Theological Thoughts

"You know, a lot of Christians talk about how bad-ass Jesus was driving moneychangers from the Temple?"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah! But--I mean, we're talking about a bunch of Jewish bankers! I could do that with my legs broke and a bad case of mono."

"No, you're thinking about it wrong."

"How so?"

"You're thinking pin-striped suit financial eggheads."

"Yeah!"

"Think loan sharks. Lots and lots of loan sharks with enforcers to boot."

"Word."

"That's what they say."

Conversations From The Living Room, Part 28: I'm a Genius!

[The Barb is wearing her shirt backwards and her grandpa stops her.]

"You're wearing your shirt backwards!"

"I know! I like it!"

[He tugs her pocket]

"And I guess people behind you could slip stuff into your pocket!"

"No, they can't!"

"Why not?"

"'cause I'm a genius!"

"..."

"..."

"What does genius mean?"

"That's when you sneak and hide and jump out at people!"

"..."

"..."

"You mean, you're a ninja?"

"Yeah!"

Gas-s-s-s-s-Land

Oil companies have been buying up the drilling rights to properties all over the country. What could be better than waking up to a big check (offer) in your mailbox? It's like you got rich for just being lucky enough to be on a natural gas deposit.

Or, to quote a common meme these days, "What could possibly go wrong?"

This is the question asked by Josh Fox, after the Fox family manse receives such an offer.

You already know this isn't going to turn out well, right?

Josh decides to investigate, grabs a video camera, and an enlists the help of a pal (?) with a camera and they run around the country investigating "fracking", the process of—well, hell, you can read about it on Wiki, if you want, but suffice to say, it's a practice of extracting natural gas (something America has in abundance).

Now, a simple truth is this: Just like oil wells, mines, or any other excavation activity, bad things are going to happen. A cold analysis of the situation would be to examine the amount of gas extracted relative to the damage caused in the process, thus allowing us to decide for ourselves whether the risk was worth the cost.

But I suppose that'd make a dull movie.

Fox runs around to farmhouse after farmhouse where the fracking seems to have caused serious problems. A propos of the situation in the Gulf, natural gas seems to also be capable of gushing out of control.

The effect of this is to make the air smell bad, causing rivers to bubble with toxicity, and (as Fox demonstrates repeatedly), makes tap water flammable.

Yes, apparently, on a farm, when your water turns bad, your first instinct is to try to light it on fire. They do this so many times in so many places in this movie, you worry about someone actually blowing up their whole damn farm.

It's a pretty decent (if one-sided) trip over all, with Fox ultimately drawing pictures of the entire northeastern area of the country being poisoned, the entire west being wrecked with wells, and stretches like someone's dad being exposed to the toxic water and being dead inside of 2 years from pancreatic cancer. (Patrick Swayze didn't even make it two years, I don't think. Pancreatic cancer is a bitch.)

About a third of the movie is borderline unwatchable in the literal sense because the hand-held cam is so shaky as to deliver no meaningful picture. The music is, well, homemade. The maker, hopelessly naive about the topic of energy. At one point, Halliburton's name shows up, as if that explains something. At one point, Fox plays the banjo in front of a plant while wearing a gas mask.

Powerful? Or just silly?

Whichever, it all ends up being sort of endearing. This is something we should know about. One would think that the drilling companies would plan for these contingencies and have settlements ready for the landowners, though I suspect the landowners sign those away with the mineral rights. I also suspect that, soon, every problem people have becomes associated with these wells.

Nonetheless, it's just as certain that the various corporations involved stonewall at least some of the time and have a lot of political clout.

Overall, then, this is one of those awareness raising deals. I'd recommend it even if you have to squint through parts and cover your ears through others.

The Boy and the Old Man both enjoyed it as well.

I Like The Cut Of This Buckley's Jib.

I've not really been up on William F. Buckley (referred to as Mr. Fbuckley on "Laugh In", if tales my parents have told me are true...) but I came across this at The Other McCain:

They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.

I think this is exactly right, if better thought out than "liberals" actually do any more. Except for being based on a mountain of fallacies, it even sounds reasonable.

I wonder if there's a mirror-image on the left, where "liberals" describes "conservatives" as accurately? Oh, wait, that's right there is!

Racists!

Touché, statists.

Falling Further Behind...

OK, we've seen Iron Man 2, Harry Brown and The Complete Metropolis.

I will get to them....soon? Eventually? Someday?

Ack!

The Ghost of Mark Twain Revisits Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

"Looking at it now, I'd have to admit it was kind of a dick move on my part. And I'm not saying this just because I want Daniel Day-Lewis to star in the movie version of Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court."

I Join The Illuminati

"Wow, it's so great you guys finally let me in."

"Your qualifications were...adequate."

"Yeah. Well. You know what the unwashed masses call a guy who just barely gets in to the Illuminati?"

"What?"

"Nothing, because those poor bastards have no idea who we are! HA!"

"..."

"..."

"OK. so, this is your desk over here."

"A desk? I get a desk? I figured there'd be, like a banquet table or maybe a grotto..."

"There are, but you have to start somewhere."

"And that somewhere is a desk?"

"That somewhere is Help Desk."

[some time later]

"Hello, Illuminati Help Desk. How may I help you control the world today?"

"..."

"You want to devalue a currency?"

"..."

"Oh, the yen! The Chinese yen, even? Very advanced. Are you upgraded to the current ver--"

"..."

"Very good. OK, go to Actions menu, Economic sub-menu, Currency sub-sub-menu, and click Fluctuation. That should bring up the Monetary Shenanigans dialog."

"..."

"Now, from there, you --"

"...!"

"What do you mean you don't have that menu?"

"..."

"You're using the latest version of Illuminati Pro World Conquest Special Edition?"

"..."

"You think so? OK, do me a favor: Click on Windows+O. That should take you right to the Overthrow window."

"..."

"You what?"

"..."

"You don't have a Windows key? What kind of keybo-"

"..."

"It's an Apple key? Lady, you've got the wrong number. You need to call the Tri-Lateral Commission Help Desk!"

"..."

"OK, yeah, I can give you the number."

Well, That Was Fast!

Man. April! If April showers bring May flowers, I'm gonna be up to my ass in flowers pretty soon here.

I'm so far behind on movie reviews it's ridiculous. In April we saw Gasland, The Secret of the Kells, Kick Ass, Cop-Out, The Secret In Their Eyes, City Island and...I think one more....

I've also been meaning to write on two topics for some time: One is that free marketers often accuse (rightly) statists of operating on the basis of how the world (specifically people) should be versus how they actually are, and how I thnk free marketers have a similar blind spot.

Also, I wanted to write about how racism isn't, in fact, the worst thing ever. (Let's see if I can worm my way out of THAT statement! Heh.)

Anyway, I'll get back on the stick here in a bit and thanks for dropping by.

Happy Easter Everyone!

I like to draw Easter Bunnies from the ears down, and when I started this one at the Flower's behest she said, "Why do I think this bunny is going to be in a race car and wearing sunglasses."

Ask and ye shall receive.

Not shown: My blasphemous picture of Jesus coming out of the cave on the third day and no one being around because all the witnesses are out looking for Easter eggs.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

If the last few posts have seemed a little different to you, it may be because I did not type them in. I picked up a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.0 over the weekend—I think they're about to come out with a new version and so are dropping the price on the old one—and I've been using it, well, mostly as a toy.

I type close to 90-100 words a minute so there is a real limit to how much dictation software can help in terms of speeding up my writing. I mean, I'm not sure that I even speak 100 words a minute so most of the time I'm sitting around waiting for my mouth catch up with my fingers. No, that's not right. My fingers can more easily keep up with my brain than my mouth can. Wait. That doesn't sound right either.

Well, I guess it's better than my brain lagging behind my mouth.

I started typing before I was 10, back when that was unusual. What that means, in practical terms, is that for most of my life I've been using a brain-to-finger connection, as you might call it. I'm very used to thinking going right to my fingers. It's actually extremely challenging for me to compose by talking.

Of course people have been doing this for a long time using non-computer-based technology. Dictating into a tape recorder for example, or just dictating directly to a human. So, in that sense, it's not all that high-tech. Just new to me.

I've been fascinated by the concept of computer dictation going back to the original television series "Battlestar Galactica" where commander Adama used to dictate his logs and we watched the words appear on his oh-so-high-tech green phosphorus monitor. Strictly speaking, that's not really possible. The computer can't know which word you mean without context. (There's no there there. They're their there.)

I tried the earliest computer dictation software back in the mid-90s, using OS/2. It took some huge amount of memory, like 16 or even 32 MB of RAM, and a blazing 100 MHz Pentium power, and when all is said and done, it didn't work very well.

I tried again in seven or eight years ago, with somewhat better results, but with enough corrections needed so as to make the whole exercise more trouble than it was worth.

Well, now Dragon is at version 10, and it's almost useful. The accuracy is really quite good.but it does underscore certain things about the way I write, to say nothing of the way I speak. I like to use punctuation, for example, which—when you are dictating to a computer requires you to say "comma", "quote", and personal favorite "em-dash". This is far from an organic experience.

Also, it's necessarily complex. Yesterday, it was smart enough to put a space after every period and then capitalize the next word. Today, it wants to make me do it. It is spelling out the word "space"—but not always! The correction feature requires you to re-dictate or pick one from a number of options by saying "choose one". But for some reason Dragon is actually typing out the phrase "choose one" rather than making the selection.

Still, it has a lot fewer annoying habits than previous versions (and I include in this voice-recognition software from all the other vendors I've tried not just Dragon), like wanting to type a word because you exhaled forcefully or scratched your nose.

Here is Dragon listening to me recite Poe:

once upon a midnight dreary,

while I pondered weak and weary,

over many a curious and cleaned the volume of forgotten lore,

while I nodded nearly napping,

suddenly there came a tapping,

as of someone gently rapping,

rapping at my chamber door,

"to some visitor," I muttered, "rapping at my chamber door,"

"only this, and nothing more."

pot, distinctly I remember,

it was in the bleak December,

and each separate dying ember,

Roth its ghost upon the floor,

eagerly I saw tomorrow,

vainly I had sought to borrow,

from my books surcease Asaro,

sorrow for the lost Lenore,

lost to me forever more

You can see where it has difficulty, and it's not hard to see why it would. Unusual word choices and grammatical structures are naturally the most likely to cause problems. It doesn't do interjections very well as far as I can tell. Things like "Ah" or "Oh" or "Wow"—well I had to type all those in by hand.

The other thing it doesn't do well—and again it's not hard to see why—is vocal modulation. When I'm speaking aloud in this kind of context my voice modulates and sometimes stretches out a length of words: a sort of prosaic form of melisma which is doubtless exacerbated by decades of reading stories to children. At the same time, I don't find myself speaking in clipped robotic monotones in order to make the software understand me, which I have done with previous incarnations.

Anyway, it's an interesting purchase for $30 (the markdown price if you can find it). If you've ever had an interest in this sort of thing it's worth checking out.

In Which I Admit I Was Wrong

I have been saying sardonically since November of 2008 that's Obama would be the greatest President ever. Because he was so transparently an unreconstructed Marxist and because I knew that he would overreach, I figured this put him ahead of a squishy John McCain, who would move us down the road to socialism while the press decried it as conservatism, just as they did with Bush even when he was doing things that were "liberal".

Unlike some, I'm not so cynical that I could actually vote for Obama on that basis, but I figured it would play out that way.

Worst-case scenario would be that someone on Obama's team might actually understand economics and fixed the economy—which really isn't that difficult if you're not a true believer in communism. With a repaired economy, the administration would have a blank check as far as implementing social programs like health care reform and providing graft to all their buddies.

Fortunately, they've drunk their own Kool-Aid so they really don't understand cause-and-effect. They actually believe a command-and-control economy can work.

Even more fortunately, the American people seem to have woken up to the dangers of overreaching government. I've been predicting an electoral bloodbath for November for the past year, but I think the actuality may exceed even my expectations. The goal should be to make health care reform so toxic that a veto proof majority will vote to repeal it—and given how bad it's currently faring after only a few days, I don't think that this is as wild notion as it might have seemed a few months ago.

So how am I admitting I was wrong? I think that the American people were waking up to the dangers of big government anyway. I think they would have fought McCain as well, just as we saw pork busters emerge under Bush.

In other words, I don't think it was necessary to put the American people through the trauma of a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress destroying the economy in order to alert the them to the dangers the government poses. I think they would've gotten there anyway. And it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

I only hope that people will respond to the same degree that their freedoms have been trampled.

John Adams echoes Freeman Hunt

Do you remember this post by Freeman Hunt called "He Is Not Coming"? I responded to that one twice, here and here.but I'm currently reading David McCullough's book John Adams. And I came across this interesting passage:

"I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate," he wrote in the seclusion of his diary. "We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune—in everything. I feel an unutterable anxiety."

It must be admitted that to some degree the times create the character of the people. The Greatest Generation is considered to be the greatest because of their handling of the Depression and World War II. And, frankly, I don't think they handled Great Depression that well since they left us a legacy of unsustainable social programs, to say nothing of a compromised Constitution. We won't even get started on their child-rearing abilities.

I think there's a real opportunity here for greatness and I think the American people are up to it. I guess what I'm saying is that he may not be coming but perhaps we are.

Ghost Writers In The Storm

A funny thing happened on the way to the movies: in order to see a movie that didn't feature anal rape, I had to go see a movie made by an anal rapist.

I have a friend who has seen every Michael Moore movie to come out in the past 15 years. But he's never bought a ticket for one. Instead he buys a ticket for another movie, and sneaks in to see Moore's latest propaganda. I've always sort of disapproved of this but, well, our choices were Brooklyn's Finest or the French movie A Prophet. Actually, I thought about Hot Tub Time Machine, because at least there the anal sex was probably consensual.

Anyway, we ended up watching Roman Polanski's latest. I don't know why I do this to myself. I guess because I don't think of Polanski as being boring, whatever his other flaws. But Ghost Writer is a big old stupid fest on top of some really stupid politics and only marginally competent old-school direction.

Nice traditional score, however, by Alexandre Desplat, who also scored the French movie we didn't go see.

The story is that Ewan McGregor is a writer offered a juicy contract with the former prime minister Pierce Brosnan to help him finish his memoirs. The old friend who had been helping him up to that point mysteriously turned up dead through accident or suicide—but you know he was murdered.

McGregor runs into Kim Cattrall, who sports an on again off again English accent, and Olivia Williams, who bravely goes without flattering makeup and lighting so that she can appear to be a peer of Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan, meanwhile, looks like he's done a George Clooney on his face. Also showing up are Jim Belushi and Eli Wallach, as well as Timothy Hutton.

When I confessed to the theater manager and I had bought a ticket to see Girl with a Dragon Tattoo but saw this instead, she agreed and said it was disappointing to see so many actors she liked willing to work with Polanski. It's true: You watch and go, "Awwww...not Pierce! Not Timothy (what would his dad think?)! Not Jim! Anybody but Jim!"

I don't need to elaborate, I'm sure, about how this movie unfolds. Obviously, McGregor is going to find out both that the previous ghostwriter found something out that got him killed and is going to find out the same thing and therefore be in jeopardy himself.

The point to this kind of movie is in how it's executed. I was not impressed and neither was The Boy.

Both of us were sort of impressed by the sheer stupidity of McGregor's character. He seems to grasp the level of danger early on enough and yet takes few if any steps to preserve his anonymity.

Allow me a digression here for a moment: Remember Jar Jar Binks? Everybody hated Jar Jar. Except me. Sure, he was the most grating character to be seen on stage or screen since Gilbert Gottfried did his one-man-show on Bobcat Goldthwait, but he was vitally necessary. His traveling companions were Jedi who never got excited about anything. If not for his exaggerated overreactions, you'd never know anybody was in danger.

So it is with McGregor, both in terms of his emotional state and in terms of how he reacts to danger. At one point, during a car chase, he pulls off the side of the road and waits. And nothing happens for a minute or two, so he pulls right back out on to the road and proceeds on his way. (By the way, if these guys tailing him meant to do him harm, they could've been a little less conspicuous.) At one point, his room gets trashed and, well, he seems a bit miffed.

And for what should be a highly paranoid movie, he ends up trusting a voice on the phone, letting an unknown thug/bodyguard pat him down for weapons, and generally doing things that would get you killed in a real thriller.

And, now that I think about it, the MacGuffin—the thing the whole movie revolves around and which the bad guys are trying to destroy—in the hands of the bad guys the whole time. They knew they wanted it. They go after McGregor for having something that looks like it. But they had access to it from scene one.

Stupid.

To ice this particular cinematic cake, the entire movie is thinly disguised Bush bashing. The guy has been out of office for over a year, but they can't stop making movies about him. Brosnan is playing Tony Blair, and the movie's premise is that Blair was a lapdog to the US. This was a popular meme on the left.

Ever wonder if that happened during World War II? "That Churchill guy! He's always siding with Roosevelt! How come he never takes Hitler's side?" You know, it's so inconceivable that America and Britain could have a common interest that the only possible reason for them to agree must be that the British prime minister is under some sinister American influence.

This movie features waterboarding—which we did a total of three times, if I'm not mistaken, but which apparently we did so well, the world is outsourcing its torturing to us.

Stupid, stupid stuff.

And the ironic cherry on top of our cake is that the Prime Minister might have to flee to the US to escape prosecution for war crimes. One character notes that the US does not respect the international criminal Court's jurisdiction putting it in the same category as North Korea and Israel.

Surely Roman could not have missed the irony of speaking with such contempt for those who flee punishment passed by legitimate courts.

It does make you wonder why he'd want to come back here, though. And really makes you wonder why anyone would agitate to allow him back.

Anyway, dumb plot, dumb politics, and only a glimmer of directorial skill to buoy up some really weak action scenes make for a rather cheap movie. One person actually clapped at the end. I looked over and said, "Really? Really?!"

We actually should have gone to see the Girl with the Dragon tattoo again.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Finally! A good movie! And it's from Sweden! Betcha didn't see that comin', didja? Huh? Huh? Well, me neither. Last time a buncha Swedes got together to make a good movie, vampires were involved.

If you were going to describe the girl with the dragon tattoo, you might call it a Swedish Silence of the Lambs.

The story is that investigative reporter Sven Anderssen (okay I'm making that name up) has been shamed publicly when an investigation of an evil capitalists goes sideways on him and lands him in legal trouble. as he loses the trial, he ends up working for a wealthy man who is trying to solve a 40 year old mystery.

Now, how Swedish can you get? He ends up being found guilty in the first five minutes of the movie but he doesn't have to start serving his sentence for six months. And, of course, his jail cell ends up looking more comfortable than your average room at an Extended Stay America.

Anyway, while he's researching this 40-year-old murder, he's also being researched by the titular girl with a Dragon tattoo. She's a feisty, dark-haired computer hacker who is being watched over by the protective, paternalistic Swedish government for some events that occurred in the past.

Unfortunately for her, her new parole officer—it's actually called something like Guardian—sees her vulnerability as a opportunity to explore his perverse sexual peccadilloes with a partner that can't complain.

Naturally, the old investigative reporter and the young computer hacker end up working together to solve this old mystery which involves lots of dead women and, believe it or not, Nazis.

Okay, I have to admit the introduction of Nazis into the storyline made me roll my eyes a little bit. But it wasn't as hacky as that sounds.

Like some of the best European films, this one has many elements that feel very Hollywood and otherwise American while retaining a unique local sensibility, much the same way that Let The Right One In did. In other words, while it presents certain elements of the genre, there is no question that this is a Swedish movie.

It's decidedly anti-capitalist, natch—"Capitalist" is used as a slur in the way "Commie" was used as a slur in the USA in the '50s, and most of the movie's capitalists are Nazis or murderers or both—but at the same time, with the torture inflicted on the heroine by her state-appointed guardian, it must also be viewed as anti-statist at some level.

Mostly however, it's entertaining. It engages you in its characters, as intriguing plot, and while dealing with a seamy subject matter—actually several seamy subject matters—it never feels too self-important.

By the way, I do mean seamy. Much like Silence of the Lambs, this is not a movie with a lot of lighthearted subject matter.

The Boy, the Old Man and I all liked this movie.

Da Wolf, Man!

One of the problems with taking other people's advice about what movie to see is that they might get upset with you if you don't like it as much as they did. (And that's all I have to say about that. You know who you are.)

The Wolfman is a newish movie by the kind-of all over the place Joe Johnston, director of such diverse films as Jumanji and October Sky. It's oddly faithful to the original Universal classic, in such notable ways as re-creating Lon Chaney, Jr.'s furry-faced lycanthrope makeup. Nobody is calling this a perfect movie, but some parts are very effective. And, as always with horror movies, one person's effective is another person's cheesy laughable moment.

For me, I liked the sets, which seemed to use a minimum of CGI. I liked the makeup, as mentioned. I liked the way Benicio Del Toro reminded me of Chaney both in the thickness of his features and his sort of square acting.

Less successful was the near utter predictability of the whole affair. Now, given that this is a remake and there aren't a whole lot of ways for the story to turn out, it actually wasn't nearly as bad as some "original" movies we've seen lately. There's a scene in a mental asylum that was both original to this remake and evocative of the 1940s-era mad scientist movies.

Also, the finale did not emerge from classic werewolf movies of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s—which I suppose is something of a spoiler. I rather liked that, however, because the movie was faithful in so many respects to the original that updating the ending was more effective than if they had modernized everything.

Emily Blunt and Hugo weaving both performed admirably well, unlike, sadly, Anthony Hopkins, whose performance might well define the phrase "phoning it in". (Have we seen anything out of this guy in the past ten years? What the hell happened? Is it just old age? And what the hell did he do to his face?)

A mixed bag to be sure. I rather enjoyed the overall experience as did the Old Man. The Boy did not look amused as he proclaimed that this was not his kind of movie. (What kind of movie was it? I asked him. He said, "Monster/action movies.")

But I would only recommend to the sorts of people who recommended it to me. Heh.