TRON: Tarnished Legacy?

Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a good TRON sequel movie, perhaps even several different good versions out there, but this isn't one of them.  We saw it in 3D in the theater, which neither helped nor particularly hurt the experience, but did induce a little eyestrain and made an already dark movie even darker.  I will probably not be going to another 3D movie anytime soon.

Like Tycho, I have a lot of questions and concerns, from the worthiness of the bad guys compared to Dillenger/Sark and the MCP from the first film, to the number of scenes that have no energy/don't add anything in terms of character development or plot (I'm looking at you, dinner party and bad guys searching Flynn's place, to name two), to the fact that Zuse's nightclub brought on painful flashbacks to the Merovingian.  It's a shame, really, because while I liked the actor who plays Zuse in Frost/Nixon, he's wasted here.  Likewise with Jeff Bridges.  I can't tell whether he's disinterested or has lost a step, but the great spirit that helped carry the first film out of mediocrity is gone, and he appears caught between playing his original character (with a dash of the Dude) and Obadiah Stane.  Garrett Hedlund is all right, I guess, but his character is a poor mix of Bruce Wayne and the Chris Pine Kirk.  It's Olivia Wilde who comes off best in their scenes together, and I'll actually be looking to netflix something else with her in it.

Off the grid, it's a crime that Cillian Murphy doesn't have more to do.  I really liked his cameo and think that his role is expanded in one of the good versions out in the multiverse.

Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Estrin, Mark) 2002

The visitor sipped his tea, and after a while found himself describing another fire he had witnessed as a child in Prague, a synagogue burning in Josefov, the Jewish ghetto, the grand playfulness of arson.

My favorite book read this year is the eight year-old debut novel of a Brooklyn transplant to Vermont.  I've been meaning to read Estrin since the enticing Seven Days review of The Annotated Nose appeared 2 years ago, and perhaps may have even checked the Nose out of the library and didn't make much headway for a variety of reasons; now that I've made it through Insect Dreams, I can start working through his other stuff.

Estrin takes Kafka's protagonist, gives him a religion (Judaism), years of study and introspection to give him sufficient intellectual depth, and finally takes him on a tour of the first half of the 20th century, using his metamorphized state as a metaphor for the alien, both to give him a sense of kinship with the social outsiders and distance to "typical" Americans.  Gregor's experiences are almost too broad for the novel to have much focus, heading toward Forrest Gump territory with the number of historical figures he rubs elbows with, but avoiding it (somewhat ironically) because of Gregor's simple humanity.  

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Scarlett Johansson perfectly captures the pose of Vermeer's model, and there are some good scenes where Vermeer (played by Colin Firth) talks about his craft, but... the film oozes with melodrama and Johansson's character reacts to everything with the same dumbstruck look of surprise.  We must be starting to scrape the bottom of our Netflix backlog.  Thankfully they keep making new movies.

Nora (2000)

An aspiring writer and his lover leave Ireland to live together in Trieste and try to lead a life away from the constrictive social norms of County Galway.  We follow their trials and tribulations as he discovers she's not the muse who can discuss literature (and particularly *his* writing) that he'd been hoping for, becomes jealous of the possibility that she is seeing other men, grows distant from her and their children (born out of wedlock), and ultimately forge a lasting and loving relationship... and somehow it's utterly boring.  


The acting is fine, but the script is not.  From the start, their relationship works on a physical level, but they don't really connect intellectually.  By the end, it's not really clear how they've managed to become friends as well as lovers.  Certainly nothing that happens on screen suggests it, until they are walking contentedly together down the lane while text appears to tell us they stayed together happily until they died.

To Thule or not to Thule on the family year-end trip

Every year end, we travel to see all the grandparents.  Christmas occurs during the trip and so we take all the gifts with us.  We also used to take the stroller because that was the only way Finn (and previously, Connor) would nap during the day (and sometimes the only way they would sleep), so we would put a hard shell carrier on top of the car for the trip.  This year we won't be taking the stroller on the trip for the first time since before Connor was born, so the question is: do we need to take the car top carrier?  The pros are that the gas mileage is better and the sound of the air rushing between the car and the carrier is unpleasant.  The cons are that we might have to mail some gifts home if we run out of room.


Based on data gathered from the past 14 months, the round trip is a little more than 1600 miles, and we make just under 25mpg with the car top carrier (or 65-70 gallons of gas), and just over 30mpg without (or 50-53 gallons of gas).  If gas is $3/gallon (it's more than that right now in Burlington and I'm guessing it will be more on the highway in NY, and less locally in NJ and western PA), then taking the carrier costs roughly $45 more, or more than it would cost to mail a couple packages home.


Record-keeping and simple data analysis win!  No turtle.

The economy must still be in the tank...

... if my 14.5 year-old Jetta GL is exactly the kind pre-owned vehicle the dealer's customers are interested in purchasing.  It's probably only good for a couple more years, though that's what we thought two years ago.  Wait, you don't think this might just be bait to get me to buy a new car?  (Shh, not so loud, the Jetta will hear)  

What I don't get is if my car is still reliable, why would I want a new one, even for 110% of Blue Book on the trade in?  Less reconditioning, there probably wouldn't be much left anyway, but given how good this car has been to us, I'd rather let it play out its career on a single team and retire on its own terms.  

The Secret of Kells (2009)

The Secret of Kells is beautiful to watch.  I'm not sure the stories really come together; the Aisling-Brendan relationship is the centerpiece of the movie, but she disappears without a trace once he gets the crystal (though the white wolf appears briefly as he and Aidan make their escape), so I'm left with unanswered questions, mainly what happened to Aisling?  Does Brendan ever think about her?  I would have been happy with a simple acknowledgement of his childhood friendship as he passes through the woods on the way back to Kells.  We don't need to actually see Aisling, I just want to see him thinking about her and looking at and listening to her woods -- maybe he's come to disbelieve that there ever was a wolf girl in the woods and he imagined her, maybe once he's a grown up illuminator of the Gospel he doesn't need any childish paganism any more (though I can't quite accept that :-).  Maybe something like that was there and I missed it, but it seemed like Brendan simply goes back to Kells to talk to his uncle. 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 4 -- spoilers!)

Arrr, ye be warned thar be spoilers below.


Party interactions are important.  In book 1, Riordan uses a Harry-Hermione-Ron configuration, but with Harry and Hermione as the couple.  Grover is simply Percy's best friend, and there's absolutely no tension there, nor between Grover and Annabeth.  This makes the Ron character even more of a third wheel.  In book 2, Riordan swaps out Grover for Tyson as the Ron character, and Tyson works because there's actually tension between him and Percy (who doesn't want to admit Tyson is his brother) and Annabeth (who is uncomfortable adventuring with a monster).  Book 3 begins with Percy-Thalia-Annabeth, which is the BEST combination in the whole series.  This is like having Harry-Harriet-Hermione, only Harriet and Hermione are slightly hung up on a charming and talented young Slytherin who has left the school to be Voldemort's apprentice.  Sadly, we only get this combination for a single chapter, and I can't help but feel cheated.  There's nothing wrong with Zoe and Bianca as characters, but Zoe completely lacks Annabeth's history with Luke and Percy, so Zoe's only tension with Percy is "ew, boys are icky".  ARRRGHH.  Percy-Thalia-Annabeth makes a great book, Percy-Thalia-Zoe is merely a good one.


Silena playing the part of Patroclus to Clarisse's Achilles was a great touch. Making Silena the traitor just doesn't work.  We don't know enough about her to care that she's the traitor, there aren't any clues that she might be the traitor, and it's absolutely inconceivable that she would continue to feed information to Kronos after Beckendorf dies.  It would be trivial to make Annabeth unknowingly be the "traitor" by making a gift from Luke be cursed, and for her to be injured protecting Percy after Percy has revealed his weak spot to her.


Okay, I'm done.  I just wish every author had someone to point out these things before the books get printed.  Not getting more Percy-Thalia-Annabeth chapters is the one thing that really hurts.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 3)

There's also something that bothers me, perhaps more than it should, and perhaps Riordan is unknowingly committing a grievous crime.  See, Apollo is the god-damned god of poetry.  His poetry will not suck.  Riordan owes a huge apology to lovers of verse for the bilge he puts in Apollo's mouth.  Why should we turn kids on to prose that shows such little regard for poetry as to openly mock it?  If you can't write it yourself, then have Apollo quote it.  There are lines already written that can be made to fit any situation.  Percy doesn't have to understand or appreciate it, but those of us who can, should!

All right, back to where Riordan succeeds in coming up with a good overarching plot in each book, the core problem that underlies all of the individual issues above is that the journey is lacking.  We go from East Coast to West in a series of mini-episodes that don't really lead from one to the next or hang together as a coherent story.  When you look back, the events of the book should support one another so that while other events might have occurred, what actually happened seems like a series of natural consequences.

I really did enjoy the series; I mean, it's about the greek gods, so I'm there, and Riordan does get better as the series goes on (Rowling, by contrast, peaks in books 3 & 4, still has room for improvement, but just treads water for the last 3 books).  He begins to hide Grover away as much as possible.  There begins to be connective tissue that ties the episodes together so that I 'm reading a near-complete story rather than a collection of encounters from the wandering monster table.  Percy is less of an idiot.  I actually feel there is finally a moment (on the last page of the penultimate chapter in the last book - oops) which really captures a summer camp aura.


There's also a really nice parallel between Riordan's story of the family of gods that bickers and argues but ultimately has to pull together to face a common menace, and a United States that is currently in the throes of terrible partisan bickering and needs to pull together in order to get back on sound economic footing.  It is heartwarming, to say the least, to read a series by a born-and-bred Texan who is writing with great affection for New York.  You go, San Antonio.

This is a lot more than I ever planned to write about a YA series (and don't think that just because it's YA that it's okay for it to be less than perfect!), but there it is... and perhaps more with spoilers to come.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 2)

Rowling's protagonist is ignorant of much of the wizarding world because he grew up with muggles.  Similarly, Percy has never been taught anything about Greek mythology -- oh, wait, no, he's learned some of it from his Latin teacher at school.  ARGH.  What Percy remembers and doesn't remember from Greek mythology is infuriating.  Percy should know the recorded Greek myths.  It's the unrecorded details of the myths, and what the gods have been up to for the last 3000 years, where he should be floundering.  Athena and Poseidon shouldn't be on bad terms because of a B.C. dalliance; there should be a whole new set of axes that the gods are grinding.  Maybe Poseidon continues to defile Athena's temples every few decades and Percy was conceived in the NY Public Library (a temple to Athena if I ever saw one, and wonderful "MOM!" moment when Percy finds out); maybe Poseidon woos a daughter of Athena every so often because he has a weakness for the smart ones.  This gives Athena an immediate reason to tell Percy in no uncertain terms to stay away from her daughter!  We get a little of the newer grievances with the great prophecy and the agreement between the "big three", but it needs to be consistent and pervasive and there's just so much more one can do with this.

Ron can be a git, but Grover kills every scene he's in.  The name choice is bad enough; Grover should be dead as a fictional character name because it immediately conjures the image of a furry blue monster, but you have to read Grover to understand what a disaster he and all the satyrs are.

Satyrs to Grover: You figured out why so many other satyrs failed to complete our important quest for the last two millennia, but haven't made any progress in the last year.  You have one week to complete the quest or you're grounded. 

Me: Hunh? does this make any sense except as a horribly artificial injection of tension?)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 1)

Harry Percy, Hermione Annabeth, and Ron Grover go to boarding school summer camp with other children who have magic powers an Olympian god as a parent.  During the school year summer, they foil a plot that would bring Voldemort Kronos back to power.


Oi.  Going in, I didn't think that Percy Jackson and the Olympians would lean so heavily on the Harry Potter formula, but I guess the reviews all warned that this was the "next thing" to read after HP.  Riordan definitely succeeds in writing a story whose overarching plot I want to follow to conclusion, but it falls down in several places.


To start, there's the setting.  Both authors need a place where the kids are away from their families (such as they are).  Rowling trades on the English boarding school experience to give us something "ordinary" to hold on to, and by spending time developing their class schedules and extracurricular activities, life at Hogwarts comes to be very real.  Riordan can't send his kids to boarding school; aside from the fact that it would be too like HP, middle-class Americans tend to not send their children to boarding school; the only time we're sent away from home is for summer camp, so it's natural for Riordan's heroes to go there.  Unlike Hogwarts, however, life at Camp Half-Blood is somewhat perfunctory, and only serves as a staging ground for the real adventures out in the wide world.  We're told that they do archery, canoeing, climbing walls, and other typical summer camp activities (with demigod overtones), but we're really only shown Quidditch capture the flag.


Most of Rowling's characters are afraid to say Voldemort's name, so Riordan apes this by having characters be cautious about saying the names of gods and monsters.  This is a hideous mistake, first because "minotaur" is not the beast's name; it's Asterion**.  Second, Riordan applies this rule mostly to shut down conversation about a particular god/monster when the characters get close to something he doesn't want to reveal yet or can't figure out another way to segue out of the conversation.  Other authors, including Rowling, are also guilty of coming up with silly reasons for their characters not to talk to each other about important things, but the inconsistency of the use of the "don't use the names of the gods" rule is particularly galling.  Gah.


** and it's Heracles, not Hercules.  If you're going to use Greek mythology, use all the Greek names.

Burlington, a sort-of bike friendly community

There's a good primer in 7days on how the north/south plan has stalled, though I have to note that:

1. Burlington's "bike friendly" designation was awarded in 2005, technically expired in 2007, and we haven't submitted another application to be reevaluated.  (I actually submitted the application in '05, with a lot of input from Local Motion and Nicole Losch's predecessor)
2. I don't see how the hill on South Winooski is any less of a killer than the one on Battery.  Battery, at least, has better pavement and I feel more confident going down the hill.  I try to avoid both when going up.
3. It would be nice if the article tried to delve deeper into the "why" the north/south plan has stalled.  Is it really simply a problem of bureaucratic red tape and lack of a champion in City Hall?  Could be, but I didn't get a good sense of that from the article.
4. I don't really like to compare cycling in Burlington to cycling in fairer weather cities like Austin, Portland (OR) or Seattle.  Cycling in winter is a tough sell (heck, I don't do it!), but we should certainly be doing at least as well as *Minneapolis* in providing decent cycling facilities. 

Assuming the city council approves the "complete streets" design on Colchester Ave, which received a lot of positive comments, here's hoping that South Winooski and North Ave go next! 

Voting 3rd Party != Abstentionism (VT statewide officers edition)

A recent post at Green Mountain Daily argues that "a vote for a third party candidate this time around is the same as abstentionism."  That depends.  If you believe that, in the case no candidate receives a majority of popular vote, the General Assembly will elect the Republican or Democrat candidate that you prefer, then a vote for a third party candidate is in effect a vote for your preferred major party candidate.  Plus, if you truly prefer a third party candidate, you effectively get to exercise a limited sort of IRV.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003)

Woo, video games.  So, Steam was offering KotOR for $10, so now I've finally played some of it.  I didn't realize that it was based on d20, so that was an interesting surprise.  So far, the game holds up pretty well after 7 years, and loads pretty zippily on a 2006-era desktop.  It's neat to see where BioWare improved on the GUI for DA:Origins -- certain actions in KotOR (going into stealth mode, equipping your character, saving the game) require way too many clicks and are agonizing.  What's a little frustrating is that even DA's equipping GUI isn't as good as Wizardry 8's (a 2001 release).  Sigh.  How hard can it be to drag and drop from the inventory to the paper doll?

Revolutionary Road (1961)

I finished this book on September 7 and returned it to the library weeks ago, but haven't managed to put this together until now.  


Arrrr, thar be spoilers below.


I remember seeing that there existed a Kate Winslet movie called Revolutionary Road, but didn't realize until after reading this book that it was based on this book.  Doink.  I'm very slightly amused to think that this what would have happened to Rose & Jack if Jack had survived; that is, if they were teleported 28 years into the future after the sinking of the Titanic and then lived through WWII before the events of the book.


So, funny story.  When I reached the part about April's 3rd pregnancy, I gave Sarahmac the plot summary to that point, and mentioned the rubber syringe thing.  Sarahmac then gave me a lecture (in the academic sense) about how the internal hemorrhaging mortality rate for young women dropped dramatically after Roe v. Wade because women could get abortions safely.  I said I didn't really think the story was about that, but as it turns out, that's precisely the takeaway for me, even if Richard Yates didn't intend it to be.  He is quoted as saying: 

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.

I'm somewhat conflicted as to whether the novel succeeds at this.  Frank and April openly deride the conformity of the suburbs at the beginning of the novel, but I feel we're given very little actual evidence of it in their community, and they display a kind of blind, desperate clinging to the idea that they are exceptional.  Well, maybe Frank isn't exceptional.  Maybe his talent lies in writing good marketing copy.  April simply made the mistake of falling in love with her idea of what Frank could be, rather than what he was (which she couldn't have fallen in love with).  Frank's great sin is a lack of communication with April concerning his fears of her plan to move to Europe.  This is not a lust for conformity, but an inability to accept that he can't live up to expectations.

The fight against innumeracy

The Vermont News Guy is in my Reader on a trial basis, and so far I'm fairly happy.  And I should love his post on Numbers and Words, but unfortunately while railing against innumeracy, he commits the crime himself.  Sigh.  To wit, the problematic portion of the post says:

Vermonters between the ages of five and 17 had almost the same poverty rate (10.6 percent) as the entire population, but the rate for children under five was a surprisingly high 16.2 percent. Even that was lower than in most other states. In Mississippi, more than 30 percent of children under five were poor.

Unlike most states in the deep South, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and both Dakotas, no county in Vermont had a poverty rate of anywhere close to 30 percent. Still, there were obvious – and perhaps not surprising – differences among the state’s 14 counties. The lowest rate was Grand Isle County’s 8.4 percent; the highest Essex County’s 14.8 percent.

The rates in the rest of the state were as follows: Addison 10.4; Bennington 12.2;  Caledonia 11.8; Chittenden 9.6; Franklin 9,9; Lamoille 10.1; Orange 10.9; Orleans 14.3; Rutland 11.6; Washington 9.7; Windham 9.8; Windsor 9.3.

When he notes that no county in Vermont had a poverty rate close to 30 percent, that 30 percent benchmark is set by the percentage of children under five in poverty in Mississippi.  For the state of VT, the poverty rate for children under five is 16.2, but then he lists the poverty rate for all people, instead of the rate for children under five, by county.  What he wants to look at are the by-county poverty rates for children under 5.

Snow Cake (2006)

Has autism become passé?  Dustin Hoffman rode it to a Best Actor Oscar in 1988 by playing someone with roughly the same affect and self-direction as Ben Braddock.  Leonardo DiCaprio got a Best Supporting nomination in '93 for What's Eating Gilbert Grape.  Sean Penn got a nomination in '01 for I am Sam.  


So why no love for Sigourney Weaver?  Ignoring the ridiculousity of Carrie-Ann Moss's character staying in that podunk for 12 years instead of moving to the city (and it *is* ridiculous; that desperately required some explanation, even a throwaway line that gives us something to cling to while we suspend disbelief), this is a good little film in which Weaver succeeds at portraying a more difficult character than Raymond Babbitt.  It's not like the Academy was full up at the Best Actress slot; they gave a nomination to Meryl Streep for the Devil Wears Prada!  And yes, I love watching Meryl Streep, and she's having a ton of fun in Prada, but it's not more worthy of a Best Actress nomination than Sigourney Weaver in Snow Cake.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

I'm always nervous about watching old comedies, even highly rated ones; some of them make me worried about generational differences in perception of humor and my kids won't understand that Better Off Dead is a work of genius.  Some Like It Hot starts off shaky, but if they cut the first 15 minutes, which don't tell us anything we need to know, it's pretty good.  Certainly not best comedy of all time good (and not even as good as Better Off Dead), but it has a great last line and I'm glad I saw it.

Was 2008 a truly crappy year for films?

We saw 2 of the 5 nominees for the 2009 Best Picture award within the last few days: Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  We couldn't figure out why Slumdog was 2 hours long; once the clever formula was established, it's only clever for a few iterations, but every damn mini-story ended with an interminable chase scene.  When I go to see another movie about India, I'll see one made by Indians, like Lagaan.  Benjamin Button never managed to build up enough steam to get me interested.  I had this odd sense of deja vu, like I was watching Forrest Gump, but with the main character aging backwards instead of being an idiot.

The Stepford Wives; Levin, Ira; 1972

This is simultaneously terribly dated (the feminist protagonist has issues with masturbation?  really?) and yet still relevant because of the antediluvian misogyny that continues to pervade our society.  Even more importantly from a reader's perspective, the pacing is perfect and Levin hasn't written a lot of B.S. just to fill pages, so it's a quick read.  Hooray for writers who know when to stop!

I haven't seen any of the film versions, and don't really have an interest in seeing them, much as I might have liked Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the the Sundance Kid.

Note: published on 4/25/2013, backdated to when I finished reading the book.

The Girl Who Played with Hornet Castles in the Air

Interestingly, the original Swedish title is only the same in English (translated, of course) for The Girl Who Played with Fire; the first book translated as Men Who Hate Women and the third as The Air Castle that Blew Up.  I actually prefer the English titles because they lend a sense of consistency to a series; these are "the girl who..." books in my mind.


I actually liked the latter two books better than the first; or perhaps, my reading experience was better because I was ready for them to simply be fairly well-written crime thrillers, populated with cartoon-y heroes and villains, with some awkward bits that the editors should have caught** and without any deep thoughts*** -- something about the reviews of the first book/movie led me to think that it was more than that.  To be clear, Larsson definitely succeeded, in the sense that I was sad upon finishing the third book because there aren't any more Salander stories to read, and I stayed up late in order to finish each of the last two books.


** Figuerola is a 6 foot tall former near-Olympic quality gymnast?  Even coming after the slightly ludicrous natures of Lisbeth's mind, Niederman's physique, and Blomkvist's sex appeal, this was hard to swallow.  I also disbelieve that no one from the police went to interview Palmgren in The Girl Who Played with Fire.  That's a little bit too incompetent.  Lastly, the "mystery" of Berger's stalker is disappointing because there are no clues as to who the perpetrator is.


*** I can applaud Larsson's stance on discrimination against women without having learned anything new from it.... though perhaps something to talk about.  Blomkvist is a complicated character in all this because he is presented as someone who by their words and actions is someone who doesn't hate women in a series filled with men who hate women... and yet, he is a terrible husband and father.  Paradoxically, the only two women in the series that he actually has a socially well-defined duty to love and support are the two he does his best to ignore.

Ondine (2009)

Ondine is about a modern-day Irish fisherman (Colin Farrell) who pulls a woman out of the water in his nets.  Just a few minutes into the film, I had the following questions:

1. Was Neil Jordan watching Splash one night and thought, "What if we made this a drama instead of a comedy?"  Nah, probably not.  Jordan probably grew up with selkie myths.
2. Given that Neil Jordan is the director, will Ondine turn out to actually be a guy selkie?
3. Why in Zeus's name did Oliver Stone think that Farrell could possibly play Alexander?  Sigh.  I think this every time we watch a movie with Farrell in it; even Veronica Guerin.  Fortunately he's up to the task of playing a kind-hearted but not-so-bright guy in this film.  In fact, he's great!

In the end, and all in all, this was a good little film.  I didn't like some of the camerawork, and I don't quite believe Syracuse's bender, but the girl who plays Annie grows on you and Bachleda actually knows how to swim and does a nice butterfly stroke in one scene.  This would be 7 of 10, and I can't quite bring myself to give it 4 of 5.  Netflix, give me more granularity!!

The Kübler-Ross Model of Driving

On days when it's sunny and reasonably warm and we're running on time, I like to bike Finn to preschool.  Otherwise, I drive.  I usually take 127 because that way I'm not driving past the high school while all the kids are arriving for the day.  127 is a small limited access highway that ends at the intersection with Manhattan Drive, at which point it becomes Park Street and becomes residential -- 25MPH, speed bumps and everything.  Often enough I hit the red light at 127 and Manhattan.  Now, ideally once that light turns green, the lights at Park and North Street, Park and Sherman, and Battery and Pearl (Park becomes Battery) should be timed so that drivers doing the speed limit should get green lights, especially since the vast majority of traffic is going into downtown, not out... but they're not.  So on a bad morning while I'm the first car waiting at:

1. 127/Manhattan. "All right, you probably just got unlucky last week and the lights aren't specifically timed against incoming traffic, and today they'll be green going in."  
2. Park/North St. "I can't believe this light turned yellow 3 seconds too soon for me to make it through the light!  The guy in the lane next to me made it, but that's because he gunned it to 40!  What kind of moron times the lights so as to encourage people to speed in a residential zone?!"  
3. Park/Sherman. "Okay, so we're stuck in this light, too, and it also turned yellow just a few seconds too soon, but if I can just calm down we'll get through the next light and be home free heading to preschool."  Meanwhile, of course, there's a load of traffic coming off North Avenue onto battery so we end up behind a line of cars at
4. Battery/Pearl. "What's the point of taking 127 if it's not any faster than North Avenue?  At least on North Avenue I can help prevent people from speeding by actually doing the speed limit because it's 1 lane in each direction.  Ohhhh.... this line is never gonna make it through and I'm gonna sit through a second round of this light."  But it doesn't, and I can then get on with Acceptance.

Please note that this is about a mile of road and it's usually about 10 minutes each way to Finn's school; 15 on a bad day.  This is why I telecommute and I took the train while living in Chicago.  ;-)

To migrate to Google Sites or not?

Before Picasa was ready for prime time, I started leasing the macreutter.com domain and put up a personal website, hosted at goDaddy, mostly in order to share photos with the family (and especially with the grandparents once Connor was born).  I wrote some crappy custom PHP so that all I really had to do was dump photos into a folder and FTP them to the site and it would display them as a photo album. 


However, Picasa (and YouTube for videos) is now a valid competitor to my homegrown solution and may be easier to maintain "indefinitely", so if I start using Picasa exclusively for online family photo albums, I'd no longer need all that space on the hosted website, so perhaps I could use Google Sites to host the rest of the (fairly spare) macreutter.com website.  This would cost less (the ~$40/year is pretty negligible, but I could promise to spend it on friends' video games or something), *but*:

1. I'd have to migrate everything to Google Sites, which is mildly time-consuming, but more of a pain because they don't support CSS stylesheets.  You can hack around it by putting style information within elements, but to me that violates the whole freakin' point of having a stylesheet.
2. Did I mention they don't support CSS?!

I re-upped the webhosting for a year a couple months ago, so I've got some more time to decide, but I'm leaning more and more towards Google Sites, despite the lack of CSS.  There will be fairly few pages on the family website, and they will change rarely.  The material that will change/update will all be on Picasa/YouTube/Blogger, so the migration may be my Christmas vacation project...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

Two pages into the prologue, I knew that the film would not measure up to the book.  These few paragraphs tell me far more about Henrik and Morell than the corresponding film scene, in about the same amount of time (reading vs. viewing).  Not an auspicious start for comparison, and only gets worse as all sorts of interesting details are left out of the film, presumably for lack of time.

But rather than catalog all the problems, let's focus on one of the most glaring mistakes the filmmakers made.  In general, the cast is good, and Rapace's Salander looks more like a real person to me than the Salander described in the book, but I feel sorry for Nyqvist because the filmmakers have miswritten Blomqvist's character.  Nowhere is this more evident than when he goes to recruit Salander.  In the book, Blomqvist is charming and talks his way into the apartment; he brings bagels and makes coffee; he tells Lisbeth that he knows she broke into his computer but comes off as interested rather than outraged: he *makes things easy*.  In the film, he practically forces his way into the apartment, is confrontational, threatens her with his knowledge of her breaking into his computer, and practically demands she make coffee.  Needless to say, he didn't bring bagels.  The real Lisbeth Salander would have taken a golf club to the film Blomqvist's head before they ever got to Hedestad.

This isn't to say that I don't have reservations about the book.  Far from it.  Upon watching the film, my first question about the first scene with Bjurman was "why doesn't Lisbeth tell him that she's a PI for Milton Security instead of lying and saying she makes copies and coffee?  That would make him back off."  Given how well she pushes other people away, this doesn't make any sense, so I was hoping that something in the book would explain this for me.  Page 166 of the paperback says, "She did not know why she had lied, but she was sure it was a wise decision."  That explains everything.  The author decided he needed Lisbeth to act out of character in order to contrive the salacious subplot.  Whee.  Why have her lie at all?  It would be far simpler, and actually in character, for her to refuse to answer his questions and have Bjurman come to his own incorrect conclusions.

Also, I have no idea why Harriet does not confide in Henrik.  By 1966, he has already shown a fondness for Harriet and a willingness to help (having extracted Cecilia from an abusive relationship).  Henrik is not immediately available on the day she disappears, but it's for an obviously good reason.  Why wouldn't she approach him immediately after the emergency on the bridge is over?  Or in writing shortly after fleeing Hedeby?  Or even a few years later once she's started a new life?  Oh, right.  Harriet needs to be unreasonably uncommunicative in order for there to be a story.  Boo.  I don't think there is an easy fix for this one.

Still and all, it was a pretty good book.

Old Testament Social Services

Connor was interested in Moses, so we read Exodus to him.  The King James version of Exodus 2:1-10 states:

2:1 And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. 2:2 And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child,she hid him three months. 2:3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. 2:4 And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.
2:5 And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. 2:6 And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. 2:7Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? 2:8 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother. 2:9 And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. 2:10 And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.

I never noticed this before, but the government(1) paid Moses's mother for the "simple" act of raising her own child(2).  Does this make her the first welfare queen?  Or did the King James translators have a radical socialist agenda?  ;-)


(1) I'm assuming that Pharaoh's daughter's pin money comes from Pharaoh, whose money comes from taxes/tributes assessed on the people he governs.  


(2) Yes, technically, in the eyes of the government she is being paid to be wet nurse to a child that will be treated as the son of Pharaoh's daughter.  It wouldn't be the first or last time the government was wrong about something.

All the King's Men Who Hate Women

Finally got around to reading Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer prize-winning novel.  We netflixed the movie** a couple years ago and it's a pale, poor ghost of the book. The book's dialogue is excellent throughout, which makes a certain sense because it was originally conceived as a verse play, and there are some passages that are wonderfully written:

Tom Stark, a sophomore, had made quarterback on the mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the numerous new speedways which bore his father's name.  Fortunately, a highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered the wreck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt, flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp.  Beside the unconscious form of the Sophomore Thunderbolt lay another form, conscious but badly battered, for in the big yellow expensive sport job Tom had had with him a somewhat less expensive yellow-headed sport job, named, it turned out Caresse Jones.  So Caresse wound up in the operating room of the hospital and not in the swamp.  She obligingly did not die, though in the future she would never be much of an asset in a roadster.

There is a lot packed into a few lines here; telling you just about everything you need to know about Willie Stark's son, his relationship with his father, the character of of the state police, and a taste of that time and place's view of the role of certain young women in society.


There are unfortunately many other times when Warren gets in his own way.  One of many possible examples that starts off well, giving great insight to Jack Burden's mind:

I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person.  In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly."

but this is immediately followed by:

Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned [..blah blah blah..].  Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire [..yadda yadda yadda..].  Or so, I recall, it seemed.

Which undermines the original comparison.  Choose a single simile, Robert!  You might argue that since the book is written in first person, this kind of waffling is in Jack Burden's character.  I don't consider that a good excuse for ruining a good paragraph.  Of course, it's also entirely possible that the stuff that drives me crazy when I read All the King's Men is a stylistic thing that was considered good writing back in the 40's; maybe it's like how I can't stand how Olivier does Shakespeare.  I still want to go back in time with Ezra Pound's blue pencil and trim all the fat out of this.  The casual misogyny is also distracting (pretty much every woman gets the same treatment as Lois and the yellow-headed sport job), but at least I know that's a product of the era.  

Aaaand, speaking of casual misogyny, Sarah finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just before we saw the movie last week.  I should probably hold my tongue until I've read the book, but... this is basically a perfectly good mystery/thriller*** EXCEPT that the entire subplot with Bjurman doesn't work at all in the movie and (according to Sarah) is far more graphic than the book.  Who is this being filmed for?  

** the 1949 version; we have some standards, here.

*** though seriously, Nazis? isn't there some form of Godwin's law that should go into effect here?  maybe the trope isn't as trite in Sweden as it is in the U.S.; he gets a mulligan, I guess...

Clash of the Titians

Instead of an agonizingly, epically, and embarrassingly bad on all possible levels "remake" of the 1981 classic, I envision a film about the evolution of the great painter's style, from the early self-portrait to his more mature (and synergistic to this post) Danaë series to the final Pieta.  Maybe we'll throw in a gratuitous fistfight when Michelangelo criticizes Titian's draughtsmanship.

Don't Fear the Reaper

No, seriously, don't.  It's just me with my package in the mail from Perry, Maine!  Let's lay the contents out...

Heeding all the warning labels...

Next assemble the snath with wood glue, wait half an hour, and affix the blade (cover on, for the moment, because it's sharp)

Now we're ready to cut some weeds!

I've been thinking about getting a scythe for a few years and couldn't find a place in VT that made them.  Scythe Supply in Maine helped me with blade selection (I've got a 24" ditch blade) and got me set up with an outfit.  After a short test run with the scythe, I'm in love with this tool.  Much better than a string trimmer at cutting down the thicker weeds, in addition to being quieter and requiring less effort to wield (the scythe is light and only requires that you be able to turn at the waist in order to cut).  If I improve my form, it might eventually replace the reel mower.

The Terrible Ten (years of investing)

Let's say, purely as a hypothetical example, that you finished college in 1994 and went to graduate school for 4 years, and so you first started making enough money to be able to start seriously saving for retirement late in 1998.  And let's say that, starting in January 1999, you've maxed out your Roth IRA every year, invested in an index fund that tries to match the S&P 500 because your retirement horizon is 40 years off.  By the end of 2008, you've put $32,000 into the fund and it's worth... about $25,558.83 (using these numbers for the S&P 500 returns and assuming my math is right).  By contrast, if you invested the same amounts from 1929 to 1938 -- you know, just before the stock market crash and through the Great Depression? -- your account would be worth $44,274.25.  Arrrgh**.  

Thank goodness this is just a thought experiment.


** it's true that the market bounced back in 2009, but even if we take this exercise through 11 years, the account begun in '99 is worth $38.8K (on $37K invested) while the one begun in '29 is worth $50.7K.

The Island (2005)

We are so far behind on our bad SF movies.  Okay, so we've got one part Logan's Run, one part the Prisoner, one part THX-1138, and it's all a big mess that ends with further proof that Ewan McGregor can't carry the part of a traditional action movie hero -- alert!  A young Harrison Ford is not walking through that door, so stop trying to write and direct as if that's what you've got!  McGregor brings other skills to the project, so use them!

And as usual, the writing is a problem here.  The concept is all right, nothing wrong with that, but the only scene in which the writers made me feel like I'm watching people raised differently from me is when Gandu Three Echo and Neelix get the censor to slip and they discover the word "Dood!"  Otherwise, there's just so much I have trouble with.  So, I'm supposed to believe that Buscemi and McGregor are friends, and I get the impression that the relationship is at least a few months old, but that McGregor has just noticed Buscemi's pin-up collection for the first time?  Now I'm distracted thinking about that instead of paying attention to the plot.  Oh.  Ohhhhh.... I get it now.  Well, at least during all the action-y sequences all the characters seem to do reasonably intelligent things, and Ewan and Scarlett's escape doesn't rely upon the blinding stupidity of their captors.  I guess that saves this from dropping below three stars.

So, now Mark Christopher Lawrence is my hero of the movie for playing the part of the Construction Worker and delivering the lines:

 

Construction Worker: [after Lincoln and Jordan had fallen from the building, he grabs Lincoln] Jesus must love you! [then helping Jordan]  I *know* Jesus loves you!

"Jordan" is Scarlett Johansson's character.  Out of context, it's not as funny, but it's the right line at the right time.

The Station Agent (2003)

This languished in our netflix queue for years, and now we have seen for ourselves that it sucks to be a talented  actor like Peter Dinklage when Hollywood doesn't have any roles for you that weren't specifically written for dwarfs.  Of course, it does mean that he's the natural choice to be the angry, frustrated dwarf supreme, Tyrion Lannister.  And, of course, it's a sign of how badly the Song of fire and Ice has gone that when I told Sarahmac that Dinklage would be playing Tyrion Lannister, all I got was a blank look, and when I said it would be in a TV Series of A Game of Thrones, she asked whether it was based on some video game she'd never heard of.


==spoilers, about the actual movie==


I wanted to really like The Station Agent.  I *liked* the slow, measured  storytelling that characterizes most of the film, so why do we need the suicide attempt?  Answer: we don't.  It's a poor attempt to inject some Drama!(tm) into a movie that didn't need it.  bleah.

Honey, I know, I know, I know times are changin'

It's time we all reach out for something new, that means you too.
[the wall of children art and cork board is looking a little scraggly.  time to clean up in time for the new school year and all the new stuff they'll be bringing home]

If you know what I'm singin' about up here, come on raise your hand
[that's metallic paint we've put on the wall, to go underneath the final coat of...]

Purple wall, purple wall

I only want to see you hanging on the purple wall
[the metallic paint allows us to get rid of the cork board and use magnets to affix everything, except Chat Noir which still hangs on a nail, to the wall]

This wall is incredibly energizing to look at.  For three days now I've been purposefully walking into the kitchen during the workday just to say "Wow!"  Kudos to Sarahmac for (A) realizing that something needed to be done with that wall, and (B) finding the right color for it.

The Ghost Writer (2010) and Remember Me (2010)

It has actually been several weeks since Sarahmac forced me to watch Remember Me.  I dithered on writing anything about it for various reasons, but perhaps most importantly I was reading the Sports Guy's NBA draft diary as we started watching the movie, and then we had to pause a few minutes in so Sarahmac could read those first few paragraphs.  That almost sums it up; nothing more needed to be said, and then we saw The Ghost Writer.  Not only did both these movies lose an entire star (on the 5-star netflix scale) in a 10 second span in the last five minutes of film, but they suddenly and irrevocably (for me) heralded the end of Pierce Brosnan's leading man status.  We're now 8 years removed from his last Bond film, and he's now being cast as "the older man" figure for lightweights like Robert Pattinson and Ewan McGregor.  To be clear here, I like Ewan McGregor and we've netflixed movies specifically to see him; however, he's nervous and meek.  He's endearing, but he completely lacks Brosnan's assured virility.  This is what didn't quite ring true about McGregor's portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi -- he could channel Alec Guinness's mannerisms all he liked (and he did that quite well), but without the ability to command attention with calm assurance, well...

Colchester Triathlon 2010 : final results

The race results were posted on trifind.net in pdf format. I've pulled out the results for individuals competing in the swimming (as opposed to kayaking) and posted them as a google spreadsheet.  From this I now know I was:

• 108th out of 158 individual participants on total time, and
• 59th on the swimming leg
• 122nd on the biking
• 116th on the running

That's slower on the swimming than expected, but this is because the swimming leg includes the transition to cycling, and that took me a long time -- it was getting the cycling gloves on that killed me here, but I needed them in order to prevent my hands going numb 20 minutes into the ride...  I think the running leg might include the transition from cycling to running, but that time is trivial in comparison to putting on shirt, socks, shoes, helmet & gloves for cycling.

Julian Besag (1945-2010)

Julian Besag passed away last Friday to little notice, save for an update to his Wikipedia entry and kind memories on some statistical blogs.  I don't suppose the wider media will care, but do expect that the Bayesian statistical community will take notice and remember his contributions as the word spreads.


Besag authored a number of important papers on image processing / spatial statistics, including "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures," which has one of the all-time great paper titles -- it's about a method for reconstructing images in the presence of noise, or static, but statisticians can't resist a chance to employ double entendre.  


For me personally, however, his most important work is "Bayesian Computation and Stochastic Systems", coauthored with Peter Green, David Higdon, and Kerrie Mengersen.  Higdon arrived as a visiting professor at Duke University the same fall I arrived as a PhD candidate; this was one of the papers he used to teach us about Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)**, and this was the paper that really helped me to grasp MCMC methods.  Thank you, Besag, for teaching Higdon so that he could teach me.


I had a chance to meet Besag in Oaxaca during the 1995 meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), at which I was presenting a paper written with Valen Johnson on "General Strategies for Assessing Convergence of MCMC Algorithms Using Coupled Sample Paths", and we discussed this and Propp & Wilson's then-recent work on exact sampling using coupled chains (well, Val and Julian discussed, and I mostly listened) during the bus ride to Monte Alban.


** in addition to the usual Hastings, Geman and Geman, and Gelfland and Smith papers

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

This finally came up in the netflix queue, but we weren't exactly looking forward to it... knocking the writer and primary actors, in order: we'd seen Streetcar and were underwhelmed, I tend to appreciate Paul Newman as an actor without liking the movie**, I'm wary of the celebrity of Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives is best known to me as a talking snowman.  So did I genuinely really like this movie, or were my expectations just set low?  I think... I think I actually liked it!  Definitely more so than Gigi, which won Best Picture that year, but perhaps not as much as Separate Tables, and Niven would definitely get my imaginary vote over Newman for Best Actor that year.  But for Burl Ives to not be nominated for his work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (he won Best Supporting for The Big Country that year) is shameful -- he has the best lines and delivers.  To my mind, Ives and Taylor are really the stars of this movie and Newman is the supporting actor.  


Now the question is: should I take a chance on another Taylor movie?  She won an Oscar for BUtterfield 8, but I liked the book and enjoyed Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.


** The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being the exceptions.