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Snow Angels
Posted 10:51 PM, Mar 30, 2008 |
So a bunch of us went to see Snow Angels last night, and if you don’t want to know anything, stop reading after this sentence, but I will say I don’t think I’m spoiling anything at all.
The best part about this movie (for me, and for most of the group that I saw it with) was the relationship between Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby). It was pitch-perfect, a phrase that I hate, but nevertheless, it was. There was the right amount of tension and flirting and chemistry and it all seemed real. So I was all convinced that they were “in love,” you know, for kids.
And then they had to sleep together. That didn’t change my opinion of things, but their whole relationship before was this very innocent thing, and then, no longer. Plus, too, also, yes, I didn’t see why that was really necessary? Is the fact that they slept together supposed to make me really believe that they’re “in love”? Because it didn’t.
I guess here’s the thing. Choices:
1) The filmmakers had them sleep together to shed light on relationships, which are at the heart of the film. If that’s the case, it didn’t work - sleeping together didn’t seem to change Lila and Arthur’s relationship at all. So let’s throw out #1.
2) The filmmakers had them sleep together to convince us that they were “in love.” Yeah, I believed them before.
3) The filmmakers had them sleep together because, hey, that’s what those crazy high school kids are up to nowadays. Maybe, I don’t know - is that true? But anyway, I thought their relationship was better, more innocent and pure, before they slept with one another. I liked it more. I didn’t have to think about whether they’d slept with people in the past, what the fact that they had sex seemingly without hesitation might mean, etc. Their relationship was the one really innocent, pure relationship in the film, a really delicate thing.
Listen, so it’s not that I’m a prude, but everything else in the movie seemed to have a reason, every line of dialog seemed to tell us something about one of the characters, a relationship, the plot, except for them sleeping together, which did nothing. Well, for me, anyway.
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Always Right?
Posted 10:38 AM, Mar 30, 2008 |
As part of my recent effort to simply regurgitate whatever Jason Kottke does, here are the top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is, well, wrong. I’ve worked for a company in the past in which I was a manager and was told that the customer is always right, do whatever you can to keep a customer, etc. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I thought it was just because I was, like, 18 years old. But no, it turns out that it often does not make any sense.
I like it when I find things that support my world view.
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I’m Typing This With One Hand
Posted 6:27 PM, Mar 25, 2008 |
Ever find yourself wishing you could type with just one hand? Now you can, thanks to Maltron, which is the worst name I can think of for an electronics company. Well, maybe not worst.
Also, it’s always bad when you visit a website or see a product and you have to ask yourself, “Is this a joke?” and then, after asking yourself that, you can’t make up your mind.
The folk over at Spinnwebe had that problem with a video. I was going to link to the video, but now it turns out that Spinnwebe is gone. Huh? Spinnwebe and I go way back - he’s an old-time blogger, one of the good guys. No, we’ve never met. Or communicated in any way. So now this sounds creepy.
This whole post is weird. Sorry. Enjoy the keyboard.
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Gallery: Los Angeles Pillow Fight 2008
Posted 7:14 PM, Mar 22, 2008 |
Today was International Pillow Fight Day, a fact that I’d bet 37.5% of my readership did not know. Some of us trooped down to Pershing Square, stopping off at The Standard for a drink first, and witnessed / participated in the mayhem. There were maybe 100 people with pillows and the same number with cameras. The police showed up and told everyone to clean up the mess; “the mess” is documented below.
Los Angeles Pillow Fight 2008
Unfortunately, with so many people and the air full of feathers, my camera didn’t know where to focus for about 50% of the pictures. It’s time to get a “good” camera, a digital SLR camera, but I don’t know where to begin, as someone who takes a lot of photos but has experience with point-and-shoots, along with some customization (aperture, shutter speed, etc.). Any suggestions can be emailed to me.
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2 Thoughts on a Fast Food Diet
Posted 9:11 PM, Mar 19, 2008 |
1) Now, you know, they have different sizes for combo meals. Generally, they tell you the medium- and large-sized names. The medium-sized meal is never named “medium,” but rather something like “regular.” They don’t even tell you what to call the normal-sized portion, which makes it difficult to order. When they ask you (at least at Carl’s Jr.) about what size meal you’d like, they simply say, “Do you want the regular or large?” as if those are the only two options.
Of course, if you don’t want either of these, and they’ve already used the word “regular” to describe the one that is only slightly monstrous-sized, you’re only left with what can be described as epicurean embarrassment at having to say, “I’ll have the small, please.”
2) Regardless of my disdain for the tactics of fast food restaurants and the upsell, I must admit that Carl’s Jr.’s jalapeno burger is one tasty burger.
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Fact and Opinion in Sport
Posted 7:00 PM, Mar 18, 2008 |
So I like most major sports, but recently college basketball has had a wealth of lousy calls, so much so that it’s becoming more and more apparent that the game is decided by officiating, not in every case, but in too many cases. The word on Pittsburgh in the NCAA tournament is that they probably won’t do well because the NCAA tourney games will likely be officiated in a much tighter style that doesn’t suit the Panthers physical style of play.
But wait? Aren’t we all using the same rulebook? Isn’t it the same sport? How can something be legal in Pittsburgh and not legal in Denver? What’s wrong with this picture?
So then I was all cranky about basketball, but of course baseball and football are the same way - umpires, linesmen, referees, back judges, and so on, all make calls based on personal opinion. I think it’s an important part of the game - I’m not in favor of balls and strikes being called by a computer in baseball, and I’m not in favor of instant replays of particular things like base-stealing, etc. Bad calls are a part of the game.
But then I was thinking, man, there should be something that doesn’t involve judging at all. On one end of the spectrum you’ve got diving and ice skating and stuff that’s 100% judging, and then in the middle you’ve got your professional sports, and on the other end of the sport, you’ve got, well, running.
You know, like, for sport. Not like running away from, say, a tiger.
I hear some people still run for sport.
Anyway, I don’t know what it says about me, if anything, that I don’t have any interest in watching the two extreme ends of the spectrum, but if just about anything falls into that zone of both fact and opinion, I’ll watch it.
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Zen Under Pressure
Posted 6:35 PM, Mar 15, 2008 |
Recently, I’ve entered some kind of competitive mental Zone in which things just seem to go my way, almost without thinking. My lawn bowling game kind of suddenly jumped to a new level a couple weeks ago, and I keep waiting for it to settle back to, well, closer to where it used to be. Sure, it’s supposed to improve, but this was a marked improvement, out of nowhere, all of a sudden.
This has carried over to a brief stint at the shuffleboard table and some quality tennis today. Nothing earth-shattering - I’m no Roger Federer, no (name of famous shuffleboard / lawn bowls player here). But, at least with lawn bowling where I have significant, consistent history and a relatively lengthy recent burst of improvement, something is up.
So it’s interesting to find this article (via kottke) about how to think under pressure. The idea is that when you first learn some physical activity like golf or lawn bowling or whatever, you have to think about very particular things: how to hold your hands, where to place your feet, what you want to aim at, etc., and actually really thinking about those things makes you better. The more you think about them and focus and concentrate on them, the better you tend to do.
However, at a certain point, thinking about those things actually turns out to be a bad thing - Jonah Lehrer says it’s what’s often going on when athletes “choke” in big moments. A better thing for people who have the correct specifics wired in to their muscle memory is to simply (ha ha) think about their approach in holistic terms, i.e., focus on making their delivery “smooth,” their stance “balanced,” and so on.
I don’t claim to be any sort of professional at, well, anything, but, thinking back, I noticed that my approach to lawn bowling is really holistic - maybe this changed all of a sudden, I’m not sure. (I don’t think it’s supposed to work like that, anyway.) I get up to roll the bowl, set my feet, make sure everything is smooth, and away I go. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my aiming point, how hard to roll the bowl, any of that - I just kind of do it. It’s very Zen.
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Gallery: USC, LA Coliseum
Posted 9:57 AM, Mar 14, 2008 |
A recent trip to USC and the LA Coliseum, one of the sites of the 1984 Summer Olympics, yielded the following photos:
USC, LA Coliseum
Many additions to my photographic attempt to document every number in existence are included.
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The Beach Boys v. The Beatles
Posted 11:25 PM, Mar 10, 2008 |
I grew up listening to The Beach Boys; I grew up in this strange universe where “real” music was undiscoverable and unacceptable; other things that were unacceptable were Stephen King books and Fast Times at Ridgemont High yet things like The Exorcist escaped unscathed. Anyway, my musical universe was comprised of things like The Beach Boys, Mariah Carey’s Music Box, and an old Simple Minds cassette, She’s a River, that I thought was great but, it turns out, got really poor reviews.
As such, and maybe also based on the fact that I, at no point in my life, owned Pet Sounds, I always believed The Beach Boys were, well, not really good musicians, not really important, and not really innovative or influential. They were, you know, surf music, songs about girls, written with nifty harmonies, but they certainly had more in common with my mom’s Bobby Vinton or Van Cliburn LPs than with the Beatles or the Stones or the Doors. (My mother had the Doors’ L.A. Woman, which I listened to once and didn’t understand; off an old Beatles compilation, I was most taken with the country-esque Act Naturally.)
Tonight, the EC and I watched parts of a documentary about The Beach Boys on public television. If there are decent music documentaries (Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, etc.), you know it’s fund-drive time.
Anyway, again, so we watched this documentary and there was Sean Lennon talking about how The Beatles heard Pet Sounds and were kind of blown away - even now, sadly, when I hear parts of Pet Sounds (I still don’t own the whole thing; a copy can be mailed to me, if necessary), it still sounds like, well, surf music and girl music. It’s good, but it’s good in the way, I don’t know, U2 is good. They’re all good musicians, but they don’t seem particularly innovative.
There are bands today, say, Field Music, that when I listen to songs I hear The Beatles and I think, “Man, The Beatles were doing this forty years ago,” which is much less a slight on Field Music and much more a commentary on how far ahead of their time The Beatles were. But I have yet to have that experience with The Beach Boys.
Maybe it’s because they weren’t as groundbreaking or innovative, which is arguably true, but still, I keep hearing that they were at least somewhat groundbreaking/innovative. Maybe it’s because I don’t listen to the right Beach Boys-inspired music, although Super Furry Animals list them as a prominent influence. (In fact, sometimes I can hear echoes of The Beach Boys in SFA’s stuff, but it’s always, “Hey, they do that better than The Beach Boys,” not the other way around, so The Beach Boys always seem less innovative and more, well, fitting appropriately into their time and place in music history, unlike The Beatles who didn’t fit at all into their time and place, it seems to me.) Maybe it’s because I discovered and became enamored with The Beach Boys at an age where I didn’t really listen to a lot of music, although I was exposed to The Beatles at the same age.
However, on that last point, even though I was exposed to both bands at the same time, I remember having friends who thought The Beatles were the best thing around (or not around, as the case was) and not understanding their strong reaction, the almost sacrosanct place held by The Beatles, but now I put them in the same place my old middle-school friends seem to realize they deserved. I never had any friends, though, that revered The Beach Boys. Perhaps it was their clean-cut image vs. The Beatles scruffy looks - or even their clean-cut looks with those weird bowl-ish haircuts. Who knows?
I wish someone would explain how The Beach Boys are even on some level the same as The Beatles other than the fact that both groups, in fact, did release albums. I want to understand.
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Hope Springs Eternal
Posted 3:34 PM, Mar 8, 2008 |
Spring training is already upon us — already? More like finally… - and the regular season opens in a few weeks. The nice thing about spring training is that, unless you live in Pittsburgh or Kansas City, is that you can actually think your team has a chance. I’m spending my time reading spring training box scores and noting how the Twins’ regular players are piling up hits and seem like they’re doing just fine.
This year, I’m putting my money on two Twins to exceed expectations: Boof Bonser and Delmon Young.
Bonser lost 20 or 30 pounds and is in good shape. He had a good outing the other day, has some major league experience (not a lot, but some) and has shown potential.
Delmon Young appears to have dropped his bad habits and is having an outstanding little spring. The problem is, of course, that spring baseball doesn’t count for a whole lot. But you take what you can get. He looks like he’s got some power in his bat, if he can restrain himself from swinging at everything.
Liriano won’t exceed expectations because everyone in Twins territory is expecting him to be the next Santana. He may be very, very good, and may grow in to Santana’s shoes, but not this year.
Similarly for Morneau and Mauer. In their MVP and batting champ seasons, they set the expectations so high, they can’t possibly exceed them. Not to say they’ll have bad years, but you know, they aren’t going to win the MVP or batting titles again.
Can the Twins reasonably make the playoffs? (Once a team is in the playoffs, anything can happen; witness the rotten-smelling St. Louis Cardinals from a couple years back.) I suppose. They’re in a tough division, but anything can happen. Unless you live in Kansas City. Or Pittsburgh. Or actually maybe Washington D.C.
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In Search
Posted 9:43 AM, Mar 5, 2008 |
The other day, I was listening to an online radio station through last.fm. I originally tried to listen to a station with artists like Stephen Malkmus, but it was for some reason unable to play that station. So then I listened to a station by a particular guy, I don’t recall who, who also likes Stephen Malkmus. In the course of all of this, I heard a song I really liked, but I don’t know who the band was. The song was, for some reason, not recorded on my last.fm account. Here is what I think I remember:
1) The band was somehow associated with Bonnie Prince Billy / Will Oldham. This association may simply be the style of music, or maybe they’re more directly related.
2) It was sort of dreamy-ish, acoustic-like music, pretty non-threatening.
3) The band name had three words, none of which were words like “the” or “and.” They were three real words.
4) One of the words, I thought, was Country, but I searched based on that and couldn’t find it, so I may be wrong on that one. But it’s probably something like Country.
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Camping Memory I (Night Terrors)
Posted 8:29 PM, Mar 2, 2008 |
When I was a kid, we used to do a lot of camping, primarily in a motorhome, an old-style one with a low-ceilinged sleeping area over the cab. (Do they make them like this anymore? Probably, but mostly now I see the full-cab motorhomes, i.e., without the sleeping-area overhang. Also, is “motorhome” two words? My spellcheck says no. It also says “spellcheck” is two words.)
My brother and I would sleep, traditionally in US Army-issue sleeping bags, these thick green puffy things that you could crawl entirely inside and resemble an insect ready to burst from its cocoon. This was not advised - the US Army does not mess around and the heat inside a fully-zipped sleeping bag got intense pretty fast. But they were made for, like, -20 degrees F or something.
And so we would crawl up there, and this maybe happened four times, that I would wake up screaming, but of course I never remember what it was - I don’t remember now, but didn’t remember then, or at least don’t remember remembering, if you follow.
This kind of thing only happened, like I said, a few times, and only happened when we were camping and when I was sleeping in that low-ceilinged crawlspace. I suppose I was, like, seven or eight when it would happen, but it’s tough to say.
I don’t know if I was stressed out by the low ceilings, which were so low that I, even as a single-digit-aged person, could not sit straight up without knocking my head on the ceiling, which did happen frequently, or if it was due to a change in my sleeping patterns, as camping out was an excuse to stay up late and stare at fire, or what the story was.
Now, I suppose, this would classify as your grade A night terror, which, honestly, is there a worse, scarier name for something than a “night terror,” which sounds more like an Eli Roth movie than a physiological condition.
I also wonder if my parents knew about night terrors back in, say, 1986 - did anyone? Who knows? I wonder what my parents thought if they were not familiar with night terrors? They never suggested that I sleep elsewhere, not that I can recall, although there were not many other options, really.
Well, anyway, so that’s the story about night terrors and camping.
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Addendum
Posted 6:01 PM, Mar 1, 2008 |
As an addendum to the previous post, today’s “Ask Wizards” question (chosen from questions sent in, allegedly, by actual users) over at Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Magic: The Gathering, is, “Is there a recommended way to open packs fast and effectively without damaging the cards?”
Thankfully, WotC put together a video demonstration.
They will stop at nothing to get your money as quickly as possible.
Oh, and by the way, “serious” or “professional” M:tG players will tell you it is not about the money, and they are lying.
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Working Hard For Your Money
Posted 6:42 AM, Mar 1, 2008 |
So I’ve played some Magic: The Gathering in my day (see here and here), both with real, physical cards back in high school and much more recently with digital cards. I stopped playing with real cards because it turns out Magic is an expensive hobby, especially if you want to be good at it. Sadly, it also turns out that being good at it is primarily determined by how expensive you make it. The more money you spend on cards, the more cards you have at your disposal, the better decks you can make, the more you can frustrate and destroy your opponents. Perhaps M:TG players’ tax rates should be determined based on the number of cards in their collections.
I quit playing digitally because of, basically, the same reason: Magic is an expensive hobby. It’s cheaper digitally than in real form, and much easier to find just the cards you need - instead of buying whole packs hoping to get one of the card you need, you can spend considerably less to buy 4 digital ones online. But, Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes M:TG, keeps churning out new expansion sets - they’ve probably issued one while I’ve been writing this post - and so again, if you want to keep current, you’ve got to shell out cash. There’s always some new, great card that you think you have to have.
Also, there are different “types” of games, with the most common ones involving decks constructed from only the most recent sets of cards. This means that, when new sets come out, older sets become disallowed in these games, meaning you need to replace your old cards that are now illegal with new cards that do effectively the same thing. But of course this requires that you purchase those new cards. So you’re buying new cards that do effectively the same thing as old cards just so you can keep playing. It’d be like if Monopoly issued different colored 6-sided dice, and also 12-sided dice with each number 1 through 6 on it twice, and so on, and you had to buy these new dice so you could play Monopoly with people. It makes no sense.
This whole post comes about because it turns out I still find Magic to be an interesting game - the card interactions and the way the game works is fascinating. It’s an endless universe of possibilities, with more than 8,000 different cards, all of them interacting with one another in weird ways. So I still read things over at the official Wizards of the Coast M:TG site, and recently was reading about Control Magic, a card that lets you steal your opponent’s creatures and use them for your own good, which is often destroying your opponent. This is frustrating, of course, to have your creature stolen and then have it smash your face in.
So the article - man, this is a long way to go to make a point that isn’t interesting - is talking about how “you go out and get some packs and you open a Shivan Dragon” — this really awesome flying dragon that beats everyone up all the time, especially back in the day — “and you put it in your deck.” Then, the article talks about the pain of getting it taken during a game via Control Magic and getting bashed in the face with it. The article notes, “You worked hard to get a more powerful card, Shivan Dragon, than you had before.” But the thing is, you didn’t “work hard” at all, unless they mean that you went to your job and flipped burgers, designed buildings, taught mathematics, etc. But that isn’t what they mean.
In M:TG, spending money on cards is called “working hard” which makes no sense to me at all.
I could have just written that post, and those of you that understand M:TG would have gotten it, and those of you that don’t probably haven’t read this far anyway. And now I have to go.
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