Treadmill Desk, Day 15

Day off, baby! I did, like, eight minutes. But I was out most of the day and it seemed like a good idea to give the tootsies a rest.

They're not hurting, but they are numb in spots. That's probably not good. I may end up taking tomorrow off as well. And Monday I'm in the office so I'll be going light then.

"Well, it's a well run campaign, with midget and broom and what-not."

Although the Coen brothers movies are a bit of an acquired taste for some, and a taste some wouldn't want to acquire, O Brother, Where Art Thou? remains one of the great films of the last fifty years, with its mix of music, classical literature and southern-fried goodness.

What is amusing, however, is how little campaigning has changed since the antics of the '30s.

Make Blake Write A Book

National Novel Writing Month is coming.

In order to write a book of that length, you must write six pages a day, something I haven't done in some time.

Because I have so much free time (<--irony) I thought I'd take a shot at it this month, by writing the six pages to a blog.

Feel free to suggest a topic or genre.

Treadmill Desk, Day 15

I thought, after yesterday, I might have to take it easy today, but I did 420 minutes and it wasn't bad at all. I could've done more but I decided to back off a bit. By switching from shoes to bare feet and back, I eliminated most of the discomfort I had, and at seven hours switching wasn't helping.

I was actually really busy, and kept the treadmill at 0.5 the whole time. I didn't have time to mess with it, and I'm in no rush. I do have a small problem of sometimes wanting to work at the desk while my feet still hurt, so the key is to get to where 8 hours is no big deal, in case I need to put in a few more.

Last night The Boy used the treadmill at 3mph for about an hour--while playing Flash games!

Don't Be Eeeeeeeevil!

From the fevered dreams of a madman department (via Instawhatsis): Michael S. Malone posits that Google's new browser "Chrome" is stealth bomb (stealth bomb? Let it go, I'm on a roll) in their silent war to CONTROL THE WORLD's data.

There's actually a rebuttal from a guy AT Google that of the "stealthy" point. I heard about it third hand, from someone who was annoyed by all the other people telling him about it. I downloaded it and--it's interesting. I think it's probably a look at the next evolution in browser design. It's seriously uncluttered.

But of course I realized, in doing so, that this was going to be an entrée into gathering more data on us. Duh. That's where Google makes its money. They are looking to control a lot and they make no secret of it. They're counting on the organization/mining abilities they give you will compensate for lack of privacy.

There were similar issues with Gmail. "Oh, no! Google is going to give you all the space in the world but they're going to pay for it by reading your e-mail!" Well, yeah. But they're not judging you when they do it.

Of course, no one is actually reading your private e-mail. Don't flatter yourself. Nobody cares. There's just an algorithm, like the one that checks for spam, only this one checks for advertising keywords. Besides, don't you know the rule of not sending anything over e-mail you don't want the whole world to read?

Should we watch out for Google? Sure, it's smart to be aware of any company that has such a huge influence on the world, 'net or otherwise. And--most people don't realize this--their company rule is not "Don't Be Evil" it's "Don't Be Eeeeeeeeevil."

So, there's some slack there.

Treadmill Desk, Day 14

A whopping 460 minutes today. Just shy of eight hours.

I had the treadmill down slow, at around .5 and .6 miles. This greatly reduced the discomfort, though the last 20-30 minutes were still a bit tough.

My feet hurt, so I tried wearing shoes. That worked for a while, then my feet started hurting again. So I took the shoes off. That worked...for a while.

So I think what's going on is just the sheer repetitiveness of it. By changing up, I can keep the feet pretty pain-free. By the end, after stopping for an hour or so, they hurt like a mofo. That seems to be a common issue: Inactivity makes the feet hurt when you start up again.

Sort of like plantar fasciitis.

Before I started doing this, I had stiffness in my achilles tendons. This also abated somewhat over time, but never fully. Now I have the foot pain--so I'm still walking like an 80-year-old man--but the ankle and tendons seem pretty loose. And at least the foot pain is a temporary problem, so I actually get to moving at a good clip very quickly.

Man on Wire: Audience on Seat Edge

Narcissism and nostalgia, would be my bullet summary of Man on Wire, the documentary of Philippe Petit's crossing of the World Trade Center on a tightrope.

Petit, a Frenchman whose means of support is not discussed at all, is a singular man with an incredible drive...to tightrope walk. His certainty and clarity of purpose is like a magnet to those around him, as he acquires a team to help him pull off a number of remarkable stunts: Walking between the towers at Notre Dame, and over a Sydney freeway, and finally, between the two largest towers in the world (at the time).

So, here's a story about hope, passion, dedication, the creative impulse, and the ability to do the impossible, as well as a story about how easy it was to get people to do really stupid things in the '70s.

Petit narrates a lot of the story with tremendous passion, interspersed with comments from the others who were there at the various events. That's not a spoiler, dammit: He's there in the opening scenes of the movie. He obviously didn't die. Actually, everyone still seems to be alive, which is not bad, given the time span.

This is an interesting story, both of the actual events and of the group dynamic, which completely disintegrates after the big event. It's interesting to note that the whole thing was held together by one man's passion, and it worked right up until he achieved his goal.

So, there's the message: If you're passionate enough--and you don't care how you use people--you can do anything. I'm only being a little bit snarky, here. Everyone seems to have enjoyed being around this guy when he had this passion. He burned brightly. But I don't get any sense that he ever related to anyone in any other way than how they could facilitate his ambitions.

Which, perhaps, is a lesson of its own about creative drive.

All-in-all, a pretty good movie, though I was confused by the fact that there's actual footage of training they did. I first thought they had hired some very similar looking actors to the real people and recreated the scenes but, no, a lot of the (remarkably high quality!) footage is real, though they weren't able to carry that through to the actual crossing.

Then they started throwing in re-enactments, which were pretty obviously fake. But at the end I found myself wondering which was which, and that's not good for a documentary.

The ghost of the World Trade Center haunts the entire movie, though they never once mention 9/11. There's no need to. You're sitting there, looking at them going, and if you were sentient seven years ago, there's going to be some resonance there.

All-in-all, not bad, though you don't want to approach it from a dour, conventional point-of-view--or you'll end up wondering what the hell it is that allows Europeans to waste all their time doing pointless things.

Take it as a flare of brilliance--a remarkable incident, never to be repeated--that fired up the imagination of the world for a few moments.

Maybe if you do something like that, that's all you really ever need to do.

Treadmill Desk, Day 13

300 minutes. Went light. Feet are still hurting off-and-on, but otherwise feeling more nimble in the ankle area.

Treadmill Desk, Day 12

A whopping 420 minutes today. The last 90 were hard.

I might need to get shoes after all. I don't like shoes. 

Still, seven hours. Wrote, tested, debugged a program. That's cool.

Taking Advice From Enemies

I'm not sure what Sun-Tzu said about it, if anything, but I'm pretty sure that it's a bad idea.

Just sayin'.

Lotta folks trying to convince their enemies that they have their best interests at heart these days. People whom they've expressly called evil.

Must be the season.

Traitor In Trange Land

The Boy opted for the new Don Cheadle movie over the documentary about the guy who tightrope walked across the World Trade Center, and since he had been the King of All Brothers with a rather whiny Flower, I let him hold the popcorn for a while.

Which isn't really relevant to anything. Except I was proud of him. The Flower's been going through a difficult time and she tends to take it out on him, while at the same time missing him when he shutters himself in his room.

So we went to see this movie--based on a story by wild 'n' crazy guy, Steve Martin!--and, The Boy didn't really get it. That's unusual except there are some subtitles in the movie. I've noticed that if the movie is entirely in a foreign language, he does fine, but if they come and go, he can get lost. In this case, while most of the dialog is in English, part of it is in arabic, and the arabic's not all subtitled.

The other thing I think is a factor is that for more than half the movie, you're in the terrorist's lair, and that's hard to relate to, I think. I liken it to the mad scientist in a Bond movie who's going to destroy the world, except writ small. The thing is, the Bond movie doesn't have to make sense. You have to wonder about the logic that says, "If we just blow up enough random, non-military stuff, we win."

For a moment, I got a kind of Paradise Now vibe off it. Paradise Now is a kind of brilliant movie, told entirely from the Palestinian POV. If you've drunk the kool-aid, anyway. An objective POV might chafe a bit at the Palestinians blaming the entirety of their plight on Israelis. I'm sure they do that, but it turns them all into victims whose only recourse seems to be further victimization.

So, in this movie, we have Don Cheadle, Islamic explosives expert, who gets deeper and deeper into the world of jihad until he's sent on a mission to equip 50 American moles with 50 bombs to detonate on bus trips, all on the same day.

All is not as it seems, of course, and one of the big problems is that Don Cheadle is almost a latter day Henry Fonda. Even when he's not playing an American, he radiates a kind of All-American good-heartedness. He's the guy who turns the hotel into a refugee camp, who takes his crazy ex-roommate under his wing, who is wise in the ways of racism. Even in Boogie Nights, he seemed like an incredibly decent guy in a sleazy business.

Seeing him as a terrorist is challenging, and maybe it ultimately works because terrorists see themselves as good people. The movie does raise a whole lot of questions about what limits it's okay to go to get a bad man.

One of the other big problems, however, is that the actions taken to get the bad man (not Cheadle but his ultimate boss) don't entirely make sense. They do set up a bravura climax, one that's really quite satisfying.

Which leads us to the biggest problem: The movie is more tense than suspenseful, which makes it feel a little slow. (I remember Joel Siegel saying once that the difference between tension and suspense is that two hours of suspense is fun, while two hours of tension gives you a headache.)

I'm calling out the faults, but it's only the movie's slowness that hurts it seriously, and it's still quite watchable. Cheadle is fine, as always, and the supporting cast includes Jeff Daniels, Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough. Cheadle's real co-star is Saïd Taghmaoui, who respects his love of Islam and takes him further into the terrorist network.

Ultimately, the movie works in the sense that it challenges you to think about, as I said, what's okay in the war on terror, and it does so without being a navel-gazing exercise in America-bashing. So, that's a plus.

It needed a little crisper direction, however. But the director's former "big script" was the abysmally perplexing The Day After Tomorrow, so this is a step in the right direction.

Treadmill Desk, Day 11

240 minutes.

Manic Monday Apocalypso: Introduction

I thought it would be fun to start every week off with some sort of post-apocalyptic topic.

Nothing like a little doom-and-gloom to cure that "case of the Mondays" you have.


First up, Gamma World. Although I and my friends mostly played D&D, we dabbled in a few other games. The ones GMed by others never lasted long, though I don't know if it was because they weren't very dedicated, because I was so much better at running games, because I was a terrible player, or some combination all of the above. So for some reason I never got into sci-fi, and we flirted briefly with superheroes, but Gamma World was the only one that got much play when I was around.

It's entirely possible, if not probable, that my friends played without me without telling me, and Lord knows I was consumed by music increasingly as my teens progressed. But I did get a call from a 7th grade pal in 10th or 11th grade saying my Jr. High group hadn't played D&D since I changed schools.

Gamma World was highly derivative of D&D but had some cool highlights. There were little things--like the set came with a map of the post-Apocalypse USA, which, quite frankly, looks like what pass for global warming maps today.

Another cool thing about GW was that you didn't just rolled your stats, you optionally rolled your mutations. These were, of course, comic-book type mutations, not things like "easily susceptible to cancer" or "unable to aim urine stream". So you could have extra arms or legs or eyes, psychic powers, and I think even wings were an option. You could be a mutant animal, for sure. I think--like the superhero game--you could also pick a bad mutation to offset some good powers you had. (Much like you'd pick "kryptonite" for Superman.)

In retrospect, what GW really needed was a way to let GMs and players work out their own mutations.

Though GW was fairly generic, it also featured "social groups". One group was for expunging mutants while another was for expunging unmutated humans. There was an animal group that was for killing all humans, and a robot group, too, I think. Not all the groups were about killin', some were for trying to restore society or had other bases of organization.

Looking back at it, I think the real problem with the post-apocalyptic movie genre is that it seldom shows a fraction of the imagination GW creators did--and this is probably true of high fantasy and D&D, too, but high fantasy movies are really pretty rare.

When was the last time you saw a post-apocalyptic movie with a three-eyed, four-armed guy? Or a mutant animal? Or a bunch of rival societies, other than generic, purposeless, Road-Warrior-style thugs?

What puts the "pop" in apopalypse? (Work with me, here, I'm on a roll.)

Nothing, that's what. The closest you can get is Futurama, which isn't really post-apocalyptic.

The most recent versions of GW have been desultory enough to go out of print fast, which would be a shame, I guess, if I had time to play it.

Until next Monday, stay radiated, mutants!

The Seduction of B. Maelstrom

The splash I've gotten just from posting to a couple of Sarah Palin threads is astounding.

Political blogging must be so tempting. All those hits are just sitting there. You can poach (and people do) by attacking a more popular blogger and getting them to respond. You can post something inflammatory and get flamed, or get accolades from similarly inflamed minds. Get big enough and you can have conventions and internet TV shows, etc., etc., etc.

I mention it in part because Althouse used to do a lot more arty, quirky, apolitical stuff. The Palin storm is like nothing I've seen there: A couple thousand comments over the weekend. And I'm sure it's not over. Compared to a well-mannered thread on "American Idol" or photo blog, the traffic is humongous. (And she's cultivated a polite crowd over there that can mostly handle the bile that some folks seem to carry around in their cheeks all day, looking for a chance to spew.)

But after the election (and the post-election controversies) it'll quiet down again, I think, and the blog will get more interesting again.

Debutante

I was born at 6AM on a Monday morning.

At 9AM my mother called the office and said, "I won't be coming in today. I had a baby."

She'd hid her pregnancy successfully for 33 weeks. She didn't want to get fired--or treated differently.

Also, my mom loves a surprise.