan, ignoring that we spend five times as much on tobacco in a year than we do on space exploration… this argument is still dead wrong.
Why?
Because when we invest in science, when we invest in space, when we invest in exploration, we always, always get far more back in return than we put in. And not just in dollars and cents.
See that picture above? It shows a new type of rocket engine design. Usually, fuel is pumped into a chamber where the chemicals ignite and are blown out the other end, creating thrust. The design pictured above does this in a new way: as the fuel is pumped into the chamber, it’s spun up, creating a vortex. This focuses the flow, keeping it closer to the center of the chamber. In this way, when the fuel ignite, it keeps the walls of the chamber cooler.
So what, right?
Here’s what: using this technology — developed for rockets for NASA, remember — engineers designed a way to pump water more quickly and efficiently for fire suppression. The result is nothing short of astonishing:
One series of tests using empty houses at Vandenberg Air Force Base compared [this new] system with a 20-gallon-per-minute, 1,400 pound-per-square-inch (psi) discharge capability (at the pump) versus a standard 100-gallon-per-minute, 125 psi standard hand line—the kind that typically takes a few firemen to control. The standard line extinguished a set fire in a living room in 1 minute and 45 seconds using 220 gallons of water. The [new] system extinguished an identical fire in 17.3 seconds using 13.6 gallons—with a hose requiring only one person to manage.
In other words, this new system put out a fire more quickly, using less water, and — critically — with fewer firefighters needed to operate the hose. This frees up needed firefighters to do other important tasks on the job, and therefore makes fighting fires faster and safer.
There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.
If for no other reason that’s why we need to invest in science: in NASA, in NSF, in NOAA, and all the other agencies that explore the world around us. It’s for our own good. And it always pays off.
[UPDATE: I should have noted that this technology was developed by Orbitec, a contractor with NASA and not NASA itself. The argument I make above still stands, though.]
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2011/p
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badast
http://tinyurl.com/6utohck
THIS is why we invest in science. This.
by Phil PlaitEvery day — every single day, it seems — I see a note on Twitter, or get email, or hear someone on TV asking why we bother spending so much money on NASA. Billions of dollars! We should be spending that money right here on Earth!
This argument is wrong in every conceivable way. Ignoring that we do spend that money here on Earth, ignoring that NASA’s budget is far less than 1% of the national budget, ignoring that the amount we spend on NASA in a year is less than we spend on air conditioning tents in Afghanistan, ignoring that we spend five times as much on tobacco in a year than we do on space exploration… this argument is still dead wrong.
Why?
Because when we invest in science, when we invest in space, when we invest in exploration, we always, always get far more back in return than we put in. And not just in dollars and cents.
See that picture above? It shows a new type of rocket engine design. Usually, fuel is pumped into a chamber where the chemicals ignite and are blown out the other end, creating thrust. The design pictured above does this in a new way: as the fuel is pumped into the chamber, it’s spun up, creating a vortex. This focuses the flow, keeping it closer to the center of the chamber. In this way, when the fuel ignite, it keeps the walls of the chamber cooler.
So what, right?
Here’s what: using this technology — developed for rockets for NASA, remember — engineers designed a way to pump water more quickly and efficiently for fire suppression. The result is nothing short of astonishing:
One series of tests using empty houses at Vandenberg Air Force Base compared [this new] system with a 20-gallon-per-minute, 1,400 pound-per-square-inch (psi) discharge capability (at the pump) versus a standard 100-gallon-per-minute, 125 psi standard hand line—the kind that typically takes a few firemen to control. The standard line extinguished a set fire in a living room in 1 minute and 45 seconds using 220 gallons of water. The [new] system extinguished an identical fire in 17.3 seconds using 13.6 gallons—with a hose requiring only one person to manage.
In other words, this new system put out a fire more quickly, using less water, and — critically — with fewer firefighters needed to operate the hose. This frees up needed firefighters to do other important tasks on the job, and therefore makes fighting fires faster and safer.
There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.
If for no other reason that’s why we need to invest in science: in NASA, in NSF, in NOAA, and all the other agencies that explore the world around us. It’s for our own good. And it always pays off.
[UPDATE: I should have noted that this technology was developed by Orbitec, a contractor with NASA and not NASA itself. The argument I make above still stands, though.]
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2011/p
March 9th, 2012
Wands by OLEVIATHAN!
My 12-inch Action Figures of Witches and Wizards need wands. Those who didn't come packaged with replicas of their characters movie wands have to aquire theis from Oleviathan! Please note, these are NOT intended to be accurate representations of the wands created for the movies. They're just -- In my not-at-all-humble opinion -- spiffy-looking wands.
Click the picture for a larger version.
Click here for a HEEE-YUGE version!
Click the picture for a larger version.
Click here for a HEEE-YUGE version!
March 2nd, 2012
A Better Job....
Nichelle Nichols visited the White House recently, and when they met, President Obama confirmed for her that he was a "Star Trek" fan. I imagined this daydream:
February 22nd, 2012
Disney's afraid to market it, but fans aren't....
I spent much of my adolescence off-planet. Oh, I looked like I was here, in my tee shirts and bib overalls, the bib pockets sprouting a live of different-colored ball-point pens. But I wasn't, and you'd have to look in a different pocket to understand why. In the right-hand hip pocket would be a paperback from Ballantine Books, and the hundred or so pages of fine-ish type therein were actually a fiendishly powerful teleportation device, through which I spent much of my life under the hurtling moons of Barsoom:
This book has been adapted by director Andrew Stanton, famous for his work for Pixar, into a movie that Disney will be releasing on March 9, 2012. You may not know that, because Disney seems to have no idea how to market the movie, and therefore sort of isn't.
Here's an example of how they aren't marketing it: As you see above, the title of the first novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic "Mars" series was A Princess of Mars. But Disney's marketing department put their foot down. "No boy will ever go see a movie with Princess in the title." So the movie was re-titled John Carter of Mars. Disney's marketing department weighed in again. "No girl will ever go see a movie with Mars in the title!"
Hence, you might possibly, when visiting your local cinema, see a particularly boring poster, essentially a red rectangle emblazoned with the title:
JOHN CARTER
Yeah, that's it. Perhaps it's a sequel to "Michael Clayton?"
Well, no. The official trailers for John Carter, although they have some of the cool stuff, don't help much in giving a flavor of what the movie is going to be. But this fan-made trailer does a dandy job:
Yeah. I'll go see that! I hope some of you will join me under the hurtling moons of Barsoom.
This book has been adapted by director Andrew Stanton, famous for his work for Pixar, into a movie that Disney will be releasing on March 9, 2012. You may not know that, because Disney seems to have no idea how to market the movie, and therefore sort of isn't.
Here's an example of how they aren't marketing it: As you see above, the title of the first novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic "Mars" series was A Princess of Mars. But Disney's marketing department put their foot down. "No boy will ever go see a movie with Princess in the title." So the movie was re-titled John Carter of Mars. Disney's marketing department weighed in again. "No girl will ever go see a movie with Mars in the title!"
Hence, you might possibly, when visiting your local cinema, see a particularly boring poster, essentially a red rectangle emblazoned with the title:
Yeah, that's it. Perhaps it's a sequel to "Michael Clayton?"
Well, no. The official trailers for John Carter, although they have some of the cool stuff, don't help much in giving a flavor of what the movie is going to be. But this fan-made trailer does a dandy job:
Yeah. I'll go see that! I hope some of you will join me under the hurtling moons of Barsoom.