Off-topic posts

Open Mike: New Habits

Monday, 06 March 2023

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

  • Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
  • Wear compression socks;
  • Lose weight;
  • Resume using CPAP; and
  • Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

Posted on Monday, 06 March 2023 at 09:51 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (7)

Thursday, 28 April 2011

So What's Driving Me Crazy Today? (OT)

I've just spent most of the morning dealing with my dental woes—second appointment this week. It was long, but lots better than my appointment two weeks ago, when I got strangely woozy and nearly passed out in the chair. I have no idea what was wrong with me on that visit, but something sure was.

Ya hate it when that happens.

So you know what's driving me crazy today? Fruit juice.

My son wanted some cherry juice, so I made a detour to the seldom-visited juice aisle at the supermarket on the way home from the dentist.

Fruit juice is basically just sugar water, no better for you than soda pop, so it drives me a little crazy when people constantly push it as a "health" drink. [Buzzer noise.] False. It's not.

Parents, especially, who are continually foisting juice on their kids as the moral equivalent of sugary soda are kidding themselves. Hydrate with water. Teach your kids to hydrate with water. If you use them at all, use sugary drinks strictly in moderation as occasional treats. Wasn't there a Flannery O'Connor character who would treat herself to a 7-oz. Coke every three weeks—in the summer?

But what's bugging me today isn't that. It's all those labels that say "100% Juice!" They're all over the place in the juice aisle.

Know what that means? Apple juice. Most fruit juices of any flavor you can buy at the local grocery story are mainly apple juice. Flavored, colored, with a little real juice of whatever the label says it is thrown in to keep the lie from being too blatant. Just because it says "100% juice" on the label doesn't mean it's 100% kiwifruit or grape or cranberry or pomegranate or cherry or whatever the label says you're buying. If you went down the juice aisle at the supermarket and removed all the juices that contain apple juice, there'd be precious little left. Look at the labels next time.

Dr. Charlie says the most perfectly unhealthy food is the iced doughnut. It's pure starch, fried in pure fat, slathered with pure sugar. If you must eat doughnuts, don't eat more in a week than you would eat in one trip to the doughnut store. (That's one trip when you go inside and sit down where other people can see you, not one trip when you buy a bag full and pig out in the car or back at home.)

Wish I didn't like 'em so much.

If you have a sweet tooth and a weight problem, I've got the perfect diet for you. It's essentially a lazy man's low-glycemic-index diet. All you do is cut three things out of your diet:

  • Sugar,
  • Grains and grasses, and
  • Fatty dairy.

And don't go absolutely nuts with portions or fatty foods.

That's it. That'll do it. Want an even easier version of the same diet? Avoid white and yellow foods, or food with white or yellow foods as an ingredient. No corn, no white bread, no pasta, no breakfast cereal, no chips, no whole milk, etc.

There are a few exceptions to the white-and-yellow rule. Flaky white baked fish, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, skim milk, and Egg Beaters are all okay.

So you know what's really driving me crazy? The fact that I can't do it. I've tried and tried to follow the above diet, and it's really hard. I start and stop, start and stop. What's wrong with me? I feel like some sort of cretin who's congenitally deficient in willpower.

Granted, avoiding sugar is a tough one. The American food supply is nearly hopelessly polluted—adulterated would be a better word—with sugar. Sugar is the perfect industrial food: it's easy and cheap to produce, it's mildly addictive, it doesn't spoil, it makes all sorts of things taste better, and it can be added to nearly everything.

And it has been. It's in ketchup, canned soups, packaged bread, frozen dinners, even barbeque sauce. Next time you go to the supermarket, try to find things to buy that don't have sugar in them. Apart from a few staple ingredient foods like cuts of meat and leafy vegetables, and a very few things that are laden with fat and salt, you won't find a whole lot. Just try.

Or, on second though, maybe you shouldn't.

It will just drive you crazy.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Sal Santamaura: "It appears you've got oodles of willpower Mike. What you lack is won't power."

Mike replies: Oww....

Featured Comment by Patrick Perez: "I've been having good luck in trying to follow the principles in the Primal Blueprint, which is substantially similar to the principle Gary Taubes espouses (which I'll wager is the source of your diet plan strategy). I've lost ~20 pounds in the months I've been doing it. Certainly I'm not following to the letter (far from it) but I'm much more cognizant of how different foods are made up, and how that affects my health. The easiest way to keep the bad stuff out of the diet is a two-parter: Prepare your food from scratch, and use actual food as the ingredients. The more you can eliminate all prepared food, the better your success.

"It seems odd that we have gotten to the point that the concept of food containing food is novel, but that's the result of our first world lifestyle."

Featured Comment by Adrian: "A few months back I visited the dentist to have a rear molar removed. So badly decayed (sugar and all that), it crumbled in the dentist's tongs. After an hour or so battling to get all of it out, the dentist took a break. I passed out. Cold. Woke up to him shouting my name repeatedly. He and the nurse seemed quite freaked out. Know what they gave me to feel better? Juice."

Featured Comment by Amin: "As an endocrinologist (hormone and metabolism doctor), I am sensitive to the massive amount of false information on the web and in the media about what kind of diet is healthy or will lead to weight loss. Your simple diet prescription is right on target and similar to what I tell my patients every day. How refreshing to read that online. Re 'So you know what's really driving me crazy? The fact that I can't do it': You, me, and most everybody. I can say based on personal experience that losing weight and keeping it off is like quitting smoking except it doesn't get easier with time. In fact, it gets harder as the body undergoes metabolic adaptation to defend against weight loss. As many times as we fall back, it's important to keep trying. Without that, things get all the more out of hand."

Featured Comment by Simon Gledhill: "I visited L.A. from Australia a few years back, and got a rude shock on tasting the milk—it's sweetened...."

Featured Comment by Eve Schaub: "Our family—myself, my husband, and our ten- and six-year-old daughters—is four months into an experiment in which we are eating no added sugar in our diet for the entire year: no table sugar, no cane sugar, no honey, molasses, maple syrup, artificial or fruit juice sweeteners. I blog about our Year of No Sugar.

"BOY is it hard! And not just in the ways you expect—even when you get past the cravings—which do diminish—the social pressure and the supermarket's insidious ingredients are everywhere...bread, mayo, chicken broth, bacon, smoked salmon, tortellini...our family has begun to joke that if it has ingredients, we can't eat it. I highly recommend Dr. Robert Lustig's YouTube video "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" and the very recent New York Times Magazine article "Is Sugar Toxic?" Also the book Sweet Poison by Australian author David Gillespie."

Posted on Thursday, 28 April 2011 at 02:30 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (93)

Monday, 18 April 2011

Addendum to Hoarding

Note that I'm not an expert on this subject—at best, I'm an "instant expert" from reading a few books and doing a little research. But since Sunday so many people have mentioned to me privately and publicly that they share some of the characteristics I wrote about yesterday, that I thought I'd clarify this question a bit more: what's hoarding and what's not?

You're not a hoarder just because you have a lot of stuff. My guy the expert from the A&E show, Brendan McDaniel, says "hoarding" is defined not as the amount of possessions you have, but whether it interferes with your life and, especially, whether it jeopardizes your safety.

People with lots of possessions are fine if they can keep them organized. I once visited the photographer Arnold Crane in his penthouse apartment by the lake in Chicago and he had thousands of items from many collections displayed—it was a like a miniature museum. But the items were displayed beautifully and the whole place was fastidiously orderly and perfectly clean as far as I could tell. We had no problem moving around the apartment or using the furniture. He's not a hoarder, at least not on the basis of what I saw of his place.

Brendan Organizer Brendan McDaniel on the A&E show "Hoarders."

The diagnostic criteria for hoarding are things like, are you able to use your rooms for the purposes they're intended for? Where that's concerned, the most extreme case I saw on the show featured a man with a wife and four young children whose large foursquare home had an infestation of bedbugs. He was told he needed to clean the clutter out the house in order to fumigate it, but, rather than do that, he set up a tent in his yard and moved his family into it. And he had a whole rationale worked out about how people pay good money to go camping but that his family "enjoyed" camping right there at home. And freezing temperatures were on the way! The show joined him at that crisis point. I think everyone (well, everyone except that guy) will agree that that's not normal behavior.

One young adult woman had to move out of her own bedroom and sleep in her mother's bed when her mother's things invaded her room and she (the daughter) could no longer use it. Other hoarders haven't seen the top of their dining room tables for years. One mother and her child lived in a 6x10' space in the middle of a 3-bedroom house, doing everything in that space, from eating to sleeping. Several hoarders on the show could no longer use their own bathrooms—one woman borrowed buckets of water from a neighbor's spigot to use to flush her toilet—another woman used adult diapers to defecate in, and then kept the filled diapers, because they were "part of her" and she didn't feel right parting with them. The cleaners removed 3,000 pounds of full diapers from her house.

When you think about it, whether you've got a problem with this or not, the more room you devote to stuff, the less room there is for you. Hoarders effectively reduce the size of their own living spaces. The book Stuff recounts some cases in which hoarders were asked to draw plans of their homes, and they drew maps of narrow pathways or left whole rooms out of the floorplan, simply because the room was so full of stuff it couldn't be entered. It becomes like not having that room at all.

Other people have interference in their lives such as: they or their children cannot invite guests into the home; their spouse separates from them or divorces them because of their living conditions; they get into fights or disputes with neighbors or authorities; they get evicted from housing and become homeless.

Less spectacular criteria include things like: can you find things when you need them? Are your belongings stored such that they are safe, or are you ruining them by keeping them where they are? I personally have had an issue with not having any clear flat surfaces to work on when I want to do a project. An old girlfriend of mine used to sort her laundry on her bed, and sometimes there wasn't room in the bed for her—she would have to push the mass of clothes back and sleep uncomfortably on a narrow strip at one edge.

I realized only a day or two ago that I had become launched on a career of hoarding cameras without really even realizing it. As I determined what had to go yesterday, I first decided to keep only three, then expanded that number to five, and have ended up keeping seven—which, of course, is more cameras than anyone sensibly needs. Besides those listed for sale yesterday, I have two antiques (both Zeisses—and neither of which I'm counting among the "seven" I'm keeping), three lesser models that I'm going to put on Ebay, and two or three junkers or "repairables." They weren't getting in my way, but I had clearly gone more than a few steps down a road I didn't even realize I was on. Now, according to the criteria, if those were kept in nice condition and displayed in a clean and orderly fashion, there would be no problem. But let's just say that the camera cabinet was not in good order. I've been working on that today.

Still, the major criteria for hoarding is this: are you jeopardizing your health or safety, or that of children or pets? It doesn't happen often, but it's not ususual for hoarders to die because they become trapped in their homes—the fate of the prototypical Collyer brothers*. They get buried under an avalanche of stuff, they fall and can't get up, a fire occurs in the home and they can't get out easily, or they have a medical emergency and the emergency crews can't get in to administer aid. Or, they get diseases because of bugs, vermin, or rotting food. Things like that. Ironically, some people who hoard animals (the classic "cat lady" for example) perceive themselves as helping the animals, but they're really hurting them because they can't care for them properly and the conditions become so poor that the animals are at risk.

So, bottom line, some people do just have a lot of stuff—but that doesn't automatically make them hoarders.

Mike the non-expert

P.S. I'm still swamped with work today, so "Book o' the Week" will appear tomorrow. I hope.

*The article mentions that the white Collyer brothers stayed in Harlem as the neighborhood turned African-American. Curiously, my mother once lived next to a man who was the exact opposite. She had a house in Georgetown, D.C., a fashionable and expensive neighborhood in the nation's capital. The neighborhood had formerly been slums, "gentrified" in a process begun by Jacqueline Kennedy in the very early 1960s. But my mother's neighbor, who was black and not well to do, had never left. And he, too, was a hoarder—his house, like the Collyers', was stuffed full of stuff. He was a companionable if grumpy old fellow who I chatted with on many occasions (although he had a memorable eccentricity: on some days he just would not speak to anyone at all, even his son). Apropos my comments yesterday, I can picture his face, his cataracts which were worse in one eye than the other, his house, and where he used to sit on his front steps in the shade of a streetside tree, but of course I can't recall his name. I presume the situation was a bonanza for his son, because once the old guy passed away the house would have been worth a large fraction of a million dollars—or maybe even more than a million.

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Featured Comment by Robert: "My wife and I have agreed regarding all the clutter in the house: the one who dies first, wins."

Mike replies: Macabre, but funny!

Featured Comment by Nolan: "A small correction Mike: No one gets bed bugs (two words) because they're slobs; you get bed bugs by carrying them into your house after which they'll find where you sleep at night and start eating. People who are unclean and/or cluttery often times don't notice they have an infestation for a variety of reasons; they think bed bugs aren't real, they don't change their sheets, the bed is surrounded by crap, etc, however such conditions don't give you bed bugs, they just flourish because it takes people forever to notice them between their belongings. The problem with saying a person had bed bugs because they're a slob is it creates and perpetuates a stigma that undermines the reality of the situation; they affect everyone everywhere, and going forward it's likely that you and everyone you know will have to deal with bed bug activity first hand, so now is the time to declutter and educate yourself about them. I am a pest management technician with five years of experience under my belt. I have extensive training in bed bugs, directly from Gail Getty and Jerome Goddard, two of the foremost experts in the world."

Mike replies: Thanks Nolan. I modified the wording of the post a bit to reflect this information.

Featured Comment by Christopher Lane: "Mike, Interesting that we should intersect yet again. While you were cleaning up, so was I. As a result, I have a great collection of pristine photo books for sale. All hardcovers have dust jacket protectors. Many are way under going price. Most were recomended on this very website, Sorry, no Outside/Inside (I wish). Here's the list."

Posted on Monday, 18 April 2011 at 05:58 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (19)

Wednesday, 06 April 2011

My Favorite Web Comics (OT)

By Ctein

Once again, as per the vox populi mandate, I'm going off-topic. Be warned: This column is guaranteed to waste your time if you read beyond the first paragraph. Why? Because the subject is my favorite web comics. If web comics don't interest you, then reading any further will waste a little of your time. If web comics do interest you, you're at risk of finding one here that you aren't already reading that you'll like. Which means it will waste lots of your time.

You've been warned. Don't come crying to me when you no longer have a life.

I read way too many web comics. There are a pleasant way to relax, nice bite-sized breaks from concentrated work, and occasionally a great rationalization and excuse for not working when I should. 'Sides, I can stop reading them any time I want. Really.

Let me say, upfront, that I'm one of those people whose humor is influenced by their politics. I envy folks who can laugh at anything, apolitically, but I'm not one of them. And, as is no secret, my politics run radical-left, sex-positive, and techno-philic.

(Note to those about to fire off some political or ad hominem rant: don't. Mike probably won't allow it, anyway.)

That means I enjoy "Tom the Dancing Bug" by Ruben Bolling, an oft overtly-political (example) weekly. Personally, my favorite subjects are Lucky Ducky and Justice Scalia, The Fighting Judge. On the other hand, I find "Mallard Fillmore" consistently unfunny. If your funny bone is also politically influenced, but you run on the conservative side of things, you'll find some of my faves unappealing. That's cool. I'm only trying to save you from my idiosyncratic tastes.

Wrong
A famous panel from the brilliant xkcd

"Wondermark," by the multitalented David Malki, is the classic four-panel self-contained joke. It's always witty; it occasionally makes me laugh out loud, (example). Like "xkcd," which everyone here already knows about so I need not belabor its brilliance, Wondermark's multilayered. It doesn't stop with just the rollover; the title and the header lines also tie into the main joke. There may be other layers I miss.

Malki also writes essays. This one is entirely on the topic of photography and might even be more than you ever wanted to read on the subject of body image, photographic retouching, and portraiture, being over 5,000 words and spanning two millennia.

"Way Lay" by Carol Lay is invariably a gem. Rather than being a four-panel joke, each strip's a graphic short story done in a single page. Humorous in an O'Henryesque way.

"Nobody Scores: A Little Comic About Disaster" by Brandon Bolt is mostly black humor about mostly-slacking twentysomethings and their entirely fantastical and surreal schemes for dealing with the world. What Seinfeld would have been if Seinfeld were funny. Which leads me to...

Jeph Jacques' "Questionable Content," also about an assortment of indie-rockish twentysomethings, the coffee shop where they hang out, and their attempts to deal with the world. It's a full-page comic like "Nobody Scores," but "Questionable Content" is an ongoing story. Some strips stand alone, my all-time favorite being this, which is workplace-friendly only so long as your boss doesn't actually read over your shoulder.

This is what Friends would have been if Friends were funny.

If I praise Jeph, I must also praise his nemesis, Sam Logan, whose full-page "Sam and Fuzzy" strips form an ongoing series of graphic novels. A bit less realistic, too, unless you consider a twentysomething slacker with a cynical talking teddy-bearish companion and the world's most inept underground (literally!) criminal organization, The Ninja Mafia, to be realistic. If so, I might enjoy visiting your universe.

Mustn't forget "Pibgorn" by Brooke McEldowney (of the wonderful, syndicated strip "9 Chickweed Lane"). It's like this, y'see: A fairy, a succubus, and a church organist walk into a comic strip.... Beautifully illustrated, glacially paced sometimes to the point of frustration, and often witty and erudite in its dialogue. Here's where it starts.

Graphic novels
The preceding are all ongoing strips. Here are four completed, self-contained graphic novels.

"Rice Boy" by Evan Dahm is surreal, both in story and artwork. I loved it. You might hate it. A particular taste is required.

"Bite Me" by Dylan Meconis mashes up the French Revolution and vampires. How could you go wrong?

"Anders Loves Maria" by Rene Engström. Sweet, sad, poignant, and I found the art engaging, especially as the artist developed her chops.

"Afterstrife" by Ali Graham. You're a twentysomething slacker (anyone notice a pattern?) who dies an untimely accidental death and winds up in hell. You discover you're still expected to work an 8-to-5 job and earn your keep. Noooooooooo....

Finally...

"Girl Genius" by Kaja and Phil Folio. This one of the famous success stories of web publishing and one of the very few cases of an artist figuring out how to make money by giving it away for free.

It's the archetypal steampunk comic, a full-page ongoing story published three times a week. Lovely line work, utterly gorgeous coloring. Very funny but complicated, so you pretty much have to start at the beginning. Agatha Heterodyne lives in a crypto-Victorian world where mad scientists are the powers to be reckoned with. Called madboys and madgirls by their enemies and sparks by their friends (not inherently a safer relationship to be in) they scheme and jockey for position and power. There are forces in nature humans were not meant to tamper with; that never stopped a spark. Be afraid, be very afraid, and laugh a lot.

And finally, don't forget Phil's completed series, "Buck Godot: Zap Gun For Hire." Read the first short story; if you don't like it, you won't like the rest. If you do?

Well, I told you I was going to waste your time, didn't I?

Ctein

If it's Wednesday, it's Ctein.

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Posted on Wednesday, 06 April 2011 at 09:00 AM in Around the Web, Ctein, Off-topic posts | | Comments (49)

Sunday, 03 April 2011

One Cut: 'Hittin' the Jug' (OT)

A jazz cut to download: "Hittin' the Jug" by Gene Ammons, a rich, slow, bluesy rainy-day number that shows off Ammons' famous burnished tone. Two of the three places on iTunes this cut is listed are marked "View," for "view album" or "album only," meaning you can only get the cut if you buy the whole album. But if you search under the song name, or go to the album called "Blue Ammons," you can buy the eight-and-a-half minute piece for 99¢. Try it, see if you like it.

If you want an album around it, I suggest "Boss Tenor," a quintet session from 1960 and probably the best Gene Ammons album. Which is saying something.

Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, and part of the Prestige 50th Anniversary Commemorative series.

...By the way, April is Jazz Appreciation Month!

Mike

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Featured Comment by Anthony Miller: "Great track—excellent intro and comping from Tommy Flanagan on piano. Looking forward to 'Jazz Appreciation Month.'"

Mike replies: The intro was the reason I chose it—Jug's entrance is a nice moment I never get tired of. And Tommy Flanagan is underrated, isn't he?

Featured Comment by Will Whitaker: "Ammons sure got a large format sound out of a medium format instrument."

Posted on Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 06:25 PM in Music Notes, Off-topic posts | | Comments (19)

Open Mike: Disreputable Lowlife Scoundrels

This might be a very good time to take Ctein's famous advice: "Put down the can opener, and step away from that can of worms." But here goes.

I have a suggestion.

We're in the middle of a hotly-contested election here in Wisconsin. It's for State Supreme Court, which is usually a pretty sleepy affair, but this year it coincides with the election for Milwaukee County Executive—the old one vacated the post to run for Governor—which brings out the city voters, and it comes at a time when a very controversial new law is probably on its way to the State Supreme Court. So passions are running high and special interest money is pouring into Wisconsin from both sides.

I just had a modest suggestion: we should pass a law—no, a Constitutional Amendment—banning any political ad that even mentions any candidate's opponent. At this point, our two candidates for the highest judgeship in the State are each screaming that the other loves child molesters. It's completely ridiculous. This constant barrage of hysterical, slanderous negative advertising is uncivilized, disreputable, highly unpleasant, and mostly just plain disgusting. You can't even reward the candidates that refrain from it, because they all do it—both sides.

Enough, I say. I'd ban all negative ads. Make people make a positive case for themselves or their candidates and shut up about the other guy. What we're subjected to in elections these days is just beneath us. It's certainly beneath me, I'll say that. I hate it.

The election is on Tuesday. I can hardly wait for Wednesday to come.

Mike

P.S. No partisan comments will be posted, so watch it please! (Wonder how hard it's going to be to herd worms?)

Open Mike is a series of OT (off-topic) posts on a variety of topics that appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Barb Smith: "Sorry to disagree, but I am all for the First Amendment and anything goes. In the long run, free speech is best and let it all shake out."

Featured Comment by Mandeno Musings: "I haven't seen the ads, but you're probably right. However, such ads are a trivial evil when compared to restrictions on free speech.

"Think about the implications of what you desire, which is government control of what people can and cannot say. Do you really want to have so-called hate speech laws which mean that the police can arrest you when you express an opinion? This is happening now in Canada, the U.K., Europe, China, and North Korea.

"Better to be in a free, impolite society than an oppressed, polite one."  

Mike replies: Yeah, yeah, you're both right. I'm wrong. Still, I can wish I lived in a free, polite society, can't I?

Featured Comment by Asty: "Couldn't help but think of this Simpson's moment."

(Here's the direct link if you can't see it here. —Ed.)

Featured Comment by Roger Moore: "That seems a bit extreme to me. I don't like the smears, but not allowing candidates to discuss their opponents is going way too far in the other direction. A major point of elections is to hold the incumbents accountable for their behavior while in office. Challengers can only do that by bringing up the incumbent's record. Forbidding candidates from mentioning their opponents will make the system less accountable.

"If you're going to go to the trouble of passing a Constitutional Amendment, pass one that takes money out of the campaigns. The current system encourages corruption, but we're stuck with large parts of it as long as the Supreme Court holds that it's fine for donors to spend unlimited money buying campaign ads. A Constitutional Amendment could override that and give us a system where politicians represented their constituents, not their donors."

Mike replies: Roger, You've probably put your finger more squarely on the problem than I did. Campaign finance reform was recently set back to the dark ages, and we will be reaping the poisonous fruits of that for many years to come. What I'm objecting to is most probably the new normal. I guess I'd better get used to it.

Featured Comment by Dan Berry: "Will Rogers said 'What they have to do to get elected ought to disqualify the from holding the office.' Will was always right; I could not agree more."

Featured Comment by Joe Kashi: "It seems that elected judges is the immediate issue.

"Judges should not be elected, particularly not in a partisan election.  Judges should be appointed for merit and then periodically standing for re-election in a non-partisan retention election.  That avoids the worst abuses.

"I am admitted to practice in states that appoint judges on merit and states where anyone who can shake down a few million from potential litigants and their lawyers can stand for election.

"Appointing judges on merit tends to result in the sort of courts that citizens can be proud of, or at least feel as though they were heard and had a fair shake, even if they lose. When you don't have to raise a lot of money to retain your livelihood, it's much easier to concentrate on your job and to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or possible taint of corruption.

"Here in Alaska, under our constitution, three or more nominees for the bench are first selected for merit by a non-partisan panel of lay persons, lawyers, and judges, with the finalists forwarded to the Governor, who appoints the judge from the finalists.

"After appointment, the judge stands for retention re-election on the first election after appointment and periodically every several years thereafter.  A non-partisan panel polls jurors, attorneys, police, and others who have observed that judge first hand and publishes the results of those polls in a pre-election pamphlet that goes to every registered voter.

"This system has worked very well for decades in Alaska and is considered a model for the rest of the country by national legal groups."

Posted on Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 02:35 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (68)

Friday, 01 April 2011

April 1st...

...And I got nuthin'. Not in that kind of mood, I guess. March just bagged its last chance to go out like a lamb; it warmed up a little yesterday, but we've got snow in the forecast. And now I really have to do my taxes, which is going to be gruesome.

I'm not a real basketball fan—I just learned that March Madness doesn't end in March. (When I woke up thinking, hey, how come I didn't hear who won the big tournament?) March is a very inconclusive month, apparently. Personally, I don't think they need to play the last few games—the purpose of the tournament is to determine the best team, and that's gotta be Butler. A mid-tier program that lost its standout star player from last year (Gordon Hayward, who went wayward, to the bizarrely-named Utah Jazz of the NBA*) and they still beat something like 17 seeded teams in a row and got back into the Final Four. Send everybody else home, I say. Crown Butler, yesterday. March is over.

Speaking of inconclusive, eighty-three readers have ordered this week's Book of the Week from Amazon, but, as of yesterday, Amazon has delivered zero of them. To be decided in April, like everything else about this March. I'm watching closely.

Immortal Sensei Oren-san procured a copy from alternative sourcing (he has been duly scorched for this disloyalty) and has pronounced it Good.

And speaking of basketball, they're supposed to be retiring Dennis Rodman's number in Detroit later today. Wouldn't it be a great April Fool's joke if he showed up and they were kidding?

(No hate for Dennis. He was just a hard player to like unless he happened to be playing for your team, is all. I was in Chicago when he came to the Bulls, and the complicated about-face of Bulls Nation—from flagrant hate to smug love—was worth a sociological study all in itself.)

I'm going to let you illustrate this post yourself. Do a Google image search on "Dennis Rodman." Who can pick just one? Captioning bon mot: "Dennis Rodman in drag, although it can be hard to tell."

Have a good April Fool's Day. As the Sarge on "Hill Street Blues" used to say: "Let's be careful out there."

Mike

*No more bizarre than "Los Angeles Lakers," which only seems less odd because we're used to it. The "Lakers," of course, originated in Minnesota, a.k.a. "Land of 10,000 Lakes." The nickname is not an exaggeration: there are actually 11,842 lakes larger than ten acres in size in Minnesota, which has more shoreline than California, Hawaii, and Florida combined. I wouldn't have liked to be the guy who had to figure that out.

At last, an illustration for this inconclusive post:

Mn Random chunk of the map of Minnesota showing why they call it that

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Featured Comment by Ed Gaillard: "The 'bizarrely-named Utah Jazz of the NBA' were of course originally the New Orleans Jazz. Man, I loved Pistol Pete Maravich. I maintain that the NBA made a mistake when the Toronto franchise entered the league. Instead of letting them be called the Raptors, they should have made them the Jazz (at least Toronto has a well-known jazz festival) and renamed the Utah franchise 'Utahraptor.' Not 'the Utah Raptors,' not even 'the Utahraptors'—just "Utahraptor.' Coolest team name ever, with the image of the whole team as one nasty fast predator. Imagine the sports reports: 'In Salt Lake City tonight, Utahraptor devoured the Knicks 108-93' and the like. Bizarrely, Google tells me that Utah's State Fossil is Allosaurus and not Utahraptor. Oh, come on!"

Utahraptor Utahraptor ostrommayorum

Featured Comment by GKFroehlich: "Yeah, and Utah's state bird is the California Gull (Larus californicus). They couldn't get their own?"

 

Featured Comment by Steve Weeks: "Coach for the Jazz Frank Layden once replied when asked his thoughts on an upcoming Jazz-Lakers series that the names bothered him. Paraphrasing, 'There aren't any lakes in Los Angeles and there damn sure isn't any jazz in Salt Lake.'"

Featured Comment by Chuck Holst: "Now that's a picture to warm the cockles of my heart. The upper half of the map is in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and I've actually camped on one of those lakes (Pine Lake, east of Trout Lake). The southeastern shore of Vermillion was recently purchased by the state and will eventually be Minnesota's newest state park. There's another state park, Bearhead Lake State Park, at the lower right edge of the map and yet another at Soudan, site of an underground iron mine where a University of Minnesota physics lab is trying to capture neutrinos shot its way through the earth from Chicago. There was a fire in the mine about a week ago, but last I heard, the lab is safe. Bet you didn't know there was so much of interest in your random pick."

Featured Comment by Ahem: "I'm from Finland, and we have Minnesota beat by an order of a magnitude with 187,888 lakes."

Mike replies: That is impressive. Seems the standard of measurement is a bit different between our references, however. But I sure don't want to have to be the guy who has to answer the question 'Which has more lakes, Minnesota or Finland?' either.

Featured Comment by erlik: "Mike, no luck now, either. April is the cruelest month."

Featured Comment by Timo: "Not such a random chunk for me: on your map, my father's birthplace, and his grave. In turn, his father was born in Finland. Let's just be clear: many, many, many more lakes there, by any measure, than fair MN; and its sea shorelines as intricate as anywhere in the world."

Posted on Friday, 01 April 2011 at 10:03 AM in Books, Off-topic posts | | Comments (25)

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Open Mike: Penguin Great Ideas

Penguin-2 Well, I started out today by biting off more than I can chew. So what else is new?

I was going to concoct a recommended reading list. I get sort of frustrated that I can't find a list of the sort that I'd like, so I thought maybe I'd write one. At least then, other people would have from me what I want from someone else. But that's going to be a much bigger undertaking than I imagined at first... certainly more than the work of a single day.

So, as a sort of weak-coffee impromptu substitute, I thought I'd throw up another little plug for the pleasing and wonderful "Penguin Great Ideas" series. If you don't already know the series, it's a uniform edition of very nicely designed and printed deluxe paperback pamphlets that provide brief "samples" or "tastings" of great authors and great books.

Penguin-3 The key to the project is that they are authors and books we might not—no, that we probably would not—otherwise read. I mean, it's all well and good to be able to make references to Thorsten Veblen, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, but what non-specialist, post-University, actually reads books by them? It's common to assume that every educated person is more or less conversant with the identities and ideas of thinkers such as Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Marx, but, again, who actually delves firsthand? (Even most economists have never read Smith in the formidable original. I haven't either, even though I own the magnificent Folio Society three-volume set. I have it scheduled for my sixties). Finally, there are those authors who, unless they were assigned to you in school (and maybe not even then, if we're honest), you will just never read if you live to be a hundred and ten, like Thomas Hobbes or Gibbon or David Hume—and of course nobody reads classics these days, so Seneca, Plutarch, and Lucretius are pleasant to encounter en passant. (I have read Plutarch, in North's translation, but that's because I have a side interest in Elizabethan translations.)

Penguin-1 So this is where the Penguin pamphlets come in. They're good for those of us willing to admit that no, we're not ever going to read the whole Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Hannah Arendt. Because, if you don't actually read Thoreau (now that idea actually fills me with consternation—Walden is my favorite book, #1 all time, the best ever, the top of the heap, the one book I would take to the apocryphal desert island), you should certainly at least read a little.

I have a longstanding fetishistic fondness for books, I admit—books as objects, books as art—and the "Great Ideas" pamphlets are lovely little fillips in that regard too. Most of the covers are entirely or mostly typographical, and all of the pamphlets I've seen have been especially well designed. Clearly, Penguin employs some talented designers, and clearly, they've been given the green light to do their thing. They've created many modest masterpieces.

Into every such series a clinker must fall, of course, and I regret that I cannot recommend the Penguin Great Ideas Tao te Ching. It is the world's second most-translated book (after the Holy Bible), but the translation they've chosen isn't very good. (I've made a bit of a study-on-the-side of the Tao, too—I now own some 18 translations and counting.)

Although this series has proliferated—I remember when the first ones came out, and there are many more now, some of them already out of print—it's probably not a series you'd want to collect comprehensively. There's no real reason to do so. Just as the series itself dips its toe into many waters, so it would be best to pick and choose what appeals to you personally from within the many offerings. (Here's the U.K. link.) I certainly don't need the Orwell titles, for instance, because I already have everything he ever wrote. I bought them anyway; but do as I say, not as I do, and don't feel bad if you only try a few—that's the nature of sampling.

Really, though, shouldn't everyone read at least a little Montaigne and just a little Emerson? The whole works might not fit a busy modern life, but an acquaintance with the actual words of many of these great authors goes a long way toward enriching it.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appears on TOP on Sundays.

P.S. This is one of those posts that cost me a lot of money to write. :-)

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Question from Mark Roberts: "OK, which translation of the Tao te Ching would you recommend? :)"

Mike replies: I was afraid someone would ask me that. I can't really answer. I don't speak or read Chinese, so I'm not in a position to expound directly on the accuracy of the translations, and (obviously, since I don't speak Chinese), I'm not an expert on ancient Chinese literature and its cultural context. Plus, I can only comment on translations into English.

One problem is that various translators' beliefs about the interpretations of the meanings of the chapters will color their choices when rendering the texts in English. A further difficulty is that (I'm told) the shadings of meanings, connotations, and references implicit in Chinese word choices cannot be conveyed into English without great pendulous explanations, which leads to...excessive specification, you might call it. Finally, translators' goals have differed: some are trying to accurately convey philosophical meaning, some are trying to hew to the best textural sources, some want the literal meanings of the characters to convey, and some are trying to reproduce the poetry and simplicity of the original. All this can lead to widely varying results.

That said, Arthur Waley has long been considered the most accurate English translation, although his is literarily ponderous. Prof. Chichung Huang's is reputedly the most literal from a linguistic and scholarly perspective. My vote for the "best" would be the one by Robert G. Henricks (Ballantine Books, 1989), for its balance of scholarly scrupulousness and the rather easy, colloquial, effortless quality of the prose he uses in his translations, and his, let's call it, nonpartisan approach to the various controversies and allegiances.

That said, my very favorite is the most demotic (in America at least)—the longstanding bestseller ostensibly translated by Gia-Fu Feng—and not just because it is illustrated with photographs! (By Jane English). To enlist a musical analogy, there is a great danger with this text of "talking about notes" instead of playing them and feeling the swing. This version does get some of the trees wrong, but it sees the forest.

It is actually not a true translation. The book was evidently conceived to show off the photographs of Jane English, and Gia-Fu Feng did not have a very comprehensive command of English when he did the translation. His editor at Knopf/Vintage, however, was the most excellent Toinette Lippe, then at the beginning of her distinguished career, who saw promise in the project. So she worked with Feng to extensively re-write the English text. The result might be considered a "fantasia" on the Tao te Ching, rather than strictly a "translation." And yet, it...well, it's music, and it swings. It's been a perennial bestseller, and deserves that status in my opinion. It's vivid, communicative, poetically simple, and implies the text's profundities without forcing them to earth with a thud.

My position is that Eastern classics, like Eastern religions, take on a new life when they come to new lands, and slavish devotion to the historical and cultural contexts and original meanings is not necessarily superior to the life it finds in new soil; and in that respect, the Feng/Lippe book has an important place in the American cultivar of philosophical Taoism. It is still the version I recommend first, and love best.

Featured Comment by Otto Pietinen: "My answer to Mark Roberts as a student of classical Chinese philosophy is: None are satisfactory, at least from the point of view of philosophical content. The language used in the texts of the Hundred Schools era (6th to 3rd centuries BCE) is grammatically very open to different interpretations because of its lack of redundancy. Any communication of information requires a certain amount of noise in addition to the actual content in order to be legible, but the written Chinese of the period minimizes this. It doesn't mark definite/indefinite, plural/singular or gender distinctions, and has no cases or verbal inflection. In addition, parts of sentences are often omitted, and distinctions between parts of speech is only indicated by syntax, meaning you can't distinguish to win, victory, victoriously and victorious except by the context of the other things contained in the sentence, to which the same of course applies. And they didn't use punctuation either, so deciding what to actually include in a sentence can be a bit tricky at times.

"Now when you add the facts that the earliest dictionary of Chinese is from early 2nd century CE, at least 350 years after the writing of the Daodejing [Daodejing = Tao to Ching...just different ways of transliterating —Ed.], and the earliest commentary on the text was written some 100 years after that in an intellectual climate transformed by the introduction of buddhist philosphy to China, it is quite apparent that the explicit meaning of the text is very difficult or impossible to decipher, which is the reason translators differ so wildly in their interpretations. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't read or enjoy them, and unless you're going to learn classical Chinese, you should read many. One theory, not my own though I can't remember the source, for the popularity of the Daodejing is that it actually contains very little theoretical content, but rather evocative, poetry-like language that requires the reader to fill in the blanks with their own thoughts, thus making it accessible to anyone who enjoys thinking. This would mean that the individual translations are more like separate works inspired by the original book, but by reading several and comparing, you'd get a more and more complete view of the Daodejing by considering the viewpoints of the translators.

"For those interested in the philosophy of the period, I would recommend Chad Hansen's book A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. For maximum enjoyment you should first read a more conventional introduction, such as Feng Youlan's (also romanized Fung Yu-lang) A History of Chinese Philosophy or for a slightly modernized view, Angus C. Graham's Disputers of the Dao, as the Hansen book is a very polemical attack against what he calls 'the traditional interpretation.'"

Featured Comment by Toinette Lippe: "'Fantasia' is a strong word, Mike. There are many good collaborative translations that have stood the test of time and this, I believe, is one of them (it has sold over a million copies in North America).

"Gia-fu Feng grew up in China and studied with a classical Chinese scholar. He owned both ancient and modern Chinese versions of the Tao Te Ching and, to begin with, he translated both versions character by character and compared the two. He then shared one chapter each day with the students of the Stillpoint community he had founded. Each morning the group studied the text as a spiritual exercise, exploring its ideas and refining the language. I don't read Chinese and so I could not compare any of the English translations with the original. So I chose a dozen translations ranging from Arthur Waley’s historically accurate version to Witter Bynner’s lyrical poem, which seemed to take liberties with the text while perfectly expressing its spirit. I would study how each of the twelve translators had rendered a particular sentence and then return to Gia-fu’s translation to see what he thought it meant. I would then find a way to express his understanding in a simple natural way and in words that had not been used by other translators. It was the opposite of plagiarism. Finally, I would read each page aloud to a young Mexican friend and if it did not read well or if she looked puzzled, I would adjust the words or the cadence until the meaning was clearly delivered. After which I sent batches of the new text to Gia-fu who would approve (or occasionally disapprove) of what I had done.

"Over time all languages shift and some words and phrases become less immediate than they were a generation or so earlier. This October, Vintage will be releasing a new version of the book in three formats—the illustrated edition, the text-only edition, and an ebook for the first time. The new version remains faithful to the original text while using contemporary language that rings true for our time. And, in the illustrated edition, Jane English has replaced over a hundred of the photographs with others that she has made in the ensuing years."

Toinette Lippe is the former Rights Director at Alfred A. Knopf and the Founding Editor (emeritus) of Bell Tower, an imprint of Crown/Harmony. She is the author of two books, Nothing Left Over and Caught in the Act. You can see her brush paintings at her website. —Ed.

Posted on Sunday, 27 March 2011 at 06:15 PM in Books, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (43)

Friday, 18 March 2011

OT: March Madness

There exists in my country and possibly elsewhere a rather strange but nevertheless popular game called basketball, the object of which is to throw a ball through a hoop hung on the wall at either end of a circumscribed rectangle of floor called a court. In "good" games, two teams trade these point-scoring "baskets" more or less one-for-one until the last few minutes of the game, at which point the rules are deliberately broken in order to stretch out the conclusion interminably. All other games are bad games.

There are other refinements of rules and strategies, but here my comprehension goes soft.

I admit to a certain antagonism toward this game, because I got tall quite early when I was young, leading all grownups to be required to say to me, "I'll bet you're good at basketball!" This set up what is called an inferiority complex in self, because, in fact, I sucked very badly at playing this particular game. Apparently this was congenital, because attempts to improve me did not. Despite this, I was always picked early for teams in gym class and was frequently forced to play a central position called center, the fine points of which I was hazy about—for instance that it is important to contend for other people's missed shots. Which didn't seem worth bothering about, on the face of it, to me.

Evidently my height induced a certain amnesia on the part of those picking the teams. Seeing me standing there next to my classmates, they forgot that I sucked, and optimistically got the idea that my height predicted an aptitude. Each game was therefore, for my teammates, a process of gradually being reminded of something they already knew, but had forgotten. This—or, I should more accurately say, I—was a great disappointment for them, each time.

The only time I was "good" at the game of basketball—very relatively speaking—was when I played one-on-one with my little brother during the time period when he was a foot shorter than me and considerably weaker on account of the five-year disparity in our ages. He did develop a very good outside shot during this time; I developed nothing but further weakness of character.

But I perceive I am gassing on, as I am wont to do on occasion. Forgive me.

I wanted to pass along for the benefit of our international friends, who might be ignorant of customs in the United States, that every year during this month there is a long tournament in which all the college basketball teams in the country contend for a championship. (When I say "all" I mean all save approximately six of the very most hopeless of them, which are eliminated during the long and arduous "regular season"; the other six hundred and forty-three teams are all invited into the tournament. I think these numbers are correct, but you might want to check before passing that information along.) Now, we Americans do not bet money on the progress of this tournament—of course!—because that would not be legal—or right. But we care about the outcomes in the same way the players care about the games: not because there is any tangible reward, but out of local civic pride and as an expression of school, state, or regional loyalties.

For instance, last year Butler did well, causing my cousin Linda, who went to Butler, to temporarily lose her mind. I can be frank about that because she is not reading this; she is watching basketball, and possibly "The Batchelor."

Rutz
Washington Huskies junior guard Isaiah Thomas in practice.
Photo by Dean Rutz of The Seattle Times.

Anyway the interesting point about March Madness is that the productivity of American workers declines radically during this time period (I'm not making that up; it's really true). It is estimated that as many as 70% of American office workers, for instance, continue to be, or become, basketball fans during March, and that the average basketball fan spends between two and four hours of the working day—at work, I mean—following basketball.

Speaking as someone who never, ever causes anyone to waste time during work hours (because of course you only ever read TOP on your own time), I find this shocking, and of course I disapprove and so forth and so on, etc., etc.

So anyway, if you live elsewhere in the world and your American friends, colleagues, and business associates suddenly and inexplicably seem distracted and unable to do simple things like answer emails and send faxes and pay attention to matters pertaining to business, well, now you know why.

—Mike, ex post facto liason from the Midwest to the world

ADDENDUM: I can't resist promoting again my systematic fixes for the game of basketball: 1. Keep the 12-minute period, but decide the game on a best-3-of-5 period basis; and 2. anyone who fouls in the final two minutes of any period has to leave the game until the period ends. Voilà: up to five exciting endings instead of one, and none of that absurd strategic trading of fouls that slows the endings of games to a frustrating crawl.

If you agree, please elect me Commissioner and I will institute the necessary changes.

UPDATE (Saturday night): Butler beat #1 seeded Pittsburgh in a thriller, 71-70. Hours later, my cousin Linda emailed, "I still can't breathe."

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Featured Comment by Marc Rochkind: "I believe the 643 was increased this year to 646."

Featured [partial] Comment by Martin Bennett: "You may want to reconsider whether your cousin Linda is reading this column. 'The Batchelor' concluded on Monday this week. Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Uh-oh.

Featured Comment by Jed: "I was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every single LDS church I've ever been in has a basketball court connected to the chapel, seperated by a removable partition. This partition is almost always open during Sacrament Meeting (Mormon Mass) to serve as an overflow area. I've never traveled outside of the country, but I've heard stories of these basketball-court-chapels being built in Mexico, much to the befuddlement of the local members."

Featured Comment by Craig Arnold: "Well at the moment the Cricket World Cup is on, which, after Association Football, is the second most popular sport in the world. Because the way Americans feel about basketball, well, that's the way the Indian Subcontinent feels about cricket.

"Between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka that accounts for significantly more than a billion people. Of course there are other countries that quite like cricket too; it's Australia's favourite sport of course, and South Africa, England, New Zealand and the West Indies also quite enjoy it.

"Cricket has the unique distinction of being the only sport that's actually better to listen to on the radio than to watch, and so there are many millions of people, possibly even up in the hundreds of millions, who are glued to their radio sets and internet streams this month.

"March madness indeed!"

christian kurmann replies: "I went to school in New Zealand. During cricket test matches we always had lots of tests and important 'do it on your own' style quiet work. The reason was that our teacher was busy sitting at his desk listening to cricket on his little brown transistor radio. How's that for two to four work hours spent being a sports fan?"

Posted on Friday, 18 March 2011 at 09:54 AM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (41)

Sunday, 13 March 2011

Open Mike: Jazz Starter Kit

Everybody loves jazz. It's just that nobody listens to it.

For months—okay, years—I've been threatening to write an "Introduction to Jazz" post. This is a little worse than quixotic: I'm not a musician, not a music critic, certainly not any kind of an expert on any kind of music. I'm a member of "Generation Jones" (Google it—post or very late Baby Boom generation) who grew up with what's now called "Classic Rock" in the air. My brother Scott turned me on to jazz in the late '80s—dragged me along rather unwillingly at first—and I've been getting more and more into it ever since—especially over the last four or five years, during which time I've been on a "jazz kick" that doesn't seem to want to end.

But I'm just a Listener. Capital "L," though. When I was a teenager, courtesy of my father, I took a fascinating three-day battery of aptitude tests at the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation in Washington, D.C. I scored in the 90–95 percentile range on all the musical aptitudes*, which by their reckoning was very high—but, critically, not as high as musicians score. According to them, people who score in the 95–100 percentile range for the musical aptitudes literally must be musicans, or they won't be happy—that is, they have so much musical ability they won't be satisfied in life if they're not putting their musical abilities to use in some way. I was told that I don't quite have the aptitude to succeed in a music-related career, but that I have enough aptitude for music that it would always be a very important part of my life. But I was advised to be an appreciator of music—part of the audience, an active listener. And so I have always been. It was great advice, because they were right. Being a committed listener is just the right situation for me, and I'm happy with where I stand. I don't regret not being a musician. Neither could I imagine my life without music.

This is written for people who don't listen to jazz, but are curious about it, or who would like to try it. And it's just one guy's suggestions, nothing more. There might, however, be a sort of hidden benefit in my lack of expertise: being just an average person makes it easy for me to know what other average people go through when trying to expand their musical horizons. That's my story, anyway, and I think I'll stick with it.

So let's get going here. Deep breath and....

Continue reading "Open Mike: Jazz Starter Kit" »

Posted on Sunday, 13 March 2011 at 02:39 PM in Music Notes, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (82)

Sunday, 06 March 2011

Open Mike: Writers Needed Everywhere

I have a sardonic little mantra I like to repeat that goes "editors needed everywhere." It's a response to encountering "howlers" in the wild—a "howler" being an error so egregious that it makes you howl (whether in amusement or in pain remains unspecified). I even have a friend (hi there, Paul) with whom I share particularly woeful or wonderful typos and examples of ungrammatical English.

Here's a recent example (I think I found this one)—

This is an attempt to compare the performance of the PhaseOne digital back with the one obtained by scanning a low-sensibility film picture from 6x9 format.

Paul and I agreed that we can sympathize, because both of us have taken plenty of low-sensibility pictures over the years.

Anyway, as you might know, recently I've been watching some movies again. This follows a period of more than ten years when I hardly watched any at all—I virtually only saw movies that friends took me to see as part of a social occasion.

A recent article about the cynicism of Hollywood noted that Hollywood now "targets" movies at specific demographic segments—young males, young females, older females, or older males. The point was made that if  you can appeal to more than one of those demographic groups, it's generally a good thing, but if you target only older males, you're sunk, because older males don't go to movies.

Once I read that, I figured my behavior might simply be typical for my demographic.

I think it's more complicated than that, however. I think I reached a point a number of years back where Hollywood had simply let me down.

The reason is, I hate getting jerked around.

And "jerking people around" is virtually a mission statement for the movie industry. That's what they're trying for. Striving mightily to overdo everything. Everything has to be over the top, turned up to 11, overcooked, on steroids, enhanced—and that includes shamelessly and blatantly manipulating the emotions of the audience.

I just don't like being treated that way.

The most recent two movies I've watched brought that point home again. The first was "Blood Simple," the Coen brothers' first movie. It's a neo-noir thriller, and expertly plotted—I loved the basic plotting device, which is that every character misinterprets what's actually happening and acts perfectly logically according to what they believe is going on—all the way down to the delightful ending, which I won't give away. (Where she says, "I'm not scared of you [blank]....")

It has a superb score, too, by Carter Burwell, one of the best I've ever encountered in any movie. It's both extremely subtle and extremely distinctive, which is like hitting two home runs with one swing.

But of course it's a "thriller," which implies a standard packet of audience manipulations: most especially, characters must spend a lot of time standing around stupidly doing nothing when danger is imminent or something bad is about to happen to them. People in thrillers act slowly so audiences have plenty of time to squirm. Apparently people like that.

I don't.

I want people to act naturalistically, i.e., like real people would act.

But "Blood Simple" is a good movie and well worth seeing. Its disappointments are nothing compared to the 2003 "House of Sand and Fog," adapted from the novel by Andre Dubus III, who is responsible for the plot.

First of all, "spoiler alert," although if I spoil this movie for you I will have done you a favor.

My first reaction was that this was a horrible movie, really one of the worst I've ever seen. I literally took the DVD out of the machine, put it back in its case, and threw it in the trash. Sorry I watched it, wish I hadn't. (This amused me: Andrew O'Hehir, writing in Salon, said "After the New York screening I attended, a middle-aged couple coming out the door ahead of me were complaining bitterly about all the things they could have been doing instead of watching 'House of Sand and Fog.' Their list included watching 'Law & Order' reruns on TNT or shopping for their kids at Toys 'R Us; it's safe to say these folks were unhappy campers.")

I might be a little out of step, too: many reviewers apparently thought the director was trying to make the American characters sympathetic, whereas I thought the movie was deliberately trying to make Americans look bad. If that woman and that cop are sympathetic, I'd sure hate to see what passes for unsympathic.

It wasn't until the day after I watched the DVD that I realized what's special about it: it's a movie that fails utterly, but only because of its story line. Bad writing sinks the whole enterprise.

Well, and its score, which is also awful. It was driving me crazy by the end. But mostly the story line.

Everything else about the movie, though, was oustanding. Usually, great movies succeed on many levels, but they tend to hit on all cylinders. That is, all the different contributors' elements—acting, directing, casting, writing, cinematography, etc.—all work together, in concert. Bad movies usually fail in more than one area—everything's vaguely off, or bad, or weak, or doesn't gel. Sometimes, passable movies have flaws they can't overcome, but mostly, the flaws are multivalent.

JenniferConnelly Jennifer Connelly in "House of Sand and Fog."

But it's unusual, I think, to find a movie that succeeds in essentially every way except for its writing. "House of Sand and Fog" is very well crafted in many ways, from its inventive premise (Dubus also gets credit for this) to its casting. I bought it because Roger Deakins did the cinematography, and the cinematography is excellent. I could quibble with the casting of Jennifer Connelly—I thought she was too pretty for her role—but she gives a fine performance. The acting is excellent overall; the film even delivers one standout acting performance, from Ben Kingsley, and a very strong supporting performance by the ex-patriate Persian (Iranian) actress Shohreh Aghdashloo.

But the writing at the end. Ach.

One of the problems novelists have is that they're almost fatally tempted to act as puppetmasters. They own their characters, and they can make their characters do anything, anything at all, and frequently they're just unable to resist that temptation (read virtually any John Irving novel to see this flaw taken to an extreme—that guy really makes the puppets dance).

Two-thirds of the way into this story, the writer is in full-on puppeteer mode. We depart completely from rational, naturalistic human behavior and devolve completely into Hollywood mannerism. The last third of the movie, by which time a subtle and inventive premise has imploded utterly into a standard bad-TV-style hostage-and-gunpoint melodrama, complete with not one but two suicide attempts in less than ten minutes, the story line has become 100% certified fake-serious. And how does Hollywood fake seriousness? Like you need me to tell you that. Blood, gore, and premature death, obviously. (It made me laugh a few years ago when I first saw the title "There Will Be Blood." What was that, a scribbled instruction from a producer? A chapter from How to Write a Modern Screenplay? Too funny.)

Guns, blood, death, gore, and more death is the default mode of signifying depth in American art.

Although a rogue cop acting like a complete unhinged idiot never hurts*.

This one goes for Hamlet-level everybody-kill-yourself. The writer must have thought, I'm going to make this real estate squabble really, really serious, boy. You watch, everybody's going to die or have their lives ruined.

Rub hands together. Cue actors.

Gee whiz. Guess this must be Serious Dramar, then.

Piffle. I've gotten a lot of pleasure over the years from many of my encounters with art, but some of them you just wish you could take back.

Anyway, the hopelessly bathetic "House of Sand and Fog" is a fine example of the reason I stopped watching movies. It was not because I was enacting my demographic: it was because...well: writers needed everywhere.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that usually appear on TOP on Sundays. Disclaimer: the writer is not a professional movie reviewer, knows no Hollywood writers except Gordon Lewis, virtually never watches pop schlock, and has seen far fewer movies than the average American. Season accordingly with grain of salt.

*I might have to cut this movie and TV stereotype a little more slack in the future, however. In 2007 a sheriff's deputy here in Wisconsin shot six people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a party. So it does happen. Is it still fair to say that most officers of the law would not attempt to compel real estate transactions at gunpoint?

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Featured Comment by David: "As it happens, I am both a regular TOP reader and a Hollywood screenwriter.

"One of the many pitfalls of my profession is that when people love a movie, they praise the acting, the cinematography, and—most of all—the director. When people hate a movie, they blame the screenwriter.

"The contempt that is leveled at screenwriters is reflective of two attitudes: the belief that writing is easy, and a complete lack of understanding about how the creative process works in Hollywood.

"The screenplay is the battleground of moviemaking. A writer creates a screenplay that is strong enough to pull together the 'elements'—the director, actors, and financing. Then it becomes the object of endless negotiations, power plays, wrangling and tweaking by executives and producers which frequently serve to dilute or destroy any fragile shred of coherence in the final product. After a few rounds of this, the script is usually a mess. Then the 'damage control' begins as the start date approaches, torturing the poor thing further. When it's all over, the executives get to pat themselves on the back for 'saving' the movie, or, if it's a failure, they get to blame the writer. As a general rule, when you watch a Hollywood movie, it's usually much, much worse than the first draft that begat it.

"I imagine it's hard for you to relate because you are in a business where you work alone and enjoy complete control over your product. That's feasible when that product costs close to nothing. When the artwork in question costs $80 million and involves major multinational corporations with many layers of bureaucracy, it's a very different process. Even editing a photo magazine as you once did really gives you no frame of reference for what goes on in this ecosystem. Photography is fairly simple. That's why I like it.

"If you were a writer in Hollywood and had any understanding of what goes into making movies—and believe it or not, most writers in Hollywood are very much like you—you would reserve your contempt for people other than your writing brethren."

Mike replies: Thanks for the great comment—always best to hear things like this firsthand—but I think you've misread me a bit. I'm aware of the realities, at least at a couple of removes—I've read things like John Gregory Dunne's Monster and I used to have a passing acquaintance with Larry McMurtry back when he was making a good bit of his living writing treatments. And I recall that vivid image in "Adaptation" where one of the great artists in Hollywood, Charlie Kaufman (or rather the "serious Charlie" character he wrote), is reduced to lurking in the shadows of a movie set, just to be at hand in case the director might need him. Outrageous. Like Shakespeare serving at the pleasure of Shylock.

It's not really "the writer" I'm excoriating here but "the writing"—not the original script but the story of the movie as it was made. As a critic, I have to deal with the work of art that's in front of me—I can't deal with phantoms of what should have been or might have been.

I wish I could find for you an impassioned essay I once write in defense of screenwriters, condemning the system that can literally rob them of their stories, and in more ways than one. Lost, unfortunately. Suffice it to say that I think the "mess" you mention ("After a few rounds of this, the script is usually a mess") is discernible to at least some degree in virtually all of Hollywood's product—to its detriment. At the very least, I'll just mention that the contrast between plays and films could hardly be more instructive. Just imagine a staging of a Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams play where the producers called in three additional writers, changed a majority of the dialogue, changed the story line, recast the entire ending, and relegated the original playwright to uncredited status. ("I want a rewrite on Murder In the Cathedral and I want it by Tuesday!" "Dear Mr. Simon, we like Lost in Yonkers, but does it have to be Yonkers? It makes us think of honkers.") Inconceivable. Hollywood's refusal to respect its best writers and accord them some of the same status that playwrights receive is its #1 failing, in my opinion—bar none.

In fact, my feeling is that the only way screenwriters can get adequate respect these days is when the screenwriter is also the director—one and the same—as is the case with the Coens. (I was astonished recently when I read something about Joel Coen objecting when his leading actor changed one word in one of his movies—he insisted on having it exactly the way it was written. What other screenwriter would get that kind of respect from any director?) But I don't really have enough knowledge to make that claim. I'd love to hear your take on that.

Response from David: "Thanks for your reply, and sorry if I might have sounded a bit prickly. The answer to your question is: you're right.

"Directing is one way of staying in control of your product, but it's hardly a guarantee. On big studio 'tentpoles,' as they're called, the director is often as much at the mercy of the system as the writer, though they are more careful to maintain the illusion that they're in control.

"Even directors need someone who can insulate and protect them. A good producer—and they are very rare—can shepherd a project through the system while protecting what makes it unique. You'll notice that the Coens work almost exclusively with Scott Rudin, who keeps the outside forces at bay so that they can do their thing.

"These days, the best vehicle for writers has been television, where the creator or 'showrunner' enjoys a level of control that is unparalleled in movies. A writer like Matt Weiner of 'Mad Men' controls every camera angle, every line reading, the placement of every prop. He has the leverage of being the only guy who can put the show on the air every week, so he can do anything he wants.

"The truth is that it's very difficult to gain the kind of control the Coens have, and even harder to keep it. They get it because they're so good at what they do, and because they literally refuse to show up unless they get it. It's not just that they don't compromise, but that they don't even understand compromise. They resemble autistics in that they are so narrowly focused on their vision that nothing else even enters their consciousness. But their style of filmmaking is the exception, not the rule. Most studios would not be interested in dealing with them at all.

"Those of us who do this for a living are never surprised when we see bad movies. We watch bad movies and see the endless procession of meetings and memos that led to their creation.

"What's surprising—almost miraculous—is that every year one or two good movies manage to get through the system and make it into theaters, and those movies are what keep us going."

Featured Comment by Paul Byrnes: "Try watching movies for a living, Mike. Lots of people think it's a breeze but after spending most of my adult life doing it, I share some of your pain. Being jerked around is my daily duty. Recent peak: standing in the drizzle outside a movie funpark in southern Queensland on a Sunday morning waiting for my chance to see Yogi Bear in 3D, a character most of the kids present had never heard of (I asked a bunch of them).

"That said, I'm glad you didn't give up—then the bad guys win. There are still lots of great movies being made, even some in Hollywood—or just north of there, especially at Pixar. And you might like to delve into the hard-to-find works of Yasujiro Ozu, one of the greatest Japanese directors, from the 1930s to the 1960s. He eschewed plot—'plot uses people.' The smallest human interactions produced the most beautiful human dramas in his films—and he shot everything from one position three feet above the ground, the height of the head when one sits on a tatami mat. No camera movement either, the tripod was locked off. Try 'Tokyo Story.' A great antidote to modern unsteadicam techniques.

"Looking forward to your post about movies about photographers. I'm compiling a list of the cameras they used, for my own amusement—like the Argus C3 that Ruth Hussey uses in 'The Philadelphia Story,' or the Nikon F's that Clint used in 'Bridges of Madison County.'"

Mike replies: I grew up watching Yogi Bear in black-and-white. I still distinctly remember seeing Yogi in color for the first time—I was very critical, because I was convinced they got some of the colors wrong. I was six.

Featured Comment by Edie Howe: "It's been years since I've made the effort to go to a movie of my own volition. Like you, I too dislike the emotional roller-coaster of scripted movies. With all due respect to sibling TOP reader David, there is little to engage me. (Side note: Google "Bechdel test" for further explanation.)

"That said, might I suggest non-verbal, non-narrative films? As a photographer, I find myself fascinated with this form of film-making. I have this urgent feeling that cinematography has an important role in a photographers education, and since meeting Tom Lowe (Timescapes.org), I've been exploring the genre with deep interest.

"Check out Baraka from Netflix, or peruse this incredible teaser/trailer by Tom Lowe for stunning examples.

"Now for my own disclaimer: I know Tom and consider him a friend, and have acted as ad hoc location scout for him here in Yosemite."

Featured Comment by Paul W. Luscher: "Actually, there is one more way of 'signifying depth in American art': kinky sex. I.e., 'Black Swan.'"

Posted on Sunday, 06 March 2011 at 03:42 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (51)

Monday, 28 February 2011

Frank W. Buckles, 1901-2011 (OT)

Frank-buckles
Frank Buckles as a 16-year-old recruit in 1917

Buckles-2 Frank Buckles died yesterday. He was the very last survivor of the 4.7 million people who enlisted in the U.S. military in 1917–18 for the Great War, the "War to End All Wars," now known as WWI. At the time of his death he was the oldest verified WWI veteran in the world.

Buckles never saw combat in WWI, but as a civilian he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines in 1941 and spent three years in prison camps.

Warmemorial The Oak Park River Forest War Memorial in Scoville Park, Oak Park, Illinois, restored in 2010. Photo by J. Geil / oakpark.com

He advocated for years for a WWI memorial on the Mall in Washington, but he never saw that, either. (WWI memorials are common in American towns, however. My son used to play on and around one in Oak Park's Scoville Park when he was little, a juxtaposition that was never lost on me.)

Mr. Buckles was an impressive 110 years old. That qualifies him as a "supercentenarian," defined as someone who reaches that age. According to Wikipedia, only about 1 in 1000 centenarians (people who reach the age of 100) will become supercentenarians. There are calculated to be about 350–400 supercentenarians in the world currently, about 90 of of whom are known and verified.

Mike
(Inset photo: American Peoples Project)

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Featured Comment by James: "R.I.P. Frank Buckles. Just a couple of years ago, there were three British veterans of World War I alive; Frank Buckles; and John Babcock from Canada. Now all are passed away. I don't know of any German or other nation's veterans still alive. There will still be French, Belgian, German and Polish citizens alive who were young children in the 1914–18 era, and who have personal memories of the fighting around their towns and villages, but this era is rapidly passing out of living memory.

"My daughter (aged 11) and her class are doing a history project on the Great War, which will culminate in a trip over the Channel to Ypres and the Tyne Cot Memorial in May. It's good to see that schools are still interested in imbuing our children with a sense of history, but the project is all about dates, geography, and technology. I'm a little nonplussed that nothing in the project really addresses the sheer tragic waste and pity of millions of lives lost, and the impact those losses had on societies across the world. Perhaps that's a little too much to expect from the curriculum for a class of 11 year olds, but it seems a wasted opportunity to me."

Mike responds: It was known as the "Lost Generation," wasn't it? So many of the men of that generation cut down. 9.7 military deaths. Who knows how they would have changed history?

"Living memory" is an interesting complex of concepts, too. How soon before the world loses the last person born in the 19th century? There are still a few left, but, demographics predicts, not for long.

Posted on Monday, 28 February 2011 at 10:30 AM in Obituaries, Off-topic posts | | Comments (27)

Saturday, 05 February 2011

Open Mike: Three Cheers for Dentists

Do you know how a cow dies of old age? Its teeth wear out. When it can no longer grind up grass, its jig is up.

In ancient eras, many human beings also met their ends because of dental problems and complications arising therefrom.

I spent 11 1/2 hours with my dentist yesterday. Well, not continuously—off and on. We started with one long emergency appointment at eight o'clock in the morning, met again at 5:00 p.m., and finished up the first stage of a root canal at 7:30 last night. The hyperemic tooth which has been giving me fits in recent weeks had finally gone into its Red Giant phase. The level of pain was...impressive. I'm not intimately acquainted with major pain, thank you god, but the pain of that tooth at least makes the cut to the big leagues, I would guess. It was like a tungsten fire burning in my jaw. (One of his patients who had the same thing told my dentist she would rather give birth again.) When it spun out of control the pain made me sweat, and feel dizzy.

Barsamian Tark Barsamian and staff a couple of years back

I have an outstanding dentist. Very skilled, and devoted to his work. A genuinely nice guy, too. He is Dr. Tarkis Barsamian, a.k.a. "Dr. B."—Armenian-American, as you can tell from the name (my college dorm-mate Greg Aftandilian taught me that names ending in "-ian" are usually Armenian). Very interesting guy, too—it was nice to get a chance to talk with him at length, even as he was depriving me of pain meds.

Blamed, stood up, and welched on
I would have thought that dentists would find their work fulfilling. They're relatively well compensated, and they unambiguously help people.

Not so much, it turns out. People don't like going to the dentist, and blame dental difficulties of their own making on their dentist. Dentists get stood up a lot—people avoid their appointments (I do that. I've long suffered from an uncontrollable fear of dental work, triggered by a bad experience decades ago). They get stiffed a lot, too. Tark told me that some people who treat him like their best friend when they're in distress in the middle of the night suddenly unpack a trunk full of excuses when it comes to paying the bill.

Which is an injustice, seems to me. Where would we be without dentists? Sure, having the work done is unpleasant—but not nearly so unpleasant as not having it done. Before yesterday, I had never looked forward to a root canal before. Last evening I was positively eager for it.

Teeth On the trail of a tooth
Much of what Tark did with me amounted to detective work. It was fascinating to watch him on the trail. A hyperemic tooth "refers" pain—the inflamed nerve is bundled next to the nerves that lead to other teeth, making them hurt too, even though they're not affected. I could have sworn the tooth that was giving me trouble was no. 19, and if if it wasn't, then it was no. 14. Through a series of diagnostic tests, including several rounds of selective anesthesia, plus X-rays, plus a careful collation of his notes going back several years, added to good intuition and 28 years of experience, Tark figured out that the culprit was really no. 15, which surprised me. It really didn't seem to me like that one hurt as much as the others.

But he was right. Today I'm pain-free for the first time in a month and a half, and I got a full night's sleep last night for the first time in a long time. And no longer do I have to bombard my poor sufferin' kidneys with ibruprophen every five hours. I feel great.

I'm determined to pay every penny of the bill with nary an echo of complaint. And I'm never saying another word against dentists who buy themselves Leicas, either. As far as I'm concerned, every dentist should get a couple of Leicas just as a general thank-you.

Dr. B. is a great doctor and a great craftsman, and I mean both as compliments. Oh, and did I mention that Friday is Tark's day off? He had been helping his son renovate some rental apartments, and he arrived at his cold, darkened office for our afternoon appointment in work clothes. Part of the job, he said. He quoted Telly Savalas with a laugh: who loves ya, baby?

Dentists are your friends. Treat 'em well. Here's three cheers for dentists, the world over, and all they do.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear only on weekends.

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Featured Comment by Dwight: "I'm not sure if he told you, but #15 is frequently the hardest tooth in the mouth to do a root canal on. A lot of dentists would have needed to refer that treatment to a specialist. I'm glad Dr. B. was able to help."

Featured Comment by DC Wells: "Ditto on the value and kindness of dentists, Mike. And glad to hear you are feeling better for a change. I sent this along to my dentist. She and her staff have taken very good care of my teeth for quite a few years."

Featured Comment by Anupun Sra-lum, DDS: "As a long-time loyal TOP reader and a dentist by profession, I feel so great reading your compliments to Dr. Barsamian. Your kind words to people in my profession make me feel so proud being a dentist. You just make my day. And after spending 26 years performing dental treatment, I still cannot afford a Leica."

Posted on Saturday, 05 February 2011 at 05:09 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (40)

Wednesday, 02 February 2011

It Snowed

Snow-2

It's a measure of the "new connectedness" that I woke up this morning wondering how the Australians are doing. Our weather event was nothing like a hurricane. (They're called typhoons in the Pacific [and cyclones in Australia, as several readers have commented], but they're the same thing.)

And we here in Wisconsin were hardly alone. This pair of storms dumped snow over a third of the country. But the school system was right—this is definitely a snow day.

It was the sort of storm I recall as being much less unusual when I was growing up near here in the '60s and '70s. Howling wind, blowing snow. The news reported that snowplows were getting stuck, and a rescue team on snowmobiles had to be called off because the visibility was so poor. State and city state of emergencies were declared, the local mall closed, and the Mayor explained on TV that where there are signs that say "No Parking / Snow Emergency Route / Cars Will Be Towed," it means that you can't park there or your car will be towed. People really did stay indoors and off the roads. A cross-country ski race in the park today was postponed because of too much snow. The Groundhog Day ceremony at the State Fairgrounds was cancelled.

I spent some time last night watching through the front door as gusts of wind blew snow off the roof. It swirled in the air like smoke, constantly changing. Mildly mesmerizing, like watching the flames of a campfire. Very pretty.

Meanwhile, the news coverage of the Packers in Dallas took up far more local news time than the storm, so all is still right with Wisconsin.

Ctein's column will be late going up today. I have to go tend to snow removal now.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Walter Glover: "You are correct about Typhoons in Asia and parts of the Pacific but here in Oz we refer to them as Cyclones. News from Queensland is slowly filtering through as daylight reveals the extent of the devastation. Poor old Queensland just copped monstrous flooding and now this weather event up in far north Queensland.

"The cyclone made landfall at Tully and Innisfail (between Cairns and Townsville) with wind gusts up into the 270 kilometres per hour region.

"In a shelter in a school in Cairns a woman went into labour in the height of the event at about 2:00 p.m. Also in the shelter was a holidaying mid-wife from Britain. The power of nature never fails to impress—new life in the midst of chaotic wreckage."

Featured [partial] Comment by Mani Sitaraman: "Typhoons originate in the Pacific Ocean, cyclones originate in the Indian Ocean, and hurricanes originate in the Atlantic Ocean. This bit of orthodoxy was drilled into me by my geography teacher circa 1966."

Posted on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 at 01:48 PM in Blog Notes, Off-topic posts | | Comments (40)

Saturday, 29 January 2011

Open Mike: 'True Grit'

I saw the new version of True Grit in the theater the other night—Waukesha has a new and very luxurious multiplex cinema called the Majestic, which is lovely—and it's just a terrific western. Very entertaining.

The celebrated Coen brothers, accomplished as they are, suffer from a touch of the universal tendency toward bombast even when they're not being indulgent. The less said about this the better, but maybe I could just mention that I plan to have a T-shirt made for wearing out to the movie theater: it's going to say "NO MORE SNAKEPITS!"

The very best critical exegesis of the modern cinema I've ever seen came in an episode of the TV show "The Office," of all things. Michael Scott, the earnest but bumbling boss played by Steve Carrell, is taking an improv class, and despite being browbeaten to follow the sanction against introducing guns into his improv, he does it again and again, obstreperously and unregenerately. That's modern TV and Hollywood in a nutshell. Despite the incessant gunplay and the usual exaggerated video-game carnage, though, the film is fully characterological, and just beautifully cast and acted. No actor strikes a wrong note, and at least five performances are way above average. Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn is even better than John Wayne's, although he makes it into an entirely different role and a completely different, more naturalistic character. Even Matt Damon does a good job, possibly because this is one movie in which he is not allowed to wear a fedora.

SteinfeldBut how, may I ask, could a female actress possibly have more of a leading role than Hailee Steinfeld playing Mattie Ross (left)? And yet she's nominated for Best Supporting Actress? Come on. If that's a supporting role, you can throw me in a snakepit. Limiting actors to supporting nominations just because of their age is yet another mannered Hollywood convention detached from reality. She deserves to be nominated for Best Actress, and there's an end on it.

Best line from a review: Richard Corliss in TIME, who says, "To those who have fond or foul memories of the Wayne True Grit, the Coens might be saying: You've seen the movie, now see the book." The book's theme, like this movie's, is that Mattie is the one with the truest grit. (Feminist sympathizers, take your daughters.) Of course, despite being a good plot, it's still a conventional one. That is, you're in no doubt that LaBoeuf is going to hit Ned Pepper and save Rooster, and when Mattie heads to the crick for water you know full well that's not all she's going to find there. All the surprises are in the details. The guy in the bear suit, for instance, or the way that corpse hits the ground—classic Coens.

The book, by the way, is terrific too, a short, fast, tasty read. And the new movie is much truer to the book than the John Wayne version, which is a good movie in its own right but entirely different in tone and mode. The Coen brothers version matches the book better in detail, motivation, locale, even pacing. They make the story back into a real anti-Western, in the best spirit of the times in which the book was written (1968). Their True Grit is worthy of standing alongside any of the other great anti-westerns, even the best one ever made, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Even the stilted dialogue is true to the book, and meshes nicely with the Coens' symbolist and surrealist impulses, which you can easily detect even though they're mostly held in check.

To sum up: conventional, but fundamentally different from the original film version and a much better movie than any remake has a right to be. My verdict: A, and it would have been A+ but for the snakepit. Don't miss seeing it in the theater.

Mike

P.S. I'm taking the rest of today off, so comments won't be posted until tomorrow.

'Open Mike' is a series of off-topic posts that usually appear on Sundays. This weekend, a day early.

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Featured Comment by JBerardi: "Todd Alcott is the ultimate arbiter of all things Coen. I cannot recommend his analysis enough. Regarding the snake pit: "Once she puts on her father’s clothes, she takes some apples from a fruit bowl and rides out of town reciting the 23rd Psalm. The symbolism here is obvious: the red apples represent Knowledge, which Mattie will acquire on her journey, before butting up against the apple’s companion, the Snake. (For those keeping score, the snake is in the novel, the Coens brought in the apples.)' "

Posted on Saturday, 29 January 2011 at 01:56 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (42)

Monday, 24 January 2011

OT: The Strange Game

Football
Green Bay QB Aaron Rodgers just barely makes a touchdown-saving tackle of Chicago linebacker Brian Urlacher. Photo by Mark Hoffman/jsonline.

It was a weird one. The best play our star quarterback made was a tackle. The winning score was made by a fat lineman who styles himself "The Freezer" because he's the same size as William "The Refrigerator" Perry of the 1985 Bears. It looked as if their quarterback took himself out of the game in the second half because he was playing poorly. And while it's nice that my brother has to buy me a round of golf wearing a B. J. Raji jersey, look at it from my perspective—can you imagine how hard it would have been to live it down if the Bears had beaten us with their third string quarterback?!

The AFC game had its own weirdness: the deciding factor in a game the Steelers at one point led 24-0 was a goal line stand.

On to the battle of the Northern Towns—Pittsburgh, latitude 40°27′ N, with a team named after steel workers, against Green Bay, latitude 44°31′ N, with a team named after meat packers.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Will: "Nice write-up Mike. Quibble: you're not 'northern' until you're above the 45th parallel. Like us Vikings. Heard a new Vikes joke on Prairie Home Companion this weekend: How are the Vikings like a 'possum? They play dead at home and get killed on the road. Hey, it's all good fun. Go Pack!"

Posted on Monday, 24 January 2011 at 08:14 AM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (14)

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Winter

Jeez, I'm jealous. Everybody else is getting all the good winter. The East Coast got a nice snowstorm yesterday. All day long yesterday my friends out there were sending me pictures. Taunting me. I think there's a snowstorm down south of us, even.

At least we have snow on the ground here. And it's cold enough—but we've gone a record amount of time without a day below zero. North Carolina has better snow right now than we've gotten so far all winter. North Carolina. It's not fair. Although I don't envy them the shoveling.

(There's a TV commercial on in Wisconsin right now that shows a city street buried in snow, with cars struggling to move and bundled-up citizens trudging against the wind. The voice-over says, "In Miami, it's 85 degrees and sunny right now." Then a pause. Then: "I pity the poor souls.")

Speaking of shoveling, I might have told you about my mental index of how lazy we Americans can be. Previously I had a little game of watching people waiting for parking spaces in the parking lot at the grocery store—I was always interested to see how many spaces people would "save themselves" by hunkering down waiting while a closer parking space opened up. For years the record was four cars, which I saw several times. It was a record I imagined would never be beaten. Then I actually saw a woman—thirtysomething, fat but able-bodied—sitting and waiting for a spot that was two cars in from the next available free spot. She was literally idling her car next to an empty parking space while she waited for the closer space to open up. By waiting, she saved herself maybe 16 or 20 feet of walking. It wasn't even cold or raining.

How lazy can you be? No longer a rhetorical question. Not much lazier than that. Kinda made the game no fun.

So then I started noticing how little snow it took for some people to get out their snow-blowers. That quickly became no fun too, as I'd see people here and there firing up their snow-blowers for, say, three inches of dry snow. Snow you could almost clear with a broom, never mind a shovel.

Well, that one got beaten all to crap the other day too. We had basically a dusting of maybe half an inch of fluffy powder—you could almost see the color of the asphalt through it—and I actually saw a woman cleaning the snow off her driveway with a leaf blower.

If you're snowed in, stay warm. And don't feel sorry for yourself. Well, you can a little, if you were inconvenienced. But don't forget to enjoy it, too. I'm jealous.

Mike

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Featured Comment by politovski: "Greetings from NC! We are currently ~12 degrees here in Waynesville. As for snow, check this out:

Politovski

"Nothing like nine inches of fresh powder just outside your house."

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "My favorite is the person who does the 'waiting for the closest parking space' thing when they have arrived at the fitness center where they (presumably) have come to exercise. Even better are my patients who after successful coronary bypass surgery are completely without symptoms and attend cardiac rehab classes faithfully three times per week to get the beneficial effects of exercise, but then ask me to sign the DMV form to get a handicap parking sticker so they don't have to walk more than a few feet into a store. When I point out the contradiction to them  they say 'But, Doctor, I have a heart condition!!' "

Featured Comment by DF: "When I was in college, my girlfriend would always work to convice me to find the closest parking space, and it drove me batty. After dating for several months, things came to a head. Upon entering a very busy mall parking lot around Christmastime, I began the impossible task of finding a 'close' parking space with her comments getting more and more frustrating. After 20 minutes of torture, I drove to the very farthest parking spot that I could find from the mall, and I staked my claim. There were plenty of spots closer, but none were 'close enough' for her, so I decided to make a point and choose the farthest. That was a long 10 minute walk to the mall, and, needless to say, that was the last Christmas we spent together!"

Mike comments: On such small foundation stones is compatibility built. I trust if you and she were compatible in other ways, you would have taken to dropping her off at the entrance and parking the car alone!

Posted on Thursday, 13 January 2011 at 09:26 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (46)

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

OT: The Worst Remuddling Job in the History of the Universe

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Remuddle, v. (portmanteau from "remodel" and "muddle"), to remodel a building or room in a way that obscures or destroys key aspects of the original design.

-

A person can approach the world and the experience of life in innumerable ways. Approaching experience from an essentially aesthetic standpoint—and having to share the planet with so many people who don't see or understand the world that way at all—isn't the worst affliction to have. But it's not always easy, either.

If you're basically an aesthete as well, I have to warn you, this might be painful.

Dave Reichert, who is also a photographer, bought this charming, tidy little house in New York State in 1986. It had originally been built by hand—a one-of-a-kind—in 1926.

Dave-1

Dave, a professional restoration contractor, turned the house into a labor of love. He began a gut renovation that involved replacing all the mechanical and electrical systems. All the interior surfaces were replaced or restored. The original clay tile roof was restored, and the half-story attic was converted to a master bedroom and bath. The restoration took seven years. For most of those years, the Reicherts camped out in a dusty, dirty construction site.

Dave says he should have known better—he overbuilt. He couldn't help himself. He did it out of his deep respect for the old building and his pride of workmanship.

In 1996 he sold the house for a substantial loss when he moved to New Mexico, but he had given the original builder's creation new life. He had turned it into a wonderful little house that he hoped would make some family happy for at least a generation to come.

After the break is what Dave found when he returned to his old neighborhood in 2007. Take a second before you click the link, and prepare yourself...

Continue reading "OT: The Worst Remuddling Job in the History of the Universe" »

Posted on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 at 09:30 AM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (52)

Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Who Writes the Dilbert Blog?

Since Ctein has patently introduced the subject of Big Mysteries in the previous post, I'd like to review a strange case that has to do with our very own Universe, i.e. the internet. There is on the internet a blog called The Dilbert Blog that is written by a man who is signs himself "Scott Adams." Opinion is divided, but the growing concensus seems to be that Scott Adams cannot be the Dilbert Blog Writer, also called "D." S. Adams (the reason for the use of the first initial will become clear in a moment) is a cartoonist who is only "just good enough" at drawing, which is one of the main things a cartoonist does. Almost nothing is known about him apart from a few tantalizing details such as the fact this his tie flips up at the end for no apparent reason (see photo). According to the so-called "Identity theorists," who are surprisingly numerous, Scott Adams cannot be the author of the Dilbert blog. Their case seems persuasive, at least on the surface. First of all, cartoonists don't have to write much. The most words that the real Scott Adams is called upon to write in a day might approach eighty, and then only on Sundays. It is even rumored that the real Scott Adams refused to speak at all for some number of months, hardly likely to be a characteristic of a blogger who goes on an on all the time about a lot of crazy stuff, like how there is no such thing as Free Will and that we are all programmed but not by DNA. (Today, for example, "Scott Adams" seems to make the case that he is not rich, which seems to bolster the case that "D" cannot be Scott Adams, the cartoonist, who is third down from Oprah on the "Has All the Money" list.)

Searches have been made to determine the identity of the actual Dilbert Blog author, but the problem so far has proven remarkably robust and resistant to solution. Amateur sleuths amongst online aficionados have advanced a number of theories, and passions are running ever higher amongst the various schools of thought. Books have been written advancing various theories. Each book seems plausible, while you are reading it. But then, each proposed candidate seems to have at least one big problem that seems, on the surface, insuperable. I'll mention just the main proposed candidates:

• The Majority Douglasite Position: This group holds that the Dilbert Blog is written by Douglas Adams. On the plus side, he is a writer; he has the right last name; he clearly has the needed imagination to write about lots of whacky fictional ideas; and he was prolific, so the burdens of daily blogging would probably be a workload he could handle. Problem: he is dead. That is explained by "Douslasites" using some rather convoluted arguments: to wit, that he is not really dead, but only faked his own death by staggering around and clutching at his heart like Fred Sanford before being taken away by some out-of-work actors dressed as EMTs. Bolstering this theory is "his" suspiciously plain, uncreative headstone in Highgate Cemetery.

• A minority of Douglasites believe that Douglas Adams actually did die at that Montecito gym, but that he wrote all of the Dilbert Blog entries in advance for gradual release in the future. Problem: the Dilbert Blog occasionally makes references to events that have occurred since May 11, 2001, when D. Adams died. This requires further explanations like the positing of a living henchperson to insert the contemporary references, which for one thing violates Occam's Razor, besides requiring a successful ongoing conspiracy of silence (and as we all know, conspiracies of silence can only be successful when they're imaginary). It is possible that Douglas Adams was psychic, and knew what was going to happen before it happened, although his record in that regard falls far below that of George Orwell. And some things just don't seem predictable, like how weird Michael Jackson was going to get.

• The "Oxfordians." Some people believe that a cartoonist who flunked out of art school could not have the high level of verbal skills evinced by "the Dilbert Blog Writer." They note that the supposed writer's IP address was briefly exposed by hackers for four hours in 2007, and that the IP address thus revealed was that of one Earl Oxford, a flamboyant* Summa Cum Laude graduate of Harvard and the multimillionaire owner of the "Duke of Oil" chain of oil-change shops. Although of course not witnessed by reporters, Earl Oxford allegedly starred in lots of Hasty Pudding shows in the Arena where he showed a dazzling gift for witty repartée. Problem: like, er, "some" other Harvard students, Oxford is known to be toweringly egocentric and a profligate braggart. If he is writing the Dilbert Blog, why would he try to pass himself off as "Scott Adams" rather that taking the credit for himself?

• Barryism: Some believe that the Dilbert Blog writer is Dave Barry. Problem: Barry has his own syndicated column, and, as a humorist himself, could be considered a competitor of Scott Adams. Why would he write mini-columns in another blog under a different name? Why not just do something other than links on his own blog? Barryism is the least popular of the Identity theories.

Adams
Undated black-and-white snapshot of Scott Adams. Photographer unknown.

Of course, there are a few people who believe that the obvious solution is also the true one, namely, that Scott Adams actually writes his own blog. They get shouted down at conventions, however. The mystery lives on.

Mike

*This word means "gay."

P.S. We really are going to have to get back on topic, before we lose every single reader we have left.

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Featured Comment by Kevin Bourque: "My money is on Charles Addams, who is 1) a cartoonist and 2) no less dead than Douglas Adams. Besides, can you prove I'm wrong?"

Featured Comment by Paul Pomeroy: "I can't seem to find the link to it now but I was just reading about this woman in San Francisco named Vivian Maloof who was either at an estate sale or dumpster diving when she discovered 16 crates containing nearly 100,000 unpublished Dilbert cartoons and a box full of pens (with a note explaining that these were actually undeveloped cartoon strips).

"She wasn't sure who the cartoonist was or if they were actually any good, the article said, but had started a conversation up on Snickr in the Street Cartoonists group to get some feedback. Seems no one there found them all that interesting, though. The conversation had quickly drifted off topic and, of all things, they'd ended up discussing which small cameras they loved most.

"It could be worse, I suppose, but probably not much weirder."

Featured Comment by Archer Sully: "Everyone in Silicon Valley was sure that Scott Adams worked at our respective companies. Although I think there was an Eddie de Vere at SGI, where I worked."

Posted on Wednesday, 29 December 2010 at 07:01 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (15)

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

'God Bless Us, Every One'

My holiday column this year is about ghosts, too, just like Ctein's. Well, one ghost and three spirits, to be precise. All of them far more familiar to most of us than neutrinos (it was having neutrinos explained to me in college that made me decide astronomy was not going to be a core interest in my life, despite my fascination with the history and the romance of it).

As to the ghost and the spirits: I took the advice of Paul Glover from the Comments the other day, and watched the 1984 made-for-TV version of A Christmas Carol yesterday. It is, in a word, terrific. In four more words: not to be missed. I'd never seen it before.

CGI was in its infancy then (1984 was the same year Terminator was released), and the magical transitions could be done better today (not to mention that this version dispenses altogether with the vision out Scrooge's window of the restless spirits floating through the air, not a trick that any other version I've ever seen has missed). And the directing is a bit plain, something I seldom mind. (I even liked Ordinary People, which was directed as if to replicate the perspective of a person in the audience at a play.) But the locations, costumes, and camerawork and lighting are all first rate.

ChristmascarolScrooge (George C. Scott) looks on as his younger self (Mark Strickson) sits opposite his cold father (Nigel Davenport) in the confines of a carriage, in Clive Donner's 1984 version of A Christmas Carol

Overall, though, what makes this version the best of any I've ever seen is the acting, the acting, the acting. It might be sacrilege to say, but George C. Scott might almost be too good in the title role. The great man—America's Olivier—doesn't deign to act through most of the film in a nightshirt, but his riveting portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge has depth and dimension that isn't even there in Dickens—something Roger Hirson's screenplay, with its emphasis on story logic, encourages. Scott even manages to make "bah" and "humbug" almost seem like spontaneous utterances! His portrayal of Scrooge's conversion is gradual and masterful, culminating in his believably awkward anguish at his own gravesite. Marvelous.

When asked how he judged acting, Scott said, "I have three tests. First, which dominates, the character or the actor? With very few exceptions it should be the character. Second, on film— as opposed to stage—we're pretty much playing basic emotions: love, anger, fear, pity. So the trick is whether you can come up with any fresh choices to present these common emotions. Third—and this is the quality that separates the great ones from the good ones—I look for a 'joy of performing' quality."*

He passes his own tests here, that's for sure. The supporting cast, I'm happy to say, are inspired, rather than overwhelmed. There are a few wrong notes here or there in the movie (I couldn't help noticing the hard shadow in the wrong place as Scrooge walks up his staircase holding a candle), but virtually none in the acting.

I haven't seen all the versions of A Christmas Carol—the straight filmed ones, I mean, never mind the numberless parodies and adaptations—but this now takes pride of place as the best one I know. I'll watch it again next year...and maybe even once more this year.

Watch it yourself this Christmas if you get a chance. It's on Netflix, and iTunes, and on DVD (for only $7.49—less than it costs on iTunes—and only £2.99 in the U.K.), and doubtless is available from other sources here and there as well. Very enjoyable if you love the story—and I do, I admit. (I read the book every year for a number of years as a boy.)

So thanks to Paul for the tip. And a Merry and a Happy to you and yours!

Mike

P.S. A little-known bit of trivia: Charles Dickens intended to write a Christmas story every year, and actually wrote five of them before he quit the plan. A Christmas Carol is of course one of the best-known works of literature in English, but his other four attempts are virtually forgotten.

*Quote from imdb.com

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Featured Comment by Greg: "So glad to see this wonderful film promoted. My wife and I taped it off the air in 1984, and watched it every Christmas since. It has become part of our Christmas tradition. Last year the tape finally started to self-destruct and I happily found it on DVD at Amazon. What a difference! Like a whole new experience (although there was something retro-fun about the IBM ads on the tape). Without question this is my favorite version of the story (although, I confess I have not viewed the Alistair Sim version). George C. Scott is a treasure."

Featured Comment by James Finnegan: "A classic conversion of the Jew story."

Mike replies: Yeah, yeah. I've read it all—that A Christmas Carol is socialist propaganda (the neocon capitalist-fascist view); that the solution to social injustice it proposes is paternalistic and depends on voluntary generosity from those in power—GHWB's 'trickle-down' solution (this is the actual Socialist view, and they don't like the story any better than the people who think it's "socialist"); the anti-Semite interpretation; the invention of Christmas as commercialism interpretation (for those who like pointing out that Prince Albert established the convention of the Christmas tree and that Washington Irving invented the flying sleigh with the reindeer, and so on); etc., etc.

Ignoranceandwant

The key for Dickens are the two starvelings under the Ghost of Christmas Present's robes (Ignorance and Want—eliminated from several dramatizations of the tale). Dickens was riding a rising tide of social reform—the same one that drove Lewis Hine into the immigrant tenements with his flash powder, the same one that produced the child labor laws.

He was a consciousness-raiser, that's all.

For a fuller view, try Les Standiford's The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits. It's short and entertaining.

Posted on Wednesday, 22 December 2010 at 06:23 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (27)

Thursday, 04 November 2010

'Reel Injun'

Immediately after writing about a movie about Geronimo, completely by coincidence—sometimes you have to wonder at the power of coincidence—I happened to turn on the TV on Tuesday right at the very beginning of a documentary about Indians in movies. It's called "Reel Injun" and it's by the entertainingly named Cree Indian director Neil Diamond.

Andrew Schenker slammed the doc in The Village Voice, saying,

Given a formidable, fascinating subject (the depiction of Native Americans on the silver screen and 'how Hollywood's fantasies about Indians influenced the world'), Reel Injun director Neil Diamond (no, not that Neil Diamond) lacks the faintest idea of how to pack it all into 85 minutes of screen time. Combining a road trip from his native Arctic reservation to Los Angeles with an archival cinematic survey, Diamond's treatment of each is perfunctory to the point of inutility.

A little harsh. My take was that it would indeed have been much better if it were longer—as a three- or four-part miniseries of six or eight hours total duration, say—but I'm impressed with Neil Diamond for getting it done so well with the resources he had available to him. Let's face it, few people get to make their projects just the way they'd like to. Most people have to do the best they can. Better 85 minutes than nothing.

DiamondeastwoodFilmmakers Neil Diamond and Clint Eastwood

The show made me realize, among other things, that several of my all-time favorite movies have American Indians as complex characters at the center of them—Will Sampson as "Chief" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chief Dan George in Little Big Man. And it was fascinating to hear about the effect Sacheen Littlefeather's acceptance of Marlon Brando's Academy Award for The Godfather had on the people it was actually directed at. (I recall it being ridiculed by people it wasn't aimed at.) And it gave me a few more movies I haven't seen to track down, like Smoke Signals and The Fast Runner.

Here's the trailer, if you're interested. Good show. The NFB, or some foundation somewhere, ought to give Neil Diamond the money to make the long version.

Mike

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Featured Comment by martin: "The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) who co-produced this movie is in my opinion a great resource. There is a photo gallery on their website for Reel Injun.

I get a bi-weekly newsletter subscribed to by email and always find a few gems. Many are available for online viewing, although this may not be available outside Canada. (If someone is able to stream from a non-Canadian location, perhaps they can update this post?) The NFB also have iPhone and iPad apps for viewing content. I found two NFB websites http://www.nfb.ca and http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/home.php which are good places to start exploring what is available. The catalog is extensive as the NFB has a long history dating back to 1939. I have no affiliation with the NFB, just a longtime satisfied viewer.

"I was blown away by the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) a few years ago. Not sure where you would find it but well worth looking for."

Posted on Thursday, 04 November 2010 at 09:12 AM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (6)

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