In Which I Modify a Long-Standing Aesthetic Opinion

I just finished watching THE FOUNTAIN, Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi epic starring Hugh Jackman. Yes, I too think it sucked. It was overreaching, pretentious, murky and badly paced. It was also the most expensive of Aronofsky's three movies. Normally I would shrug it off and say "money ruins everything."

You know, I've long felt that. I've seen dozens of independent filmmakers do great little cheap features, only to be taken on by Hollywood to produce ungodly expensive crap. And I always assume it was the money that sucked all the life out of those movies.

But the production history of THE FOUNTAIN has given lie to that premise. The idea was germinating since the late nineties, and Aronofksy was pushing hard for this to be his next feature after LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. He had it all set up, with Brad Pitt as the star, and then Pitt walked out and the studio pulled the plug. Aronofsky re imangined the movie as a at half the budget, roped Hugh Jackman into the lead, and got it made, presumably with complete artistic control.

Given this scenario, it's clear that at least some times I was wrong. Big money doesn't cause bad movies. Big egos do. Once a guy puts out an acclaimed cheapie he thinks he can do anything, and he DEMANDS big money. Maybe the studio heads are right. Maybe that's what happened with EVAN ALMIGHTY and WATERWORLD and HEAVEN'S GATE. Maybe these people need to be slapped down for their own good.

Thank god I'm not trying to break into showbiz any more, because once this gets googled, I'd never work in this town again.

I Work At Dunder-Mifflin

I'm very pleased (okay, relieved) to report that I've just recieved an offer of employment from a printer supply company here in town. Good people (looks like, anyway) solid work and a four mile commute. I start Monday.

So that's one source of anxiety down, leaving only the other 1100.

If you are a British reader of this blog, please change the title to I work at Wernham Hogg.

Bloody Well Wright

Let me establish my boomer cred by admitting that I was looking forward all week to the free concert-in-the-park by Gary "Dream Weaver" Wright. I went, I saw, I took some pictures. Not bad. In the photo, note below the prominent SOPRANOS logo on the man's hat. I Love L.A.!

Gary Wright is a perfect choice for a free concert. For one thing, he is not a one-hit wonder like the Little River Band, who performed last week. Gary had two hits, the other one being LOVE IS ALIVE. Thus he is able to have a 45 minute set with a climax, a break for people to buy more kettle corn and barbecue, then come back for another set with another climax. Furthermore his hits are still in pretty good rotation on certain radio stations, which means that the younger generation has a fighting chance of knowing him. Finally the material is catchy and light as a feather, listenable without being troubling.

However, it didn't really work. Gary and the band were fine. They sounded great although there were a few mic problems. Maybe it was the heat. At 6:00pm the temperature was around 90 degrees. So try though they might, Mssrs Wright and company were unable to raise more than a tepid response from the crowd. I think we all dug it and everything, but we were just like, you know, mellow.

I learned a few things. Gary Wright is not the least bit British. He's American! But he got established in England with the band Spooky Tooth, which I have heard of without ever having heard. I read a lot of Rolling Stone when I was young. Also Wright played on a couple of George Harrison albums, and a book of indian poetry inspired DREAM WEAVER, his best-known work.

Well, the important thing is I got out of the apartment for a couple hours. Maybe I'll do the same next week, for the Zydecats. Oh how I wish they were the Hamonicats!

This last picture is best appreciated in conjunction with another blog called SUICIDE FOOD. They meticulously document the phenomenon of advertising depicting animals happily inviting you to eat them.


From now on you'll notice it EVERYwhere.

The Bright Side of Global Warming

I was just watching the BBC News and they quoted an interesting statistic. Even though the frequency of "weather events" is measurably rising, the death toll from them is falling. Weather events, obviously, include flooding, hurricanes and such like. The BBC rep said that it's believed that the casualty rate is down because it is now easier to predict these things and the sheer frequency has put rescue crews at the top of their game.

So, there's your bright side - practice makes perfect! Let's pump a little more carbon into the atmosphere, to speed up the training!

The Two Things I Accomplished Today

Actually I accomplished three things. One, I made my pasta with olive oil and basil. Note to self - next time, garlic powder too.

Two, kick ass job interview at the place the laid me off a couple of years ago, which put me into the job I was just laid off from last week. I think they'll make an offer, but it's a big company and it will probably take another week.

Finally, I have posted another Dark Meat show! This is the first new, non-rerun show in quite a few months. In order to make sure it gets heard, I name-checked Ron Paul. I can't wait to see the stats.

You Can't Imagine How Boring I Can Be

Sherlock Holmes. Famous detective. Brilliant guy, if fictional. He had a few quirks, not the least of which was he was a drug addict. If there was not a case to occupy his mind, he would turn to cocaine, a 7% solution self-injected into his forearm.

I bring this up to explain why I'm not writing lately. Writing, you see, is my cocaine. It's something I do when my awesome mental powers aren't needed elsewhere. Sadly, I'm putting them to use in the service of getting my own life back together. Look, it was a bad week. My divorce progressed painfully, I moved out of my house and into the swinging bachelor pad, and the very day after I got into the new place they laid me off from my job. I worked for a subprime mortgage lender. Should have seen it comin'

Anyway you'd think I'd have more free time but I have less. I spend most of the weekday work hours looking for work. And surely you know that finding work is way more work than doing work. Then in the evenings, after the temp agencies are closed, I try to beat my little studio apartment into place. I have been haunting the thrift stores trying to find the perfect kitchen table, the best salt shakers. I've been keeping an eye out for the right shade of blonde wood. I've been going through my digital photo library and finding good pictures that don't have my ex-wife or ex-dogs in them.

I've been installing water filters so I don't have to buy bottled water.

I'm excited as hell because tomorrow they finally turn on the gas in this place and I can boil water and make my own pasta, which I will top with frozen meatballs, oregano, and olive oil.

Anyway, I have a job interview tomorrow and sooner or later I'll run out of things to buy for the place (I still have to find a set of throw pillows for that futon!) and then, I'll be writing all the time to alleviate the boredom of living in a tiny place like this.

Or, hopefully, dating.

Swingin' Bachelor Pad

Well, that's one hurdle crossed. I've managed to move into my new studio apartment to the point where I'm comfortable getting up tomorrow and being able to shower and put on clothes. The rest is gravy.

And by gravy I mean I want a refrigerator, gas hookups, my new queen size bed, and the combination microwave/toaster that I saw at Sears this weekend. Yes, a toaster! It's built into the side of the microwave. Useful for small spaces.

By the way, I don't have DSL service until Friday. One day I will find out which neighbor didn't encrypt his wireless router, and I will take him out for a drink.

Your Real Age

Even with all I'm going through, I'm actually 3.5 years younger than I thought, plus I look even younger than that! Try it for yourself.


Poodwaddle.com

Ron Paul - What's Up With That Guy?

Ron Paul is a Republican Presidential candidate who is against the war. Do I love him? Do I hate him? I don't know, but I do know that just mentioning Ron Paul on your website can quadruple your hit count.

Nothing Freaks Me Like A Cephalopod

I grew up in the Monterey Bay Area, and I've seen some weird stuff. One year, there was a population explosion of bio-luminescent plankton, and for months the tide glowed eerily. Then the plankton population used up the oxygen in the bay and there was a mass grunion annihilation. Volunteers scooped up thousands of beached grunion.

But thankfully I don't live there now, because this terrifies me.

A mysterious sea creature, up to 7 feet long, weighing up to 100 pounds. It hunts in packs of hundreds, flying through the water at 25 mph, changing color.
With a parrot-like beak and arms covered with thousands of sharp barbs, it attacks and tries to eat nearly anything it sees, including fish, scuba divers, even its own kind.
But it's not a creature of Hollywood. It's real. And it's reached the Monterey Bay. The Humboldt squid, also known as the giant squid or jumbo squid, traditionally has lived in warm waters off South America and Mexico, where fishermen call it "diablo rojo," or "red devil."
For reasons that still aren't entirely clear, large numbers of the scrappy cephalopods have been steadily expanding their range north, first off San Diego and Los Angeles, where hundreds have washed up on beaches in recent years.

Squid and jellyfish are sooooo alien and amorphous that I can't deal with 'em. Don't ask me to explain it either. They're just creeeeeeeeeepy. And why no real plurals? What's up with that?

WAMK will be surprised to learn that a mainstream newspaper goes out of its way to dismiss Global Warming as a cause for the migration, blaming instead overfishing in diablo's native waters. I think it's more that they sense that their first major attack on humans would be better launched from somewhere closer to Silicon Valley. Once they take down our technology, then we will be helpless as babes, plump and primed for devouring. And I'm well aware that Los Angeles is right along their route.

The article is two days old, but I read about it today. It figures. Thursday... Cthulu, HP Lovecraft's eldritch God of the deep. Sweet Jesus, we must stop them now, before it's too late!

Then again, I live 30 miles from the beach and it's 100 degrees out here nowadays, so I can probabaly outrun my ectomorphic overlords if the time comes.

Okay, never mind. I'm fine now. Whew! Still... watch the aquariums.

Flaunting My Ignorance

The first ever YouTube debates happened a couple of days ago. There's been plenty of comment around the blogosphere about 'em, and even a fun hoax which claimed that somehow the goatse had made it on to CNN. I don't want to say any more about the goatse. Look it up on Wikipedia, and even follow the links if you want to know more. You'll be sorry.

I didn't watch, perhaps out of goatsephobia, but mostly because it's too damn early. The campaign cycle is criminally lengthy and I don't need these people shouting VOTE FOR ME in my face when we all know that a year and a half from now the elections will have been cancelled because Dick Cheney has declared martial law. I've got to buy a barrel of rice and a water tank and shotgun shells. YouTube! Ha!

Also don't fool yourself that opening up the questions to WeThePeople was somehow more democratizing than the normal debate format. The questions were screened, and there were many thousands to choose from. Even taking out anything with goatse footage, any question a moderator would have asked on their own was surely supplied by SOMEONE in YouTubeniverse. If you think the debates are normally sealed off from reality, this is worse because it has the appearance of not being so. Which is more dangerous, a Terminator that's a titanium skeleton or a terminator that appears to be a flesh and blood policeman? I think you know the answer to that!

At this early stage it's not only safe to ignore the candidates posturings, it's VITAL. This is their training period. Pay attention next year. If you must vote in the primaries, start looking at them in that final month when they have their messages all polished up. If they can stay on message and only use small, easy-to-digest sentences -- vote for the other guy.

Silver Lining

So last night, a picture fell off a high shelf in my office, plummeting 6 feet to the the tile floor below. Bright side? I'm sleeping on the floor of my office until my swingin' bachelor pad is ready next week, so the picture harmlessly plopped on two layers of sleeping bag, a blanket and sheet, and my leg.

Okay, so maybe it's not the most cheerful silver-lining story ever. You want uplift, watch some Oprah.

The D-Word

I'm getting divorced, all right? That's why I haven't been writing much lately.

Just signed the papers last night, which means now the part that everyone loves begins - negotiating who gets what appliances, which CDs and so on. Music isn't going to be very difficult because we had very, very different tastes in music. The hardest part of DVD shares will be determining who has to keep the ones NEITHER of us likes. How did those get in there?

We were married for a little over 14 years.

Financially we look to be okay. I think both of us are walking away from the union with more than what we had when we met, which means the whole thing turned a profit. Bright side!

Irreconcilable differences. It's the only reason you need in California.

If you enjoy reading this blog, bear with me for a few more weeks and I should be back to speed. Right now I'm embroiled in detail work, the kind that I started writing blogs to avoid doing. I'll be back though. And I won't really be gone either, because I can use the therapy of posting once in a while.

(P.S. I'm not normally this shameless, but if you're a woman who reads this, drop me a line about my profile picture to tell me that I'm totally hot. A little of that goes a long way in these circumstances.)

Hidden Beauty: Local Boys Make Good

I swear I was gonna keep off this story, but there's a local angle. You always play the local angle!

Mitt Romney, who threw himself onto the John Edwards Haircut bandwagon at breakneck speeds as it careened past him, has been revealed to have used the services of Hidden Beauty, a “a mobile beauty team for hair, makeup and men’s grooming and spa services.” He got two sessions at $150 a pop. I bet it was when he was doing those debates at the Regan Library, which is about a 20 minute drive from here.

The company is based in West Hills! So am I! And as you might expect, I've never heard of Hidden Beauty. There is a gated community called Hidden Hills around here somewhere, though of course it's hidden so I couldn't quite tell you where. It's kind of like the train platform to Hogworts.

Anyway, Romney was quoted as saying about Edwards that he pays $50 for a haircut, including tip - when you include bronzer treatments, this rounds up to $200 bucks, and that makes them about even. Maybe there aren't two Americas, after all. I can't wait to hear what Fred Thompson spends on makeup, though it's a safe bet his hair budget is pretty low. Guiliani, well, calculate by this:

Boing Boing: 1952 comic predicts Bush/Cheney Iran policy

Click to Enlarge

As they suggest, perhaps Cheney read this as a child and it stuck with 'im.

No Legs = Unfair Advantage

...South African Oscar Pistorius, 20, on Sunday night made his debut against a top field of able-bodied athletes. In rainy chill that validated the common phrase "dreadful English weather," he finished a well-beaten seventh, then was disqualified for having run outside his No. 8 lane In the Norwich Union British Grand Prix race.
LA Times, 7/16/07

Oscar Pistorius' legs are missing from the knee down. He was profiled in Wired Magazine a few monts ago, which is why I know anything about a sports story. He has been fitted with carbon fibre springs in the place of normal prosthetic legs, as pictured here.

Pistorius was running in a race against less exotic atheletes, and he'd fought hard to compete in that arena. There are two arguments he had to refute. One is that as a man without legs, he was at a disadvantage. His counter-argument was the second reason why he shouldn't compete: the springs enabled him to propel himself farther than someone with mere feet, and with less body mass, his lungs didn't need to provide as much oxygen thus giving him better endurance.

So in a lot of ways, it's a race of apple versus oranges. Or cheetah versus motorcycles. The question is, is it a fair race?

And the answer is yes, if we all agree beforehand.

Sports is entertainment, nothing more. We pit people against each other and hope that one person or team will win. Often implicit is the assumption that they're evenly matched, but it's no requirement. If people buy tickets to the big Clean Vs. Steroids game, they are perfectly happy to root for clean or steroids, knowing that the Steroid people, while stronger, will have worse judgement and mobility. It's all in the disclosure. Plus, no one goes after their bookies if you know the parameters in advance.

This is the calculation that the promoters made when staging the Pistorius race. It's very disappointing that it ended in a technicality; because this proves nothing. If he wins the next one, it will prove something: We have the technology. We can rebuild him - better, stronger, faster.

My Best Blog Metric

Just a quick observation - I use FEEDBURNER to syndicate this blog, and they provide me with handy statistics. It's because of them that I know what the number one post is, as the result of google searches. I'll make it a multiple choice for you.

1. Turtles All The Way Down (6/19/07)
2. Geopolitics as Barfight (12/6/06)
3. Oh No, Ann Coulter Again (3/5/07)
4. Adwords - Does It Make Adsense? (5/16/07)
5. SECOND LIFE Is Much Cheaper Than Heroin (7/7/6)
6. Nazi Porn Vs. Terrorist Gangs (5/7/07)

Yes, of course it's #6. But thanks for playing!

The Photo the GOP Wants To Hide

This ranks with the "George Bush Can't Find the Exit Door" and "press conference in front of a cemetary" photo ops and the best Republican Encapsulation of recent times - the stage at the NAACP Republican debate. Note Tom Tancredo... and NO ONE ELSE! They all had "scheduling conflicts."

read more | digg story

The Longest Delayed Punchline Ever

I was just about to write a comment in another blog about someone resorting to a reducto ad absurdum argument and I caught myself. Where the hell did I, who never finished college, get all these fancy latin phrases?

Looking back, I remember a 16mm film from high school. It was about how to identify propaganda and counter it. It stuck with me because "propaganda" was depicted as a 7-headed dragon, with one head being ad-hominum attack, another being false analogy, and so on. It was a keystone in my logical development.

I guess it's a pretty dry concept and they filmmakers had to do that to "catapult the propaganda." And it didn't occur to me until just now that depicting propaganda as a dragon IS propaganda.

Setup... beat... beat... beat... (repeat for 30 years) ... PUNCHLINE!

I Was Wrong About Blaming The Messenger

So sue me.

I did a little railing against ad hominum attacks yesterday, calling them a distraction from the real issues. But a weird thing happened. Through means I can't fully comprehend, I have acquired access to a news database from the year 2030. I think it has to do with ATT upgrading its network for the iPhone. Anyway, if you look at these quotes, I think you'll see how wrong I have been. My bad, people!

Al Gore looks sheepishly into the distance. "The thing I never realized was that one man CAN make a difference. Once Tipper and I decided to move our family into that two-room apartment, the global warming trend reversed! It's documented. They were right to ridicule me." Gore sighs heavily and rolls his futon back into place.

See, I wouldn't have seen that coming either.

It was revealed today that Niger had actually sold over 3 tons of yellowcake uranium to Sadam Hussein's Iraqi government in the the 1990s. The evidence had gone unnoticed for decades because Joe Wilson, United States envoy, was enjoying an Iraqi vacation at the behest of his wife, Valarie Plame. "Joe was just there to party on the government's dime," an anonymous source told us. The papers revealing the truth were found under a mini-bar in the hotel where Wilson stayed.

Wow! Is my face red!

The "fame addiction pill" has it's detractors, but Sheehan isn't one of them. "I was out of control. I didn't care about mourning my son, I didn't care whether the war was just. Hell, I was FOR THE WAR! But I just had to have fame."

Page after page of this stuff -- DIXIE CHICKS HOSTED AL-QUAEDA CEL IN STUDIO, OLBERMAN'S EX-DATES TELL ALL: "HE'S A BELOW-AVERAGE LOVER", POOR PEOPLE DIRECTLY AFFECTED BY RISING PRICE OF HAIR PRODUCTS -- I realize now that I have been horribly wrong. In fact it's always appropriate to counter a rational argument with an attack on the person making it.

That's why I feel comfortable saying that Rush Limbaugh's opionions are worthless because he's a drug addict, and anything anyone says on Fox... well, come on! They're fame-whores, or they wouldn't be on TV, right? People who fight illegal immigration are racists, by the way.

Man, is this easier than a real argument? You bet it is! Not that you'd know. You're a terrorist.