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.