Friends with Benefits (2011)

There are many movies with fine casts that fail because the script was mauled somewhere along the way.  Friends with Benefits pulls off the rarer "this would have been a much better film if they had better actors as the leads."


I didn't look at the Netflix description, and so didn't recognize the leads.  I spent the first half of the movie thinking that the male lead was a bastard crossing of Matt Morrison and Neil Patrick Harris who spent a lot of time in the gym, then finally gave up and looked at the IMDB.  Oh, so that's what the agent of the introduction of "wardrobe malfunction" into the English lexicon looks like at 30.  Sarahmac bested me by honestly asking who Justin Timberlake was.  Touché.  In any case, he has little on-screen charisma and we liked the guy who was awful as Green Lantern better.


Once we identified Mila Kunis, well, she's a slightly different story.  We liked her in Black Swan; she's not actually a bad actress, so this is more a problem of her not being right for this part.  We need someone with more NYC cred, but I'm blanking on anyone in the right age range.  Maybe Blake Lively, or maybe I'm just wishing she weren't also in the awful Green Lantern movie.


(backdated to 12/8 when this was mostly written, but finally posted on 1/24/2012)

Cutting the land line

Wireless service at our house is now good enough** that we moved to a family cell phone plan and cut the land line, a little more than 10 years after we initially planned on doing this, but discovering that cell phone service was terrible here.  So I made the call to Vonage this morning, and they took it surprisingly well, only trying to sell me on keeping my number (no, thank you, everyone who needs to know our new number either has it or knows how to reach us via e-mail, and we're happy to ditch all the junk calls***).  


Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers?  oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable.  The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****.  I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then.  Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters.  We still have those.  I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose). 


** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work.  Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.


*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number.  I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.


**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first.  Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not.  Another good thing about cell phones.

The Mote in God's Eye; Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; 1974

How I hate the 60's and 70's mainstream SF androcentric gender politics.  There are some direct attempts to criticize the strict gender roles of the Second Empire of Man, but the actual writing of the only female character betrays these efforts**.  Lady Sally Fowler is a competent, if well-connected***, anthropologist who does useful work for the expedition to the Mote, but whose ultimate purpose is "to keep Blaine active.  When he does not brood, he is good officer."  Cordelia Naismith, we need you!


This is otherwise one of the better 70's Nebula finalists that didn't actually win the award.  




** the wikipedia entry notes that Heinlein gave them extensive advice; never a good sign for the female characters.


*** being well-connected is acknowledged as a "sin", both against Lady Sally's credentials as a xenobiologist and Lord Rod Blaine's credentials as a naval captain.  Rod is able to expiate these sins beyond all reasonable doubt, but there remains a shadow over Sally's accomplishments.

Super 8 (2011)

I don't trust Spielberg anymore, so when his name was heavily attached to Super 8, I didn't even want to watch it.  However, JJ Abrams directed, and after the Star Trek reboot, he's got a lot of credit with us.  So we warily put it on the netflix queue, and finally watched it.  


==spoilers==


It opens with a beautifully simple bit of storytelling, showing us a sign outside an area of heavy industry that proudly proclaims no accidents in ~740 days.  Then an employee starts to take down the numbers.  We cut to a boy sitting alone on a swingset on a snow-covered yard, while the wake is being held inside the house.  The muted conversation between two adults reveals it's his mother who has died.


This is great.  We're hooked.  We're ready for more.


Four months later, school lets out, and the boy is helping his friend, an aspiring filmmaker, complete his entry for a competition.  The group of kids are well-developed caricatures.  All is good (especially Elle Fanning, who is playing a 15-year-old while 12 herself).  While they're out shooting a scene by a train station at night, a truck purposefully drives onto the tracks and crashes into a passing train, which derails.  And derails.  And derails, so unbelievably ridiculously spectacularly that it derails all enjoyment of the film for a couple minutes, but eventually we get back to the kids, who now have a mystery on their hands... but mostly they're still just trying to shoot their Super 8 film for the contest.  


With Spielberg's name attached to the film, you'll never have guessed this, but... there was an alien in the train.  Unlike E.T., the gubbamint got to this one first, and they held it captive and did tests on it and generally pissed it off for 20 years, but now it's escaped and running loose in the American Heartland.  Also unlike E.T., it captures innocent bystanders and eats them, at least until "our hero" shares his memory of his mom dying to let it know that "Bad things happen... but you can still live."  Mmm-kay, thanks, but I don't see how that suddenly turns Alien into E.T.  I'm certainly not going to be staring up in wonder as it leaves, like this is Close Encounters or something.  


The whole last 30-40 minutes is a mess, really.  I assume the filmmakers want the alien to be a misunderstood monster, like Kong, or Mighty Joe Young, or Frankenstein, but there's no time to get to know this creature on a personal level, so it's impossible to sympathize with it, beyond a general sorrow that it's been held captive for so long.


As the credits roll, we see the film the kids made... and sadly, it's ultimately more satisfying than Super 8.  Boo.  I'd rather have had the Star Trek sequel sooner.  Honestly, this was the worst film we've seen since we Green Lantern hit the top of our queue last week (that was far worse).

Google search killed the bookmarks toolbar

Sure, we've known this for a long time, but it really didn't hit home until I switched to Chrome as my browser and got used to its severely limited bookmarking capabilities.  Still, the enormous crusty old set of bookmarks remained on Firefox until I recently got the go-ahead from Sarah to clean 'em out.  But I couldn't simply throw away seventeen years of accumulated stuff without lovingly clicking on each one...

• A number of them simply didn't link to anything anymore.  
• A bunch of them are to sites and information that is trivial to get to with a Google search.  
• There are a very few that I'm considering keeping because they represent something that I might need but would have difficulty remembering the correct keywords to find with a Google search.

And, there are a few that deserve a little retrospective before they go.


(approx 1997-98?)  What every new grad student should know.  I assume Sarah found this while at NWU.  I certainly didn't have it at Duke; maybe I would have finished the PhD if I'd figured out some of this stuff sooner.

(approx 1998)  Duncan House.  We got our wedding rings from Duncan House.  Back in '98, he was still on the U.S. Pacific coast and presumably dreaming of one day moving to the Isle of Skye.  He still does beautiful work, though the skyrocketing price of gold probably means that we'll be looking at the Cuchulain rings in silver.

(approx 2000-2001) Seascape sailing.  


Best.
Vacation.
Ever.


We did this the summer we moved to Vermont.

American county to county migration

Maps awesomeness.  I wonder about the income numbers -- presumably people typically move for higher paying jobs?  but if you move from NYC to AL, you might take an absolute pay cut in return for a relative pay raise?  Also, the numbers for the year will be some mishmash of the job people had in the old location and the job they had in the new location, plus possibly some job seeking time.  If we could look at the numbers for the prior year and the following year, we might have a truer view of the incoming/departing incomes. 

Test 2

This is a test to see whether twitterfeed does an adequate job of updating FB from Blogger.  From further reading, it looks like I'll just have to wait for the Blogger/G+ integration.

And here is a picture of me Tin Tin:

Test

This is a minor test to see how well blogger posts to G+ (now that my profile is linked) and FB (using e-mail).

And now here's a photo of lettuce seeds:

No more automatic blog imports to Facebook

I have to admit that I never really liked the fact that the way you "integrated" your blog into FB was for FB to mangle your blog posts into FB Notes -- it would always have been better if the automatic integration was a wall update with a link to the new blog entry.  Now... now I wonder if there is (or always was) a way to update my FB status by sending an e-mail.  I know that blogger can automatically send an e-mail when an entry is posted; now I just need to figure out how to get that onto FB (and, ideally, G+).


Aha, there is.  Sort of.  Maybe.  Or maybe one of these ideas will help.

Separated at birth?

My mom pointed this out during the 1987 playoffs.  It's still eerie.

Open letter to Vanguard

I recently received a snail-mail letter telling me to stay invested in Admiral Shares.  This pisses me off for a couple reasons:

1. I'm signed up for e-Delivery on all possible communications from Vanguard.  Only letters that the Feds require you to snail-mail to me should come via the post office.  I seriously doubt this falls under that category.
2. This was my Roth IRA account, which I opened in 1998 and have maximized contributions to every year.  Because of Vanguard's once-stricter conditions on switching to Admiral shares and the crappy economy over the last 13 years, it wasn't until last year that I *could* switch to Admiral shares.  I had been desperately wishing for Admiral shares until then, and I certainly don't need to be told to stay in them.

I love Vanguard, but you are wasting money on fluff.  Whatever you spent snail-mailing me this letter (over and above the cost of sending me an e-mail) is money that should be going into my retirement account.  Stop it.  Never, ever, ever, send me another paper letter about how great Admiral shares are.  You have my e-mail address.  I read e-mails from Vanguard.  Send communications there.

Toys

A few weeks ago, PA talked about Skylanders touching on the issue of our kids' toys vs. the ones we grew up with.**  I was set to violently disagree, because my own kids' toys are either the same as those we had (Playmobil, Lego***) or look pretty for display, but aren't good for actual play -- however, my only real basis for comparison are the Star Wars figures (the Galactic Heroes line holds up fairly well for play, but the figures are less poseable than the old Kenner line).  Completely separately from this, I discovered Shortpacked!**** when Dave Willis guest drew for QC this week.  While catching up on back issues of the comic, it was interesting to see Willis' take on the Battle Armor He-man action figure vs. today's toys.

At any rate, I looked up Skylanders, and it seems that the innovation is that your action figure is also a gussied up flash drive that holds your character information and achievements from playing the video game.  Okay, that's cool, but to my eyes the figures themselves aren't really good for play outside the video game.  They're a step up from static *collectible* figures, but are orthogonal to *action* figures that you actually play with.  


** The news associated with the comic has little to do with the comic itself, but is a must-read for Andy Schatz's commentary on how the one-button Mac mouse influenced his game design.


*** You could argue that Lego is better now because of the Star Wars / Harry Potter / Indiana Jones / etc cross-branding, but I would argue that many of the SWLego vehicle designs, while they look pretty for display, don't hold up to extended play the way, say, the Battrax did.


**** It's a comic about toys, but even if you don't play with or collect toys any more, you'll like this.

The great bathroom remodeling saga

[note: I originally meant to post this in October 2011, when the project was complete.  I'm finally posting it now on 6/14/2012, but backdating it to 10/28/2011]


From the design phase in December 2010 to the final sign-off, we spent most of a year on a remodel of the 3/4 master bath.  The room is about 5'x8', which is not much space to begin with, and the original bathroom wasted a lot of that space, so our primary goal was to reclaim as much space as possible, and make it open, light, and clean-lined.  The photo montage doesn't quite do it justice, but I think Sarah's new design is brilliant, and over 6 months later, I still love being in that bathroom.

La Cage Aux Folles (1978)

The Birdcage isn't so much a remake of La Cage Aux Folles as it is an extraordinary doppleganger.  There appear to be passionate arguments on the imdb boards over which version is better, but the reality is that there's not much difference.  Even minor plot and staging elements have been scrupulously translated from the French to the American, and the performances are direct homages.  

Gene Hackman is a significant upgrade over Michel Galabru, who seems to shout all of his lines -- Hackman strays the furthest from the original portrayal, to the benefit of all.  Dan Futterman comes off better than Remi Laurent, but this has more to do with minor script changes -- in both films, the character is self-absorbed to a fault, but he redeems himself in the remake by declaring Albert to be his mother, while he is simply absent from that scene in the original.  The script change is a vast improvement.   I preferred Michel Serrault to Nathan Lane, and Benny Luke was vastly superior to Hank Azaria.  Otherwise the actors are largely toss-ups between the two (though I lean slightly towards the ones in the remake, being more familiar with them).

Two superhero movies in need of some fewer characters, and one that got it right

I was going to just catch up on Thor (2011), which we saw weeks ago...


Around the time we were watching it, the Brads used Thor to make a point about Netflix, but what I want is to see the version of Thor where his three male drinking buddies die during the expedition to Jotunheim so that:

1. he starts off feeling more guilt, and maybe even believes he deserves to be banished, because right now, his "transformation" while on Earth doesn't really work and
2. we don't have to pretend they're real characters.  Maybe we could even develop Sif! or devote more time to Thor learning to act like someone worthy of Mjolnir

...but we also recently saw X-men: First Class, and amazingly enough, this movie had the same problem; they needed to get rid of all the mutants aside from Charles, Raven, Erik, Hank, Shaw, and Emma.  I didn't care one whit about the Banshee / fake stupid Angel with butterfly wings / whirlwind guy / can't remember who else was fighting.  I wouldn't bother with cerebro at this early stage (though the "recruiting missions" were very funny, highlighted by Hugh Jackman's cameo), and use the money saved on not hiring those extra actors and bothering with their sfx to get Hank a decent mask.  Seriously, the Beast mask sucked; it was as bad as the Green Goblin mask in the first Spiderman movie, which at the time I thought looked like they stole it from the Power Rangers set.  This is still a good movie that aspires to greatness on the strength of McAvoy and Fassbender -- especially Fassbender, who not only has great chemistry with McAvoy, but breezes like a native through his lines in several languages, generates some serious onscreen hate for his nemesis (Kevin Bacon himself was a revelation as Shaw) and, dare I say it, brought a *magnetic* physical presence to the role that was sadly lacking from McKellan -- with Jennifer Lawrence ably assisting both of them.  Get rid of the dead weight, and you can bring a sharper focus on the Moira-Charles-Raven-Erik-Hank love pentagon, with Shaw looming large in the background, and maybe the movie actually achieves greatness.

By contrast, Kick-Ass knew where to draw the line on the number of costumed heroes.  There are four (sort-of), plus one main bad guy.  Everyone else is window dressing, and as a result you get to know the characters a little better.  Though, to be honest, Chloë Grace Moretz is the only actor who really deserves extra screentime.  (we are not Nic Cage fans, though his imitation of Adam West's delivery as Batman is hilarious here)

Posts no longer needed, baseball awards edition

A month ago, with a few weeks left in the regular season, I started looking at the MVP and Cy Young races. The Cys were pretty much wrapped up by Verlander and Kershaw by the end of the season, and I'm thoroughly uninterested in the AL MVP race; some years, maybe they just shouldn't give out the award.  Even the NL MVP race, which looked interested on September 13, really comes down to whether you like Braun because his team went to the NLCS or Kemp because he had a higher WAR and the amusement factor of having the Cy and MVP winners coming from the same team that missed the playoffs is too great.

Pujols side note: as mentioned before, Pujols had some long-running streaks on the line, and sadly missed 30 2B by 1, 100 RBI by 1, and .300 by .001.  Continuing both his HR + RBI streaks would have been particularly historic; A-rod's own streaks ended this year, so if Pujols had managed to go for 30HR 100RBI for three more years, these all-time records would have been his.  He still has a shot at HRs.

Dunn side note: well, he managed to live the statistical nightmare that is .159 BA / 177 SO.  Here's wishing him a better 2012.

The uninvited guest

We had just finished watching Imagine Me & You and talking about how much we liked it when scamper, scamper, scamper in the direction of the kitchen.  It's amazing how loud a fat little mouse can sound on a hardwood floor in the middle of the night.  So out came the traps with Maranatha peanut butter on pieces of Carr's water cracker as bait.  Only the best for our pest!


Sure enough, Sunday morning we had caught our little friend and relocated him to the Intervale.  Slideshow and video below.  

Imagine Me & You (2005)

Boy & Girl who are best friends, but haven't really fallen in love, get married because this seems like the safe thing to do.  Girl immediately meets someone she *does* fall in love with, and we feel bad for the girl, because she's married and doesn't want to be in love with someone other than her husband, and we feel bad for the boy, because this is one of those movies where everyone is fairly likeable, but eventually everything works out and the girl gets to be with her love and the boy is understanding (since everyone is fairly reasonable as well as likeable) and goes off and travels like he always meant to and (presumably) finds a love of his own.  Yay!  Everyone is happy, especially us.


I'm pretty sure we've seen this before, though the exact title(s) eludes me.

Brideshead Revisited (1981)

It is incredible, in a way, that so finely crafted a series should have escaped our notice for so long; and yet, there is a certain rightness in discovering a young Jeremy Irons staking his claim to be considered among the great actors of his generation (I didn't like his turn opposite Meryl in The French Lieutenant's Woman) on the thirtieth anniversary of the year it originally aired.  It rightfully won heaps of TV BAFTAs, and sadly was nearly shut out at the Emmys, save for a token supporting actor award to Olivier (then the most recognizable actor in the series to American audiences, unless they recognized Gielgud, playing a very different character, as the butler from Arthur).  I hopefully shall be forgiven the sin of viewing the series before reading the novel, though perhaps my punishment is to now be hesitant to pick it up, fearful that Waugh's prose will not live up to the expectations set by the series.

And then there were eight

If you follow the sports, you might have heard that the Braves and Red Sox both completed historic collapses last night, or alternatively, that the Cardinals and Rays completed historic comebacks.  


The NYT has adequately documented the Sox collapse, but the same article could be written concerning the Braves, if only the Braves and Cardinals played in the AL East instead of the Red Sox and Rays**.  In fact, Cardinals, without Wainwright for the season, with Carpenter getting older, and with various nagging injuries to their 3-4-5 hitters, looked worse off to my eye than the Rays, and like they might miss the playoffs for Pujols' possibly last season in a Cardinals uniform. 

What shouldn't be lost in all this is that the Braves would still be alive if Kimbrel hadn't blown a save. The Red Sox would be alive if Papelbon hadn't blown a save, or if the Yankees hadn't sent Cory Wade out for the ninth.  All of which is to say that, if you weren't already convinced, Mariano Rivera is the greatest reliever of all time -- which is something, even if that means he's "only" been as valuable over his career as Tommy John, David Cone, or Bret Saberhagen.  After all, being the 50th most valuable pitcher of all time is damn good, and leagues better than the next reliever on the list (Gossage, if you're counting at home; I don't include Eck because he had a great career as a starter before becoming a reliever).


** though you could then plausibly argue that the Angels would be the AL WC, all disrespect to the strength of the NL intended

Hi, it's Irving. Irving Who? Irving Gas

Got a call from some people "doing a survey."


She: Have you bought gas at a local station within the past two weeks?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Hunh?
Me: I own a Prius and don't drive very much. [as it turned out when I checked my records later, it had been more than two weeks]
She: How about within the last month?
Me: Yes.
She: Where was it?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Hunh?
Me: I know where the place is; it's the place I go to all the time, but I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head.  I could go check my records to find out.
She: Well, was it an Irving?
Me: I've never heard of them before.
She: You haven't?
Me: Nope.
She: Well, we have enough people in your category.  Thank you!  [click]


I was fairly certain there wasn't an Irving Gas in Burlington; looking online, they appear to be a MA-based company... oh, they do in fact have a location in Burlington, and it's the closest gas station to my house, and right across from the park we walk to.  My only defense is that it's a relatively recent name change, and I haven't fueled at that gas station in about nine years because they have the highest prices around, so I don't even look at it anymore.  Even with the name change.

Moby-Dick (1851)

Cleaning out my Drafts folder, I found a 3 months-old reply to the following question.  The e-mail thread is long dead, but the reply seems postable.

Now, how does anyone feel about Moby-Dick?

I think "Call me Ishmael" is one of the more overrated opening lines of a novel.  It has a certain simplicity and oomph the first time you read it, but it gets tiresome with repetition.  The opening of Pride and Prejudice, OTOH, makes me happy every time.  I have a stupid grin on my face right now from thinking about it.

IIRC, roughly half the novel is basically a technical instruction manual on whaling, as best as Melville could research at the time, which is fascinating from historical perspective but is a questionable addition to a novel.  Still, I read it all, so mission accomplished, I guess?  

There's that fascinating bit at the beginning where Melville spends pages and pages writing about how Ishmael makes an incredible fuss when he finds out he'll be sharing a bed with a harpooneer.  

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.

Oh, Ishmael, you naive homophobe!

Personally, I think China Mieville's The Scar features a better story of a hunted leviathan, but Moby-Dick was worth a read, if only to provide some perspective on The Scar.

Netflix and me, the sucker

A lot has been said about Netflix/Qwikster, but one thing I haven't seen stressed enough is this: 


Actually, scratch that.  I was about to say that I, and presumably many other Netflix customers, still have the streaming service solely because we want 3 DVDs out at a time.  This was based on the fact that when the new pricing went into effect and I looked at the options online, it looked to me that if you wanted no streaming, you could only get 2 or 1 out at a time... but when I went to go get a screenshot of that for this blog entry, I finally noticed the "Show Additional all DVD Plans" text in the lower right.  Because I have "only" a 20-inch screen and usually have the bookmarks sidebar open, half the text was off the screen.

So... it turns out that you could simply cancel streaming from the get-go, and if you were just using the DVD service anyway, actually pay less than you were previously paying.  

So, aside from Netflix's skeezy tactics of not showing the 3 DVDs out at-a-time with no streaming option by default, what's the big deal here?


(I mean aside from the fact that now that the DVD rentals are a separate business, everyone like me will drop the streaming service until streaming matures to the point where it can almost completely replace the DVD rental service... at which point, the best option might not be Netflix.)

Jane Eyre (2011)

Very moody violins.

This is faithful to the letter and spirit of the novel and well acted and well cast.  The choice to start the movie with Jane running away from Thornfield, without any explanation of where we are in the story, is a curious choice... and it doesn't work.  The beginning drags awfully, and it's not until we get to Mia Wasikowska and Judi Dench that it begins to pick up.

The Book of the Dun Cow; Walter Wangerin, Jr.; 1978

God imprisoned Wyrm, evil incarnate, inside the Earth and set the creatures of the Earth as his unknowing keepers.  Wyrm tries to escape; his plan is to loose Cockatrice and a horde of basilisks upon the world to kill his keepers. Anthropomorphized animals assemble!  


This was shelved in the adult section, but it reads like YA (ah, and the NYT classed it so, calling it the best children's book of that year).  I could see people liking this, but I definitely prefer Chanticleer and the Fox.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

(originally viewed 8/17/11)


I wasn't going to write about it, but it recently came up that I didn't enjoy The Big Lebowski.  So, how did BL fail me?


On cursory examination, you might think the film stands noir on its head, but noir is essentially all about slackers who, through some otherwise minor event, get dragged way over their heads into grander schemes than they can imagine, but manage to muddle through and unravel the seeming mysteries that motivate the puppet masters, and finally come through in the end.  We just haven't seen a noir protagonist quite like The Dude before.


Since nothing really new in the way of plot is being offered, the script needs to excel in the characters and dialogue.  Unfortunately the dialogue, especially and at times excruciatingly in the scenes at the bowling alley, is not up to snuff**.  The Dude, Maude, and the "real" Lebowski all come off well, but Walter, Donny, and the nihilists just don't work, even now that I know that Walter is a direct poke at John Milius.  I realize that not everyone lives in a Noel Coward play, but I personally think Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as modern comedic noir has a lot more going for it than Lebowski***.  


There are flashes of a great movie that lies somewhere in the concept of The Big Lebowski, but that movie never manages to reveal itself, and I guess it's that failure to reach its potential that is ultimately disappointing.  The Dude, and apparently the Coen brothers, would have a clear conscience about that.



** I felt much the same way about Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers remake, only the problems are more pronounced in those films.  I wasn't crazy about No Country for Old Men.  Needless to say, I'm really worried that I won't like Fargo if I watch it again.


*** full disclosure: I'm a Val Kilmer homer, but also a Jeff Bridges homer, so neither movie is getting too big an advantage from my actor preferences, right?

Notes on a Scandal

As part of my ASA membership, I get a gratis copy of Signficance magazine, which was also the first I'd heard of the scandal surrounding Dr. Potti at Duke University.  Sadly, the Significance magazine article is not publicly available, but the writer's highlighted conclusion is that "Universities should support statistics as they support computing: specialist units should give advice on each."  The sad thing is that the Statistics department at Duke University has a 20+ year long history of working with the Medical Center; in fact, the Statistics department is housed in the Old Chemistry building right next to the West Campus entrance of the Medical Center (while I was there, the grad students used to go to the Med Center cafeteria for lunch all the time).  Don Berry, in particular, was a strong liaison with the Medical Center and did a ton of work on clinical trials at Duke in the 90's before moving to, ironically, to be the head of the Division of Quantitative Sciences at M.D. Anderson, where Baggerly and Coombes (no website?!), the professors who unearthed the problems in Potti's research, currently work.


But it's not like after Berry left there were no connections between the Duke Statistics department and the Medical Center.  Dalene Stangl (former chair of the department) has been doing clinical trials research with the Medical Center since before Berry left Duke, and Mike West (chair of the department during the 90's and the driver behind the department's rise from obscurity to prominence among Bayesian departments) and Ed Iversen have been doing work in genomics for ten years.  All this is to say that there is absolutely no reason why Potti should not have known about the statistical resources at his disposal.  So why didn't he use them?


Well, looking at the list of papers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP), West appears as coauthor on three papers with Potti, though thankfully not the Nature Medicine article, which is not (no longer?) listed on the IGSP list of papers.  The problem is that many of the remaining papers in the list that include Potti as coauthor have titles like "Oncogenic pathway signatures in human cancers as a guide to targeted therapies" and "An integrated genomic-based approach to personalized treatment of patients with advanced stage ovarian cancer", very similar in title to the problematic "Genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics" Nature Medicine article.  Excising the one tumor won't really give confidence in the health of the  other papers, especially any that are based on the same data, until a thorough independent biopsy is conducted on each of them.

Your Highness (2011)**

I've slept on it and decided Your Highness is a horror movie.  Not because of the gratuitous amount of fake blood spilled.  Not because Natalie Portman's character must protest that she doesn't want a chopped-off minotaur's penis to touch her.  It is because we are pleading that Danny McBride won't touch her.  In the end, we are saved from this mental image by a chastity belt, and can happily imagine that he is killed on the quest to defeat the witch that put it there.


** I was considering "Natalie Portman goes slumming" as the title, but there's that whole Star Wars prequel thing.  You could argue that was unintentional slumming, because no one could have known in 1997 just how bad the results would be, but it's possible she thought this would be funny.

Mix tapes for the 21st century, part 2

Grooveshark wins for now; here's the "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" playlist and here is the accompanying story.  I might have liked to have the Sinead O'Connor version of "Why don't you do right?", the Peggy Lee version of "You'd be so nice to come home to" and especially the Rosey Grier version of "It's all right to cry", but close enough.  

So far I'm fairly impressed with Grooveshark's selection, but their interface feels a bit clownish with the noisy ads.  


I also hate their search engine; it throws up a lot of chaff when searching for a track, and does things like rank "Where the Hood At" and "Ride Wit Me" as more relevant to a search for "You'd be so nice to come home to" than several versions of the actual search term.  This means I almost always need to click the "See all" button.  All in all, not nearly as satisfying a user experience as putting together the mflow "Confessions of a Sock Money" playlist, even if mflow came up a few tracks short.  Mflow's search field to "Quickly add tracks to this playlist" especially kicks the ass of anything Grooveshark had to offer.  

So, I want mflow's interface and Grooveshark's database.

Mix tapes for the 21st century

Been playing with some Chrome apps.  A friend recommend We Are Hunted, but while I like the idea of having a "radio" that plays through new music, I had to keep stopping what I was doing to skip to the next song, and at the end of the day, I had about 4 songs marked that I kinda sorta liked.  So I went hunting through the music section of the Chrome apps store, and Mflow was highly recommended. 

The search isn't bad; it starts showing results as you type and separates the results into artists, albums, users, and tags (sadly, not tracks here, though if you do search by a particular song name, the search results do show a tracks section).  The track listings also helpfully show which album the track is pulled from, which is important when you want the version of "Pressure" from the Nylon Curtain and not the one on the Greatest Hits album.


I'm having fun with this, because I can check out holes in our music collection, and confirm things like:

• we're good to go with Prolonging the Magic and don't need any other Cake albums
• we're good with just the first two Cranberries albums
• same with Ben Folds Five's second and third albums and can skip his solo career, though I might be convinced that we need "Rockin' the Suburbs"

Sure, previewing music online isn't new, but my prior experience with places like last.fm gave me the impression that most places just gave you clips, and while you can hear full tracks youtube, it's less convenient to listen to whole albums (and I'm still a bit of a sucker for albums).


What I'm not entirely satisfied with on mflow is the selection.  It occurred to me that creating and sharing mflow playlists would be a good replacement for mix tapes; however, until they have more Shelleyan Orphan, that won't work for us. 

So what other services are out there?  Here's another situation where Wikipedia is really helpful, with a list of online music databases, and in particular the streaming services.  Of these, I need to check out Grooveshark, and maybe I'll check last.fm again, but the rest seem like they won't suit my needs.  The one that allows me to share "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" as a cloud mixtape soonest wins.


...of course, there's also Mixcloud, which would allow me to put in my own audio -- very helpful when the mix includes a sample from Mahler's 5th, or if I want to read the script as part of the mix.  I'll have to look into that, too.

High School Rankings

Google and Chrome have killed my once compulsive bookmarking.  Our Firefox bookmarks have been accumulating since before we moved to Vermont; since Sarah no longer uses the desktop for her primary web browsing, she's given me license to clean house.  Some of the things I bookmarked were interesting, like my high school district website... as if I would have difficult finding it if I needed it.  


At any rate, they had linked to this Newsweek ranked list of the top 500 public high schools in the U.S. (though you can't tell that from the title), because OTHS made the list.  I don't know if I have the time or energy to properly criticize this kind of endeavor, but while they seem to mostly be interested in the "best" *college prep* high schools (as determined by a narrow band of statistics), at the same time they don't account for where kids are going to college (presumably Newsweek's definition of "best" would rank a HS that sent more kids to 4-year colleges than one that sent more kids to 2-year colleges; look at the NJ Monthly ranking to see how the 2-vs.4-year college matriculation rates vary wildly across schools).  This is like the bad old days of baseball statistics where the Cy Young award was generally simply given to the pitcher with the most wins, with strikeouts and ERA as a tiebreaker, with little regard for factors like run support or BABIP.



So, the top 25 of Newsweek's rankings is littered with magnet schools, and all I can think is: Really?  No kidding?  When you get to pick which kids go to your school, your students all perform well?  Wow.  That's about as insightful as putting Harvard and Princeton at the top of U.S. News and World Report's list. Get me some pre- and post-testing and we'll see how each school is really performing.



There's also no idea here of what the difference is between ranks.  There's this "Newsweek Score", and presumably there's very little difference between 2.874 and 2.807, but how much better is 2.8 vs 1.8?  And are we supposed to be whipped into some sort of competitive frenzy by this?  Where did OTHS place, anyway?  Somewhere in the 400's?  Yup, just ahead of... rival school Red Bank. 

Woooowooooo!  SUCK IT, Red Bank!  In your face!  ;-)


I've put the Newsweek rankings data in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, so if you're interested, you can analyze it however you like, but I'm afraid it's mostly GIGO.

Anniversaries, part 2

Twelve years together; that's the bathroom anniversary, right?  No, technically it's silk/linen?  Well, close enough.

Anniversaries

We just hit 10 years living at our current address -- it was the day Irene hit VT, and while there wasn't much at all in Burlington beyond some wind and rain (no flooding, no power loss) we were still distracted enough to have forgotten about having a minor celebration of the date.  Also, technically, I didn't start living here for another four weeks, because I was finishing development work on SPSS 11 before moving.  

What I hate about (population) statistics

You can, too, in a few easy steps:

1. Go to Wikipedia's list of urban areas.
2. Click on the Density column in the table so that urban areas are listed in decreasing order of density.
3. Scan the table to find that Los Angeles, at 2,570 people/km^2, is the most densely populated "urban area" in the U.S.
4. Hate population statistics.

To be fair, Wikipedia warns us about the dangers of trying to rank the world's largest cities, but it's one thing to read the article and quite another to see that, by certain criteria, the U.S. model for urban sprawl and poor city planning could be considered space-efficient.  

Looking at the list of cities proper, you can see that NYC's population density was being severely dragged down by the inclusion of its suburbs, while the city of Los Angeles is barely more dense than its suburbs.

Choosing what to report

I had heard about the new leukemia treatment, but not looked any closer until this xkcd popped up in Reader. 

So I searched for recent articles on the leukemia treatment, and after looking at articles posted on ABC, IBT, MSNBC, the Myeloma Beacon, NYT, Nurse.com, WSJ, Huffington Post, CNN, CBS, and Fox, only *one* article mentioned the (very cool) fact about the repurposed HIV.

Kudos to you, Robert Bazell of MSNBC.

So, I think I'll continue to read comics as my primary news source.

Raising breast cancer awareness, PA style**

Rediscovered while going through photos from July...while getting on the PA turnpike, going east from the Irwin exit, there was a truck in front of us that supported breast cancer research.  That was sweet of them! 

But could we get a closer look at the bumper sticker?

Um, thanks for your support, I guess?


** To be honest, I'd associate this kind of sentiment with NJ more than western PA.  Maybe the truck was from Philly?  Oh, wait, Hazleton, PA is right around the crossroads of I-80 and I-81.  That's not Philly, but still definitely east of the mountains.


Oh, man.  It's an entire company that does nothing but "save the tatas" merchandise.

Fun with Picasa

Ever since I started thinking about moving to Picasa for all my online photo album needs, I've spent a little time here and there playing with it.  One of the coolest (and scariest, if you're worried about Google using your tagging of people in photos in order to be able to use their facial recognition software to track where you are) features is its ability to pick out faces from your photos and group similar photos together so that you can more easily tag your photos (and then later on be able to easily find "that picture of aunt Bea and cousin John").


Even after tagging a whole lot of people, some of its guesses are funny-cute, like guessing that the 4 year-old version of Sarahmac is the 4 year-old Finn.  

And some guesses, coupled with the faces that it managed to pick out of the picture, are just odd, like thinking the Clone Wars-era Anakin might be me or Connor, or that Luke might be Sarah.

I am Number Four (2011)

Is it an alien action-horror-thriller, a high school drama, or love song to obsolete photographic technology?  You decide, because the filmmakers couldn't.  They probably should have stuck with the high school drama with some alien thrown in, like a teen Starman.

Kevin Durand sighting!  It makes us happy to see Joshua getting work.  He's got a great voice and body language.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

We liked Amanda Seyfried in Veronica Mars, so we've since netflixed Letters to Juliet and now Red Riding Hood **.  Letters to Juliet was watchable, if uninspired, and notable mostly because it paired Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, presumably in a nod to Camelot.  


Red Riding Hood has received execrable reviews, and for about 80 minutes I couldn't understand why.  It wasn't good, but it wasn't terrible.  And then we got the "reveal", which was one of those Agatha Christie-style reveals where the murderer is one of the least-developed castmembers and one of the few who hasn't yet been accused by someone else of being the murderer.  Sigh.


** yeah, we also saw Mamma Mia!, but that was for Meryl.

2011 Colchester triathlon

The race was on Sunday and the results are now out.  I've put a spreadsheet of the individual results up on Google Docs.  Compared to last year's results, my swim and bike times were actually worse.  I'm not too concerned about the swim time, because scuttlebutt after the race last year was that last year's swim leg was shy of 1k, and everyone's times were low as a result.  The increase in my time from last year to this is consistent with the overall trend (maybe even slightly less of an increase, relatively speaking compared to the leaders).  It's still slightly embarrassing as a self-identified swimmer to be in the middle of the pack, even if the pack is very fit.  I'm pretty sure I did worse on the biking because I did more running and less biking than last year, because the running training was actually less wear and tear on my body (the position of my bike's handlebars is conducive to making my hands numb after 15 minutes of cycling; I really need to fix that for next year).  So: more open water swimming, more cycling with improved handlebars on the bike, and more overall conditioning so I can go faster on the running leg (I have no excuse, other than relatively poor conditioning, to not be doing a sub-25 minute 5k).

New-school westerns

We recently netflixed The Warrior's Way (2010) followed by Rango (2011), without really intending to watch westerns back-to-back.  


In fact, neither of us really remembers how the Warrior's Way got into the queue -- I expect it was my fault, but we're both glad to have seen this "sushi western".  It was very thin on plot, so they smartly kept it to 90 minutes and minimized the dialogue.  It was thick on slick, stylized contrast and commentary on the "years of disciplined training to become a great swordsman" of the east versus the "shoot 'em up" of the west, and, funny enough, no matter which way you go, you mostly end up dead.  I could quibble with the denouement, but had too much fun to bother.  Recommended for a brain's night off.


Rango begins brilliantly and ends well, but the middle is a mess.  They seemed desperate to try to fit a complex "whodunit" plot into the middle of a movie that didn't need one.  We both fell asleep around the halfway mark and had to finish the next night.  Never a good sign.  Simplify, and cut the running time from 100 to 80-90 minutes, and we've got a movie.

The Tiger's Wife; Téa Obreht; 2011

Everybody loves The Tiger's Wife.  


Well, not quite everyone.  The New York Observer reviewer derisively compares it to teen fiction (which I find insulting to good YA fiction), and other detractors point out that Obreht never actually lived through the war in Yugoslavia.  The Salon reviewer is enthralled and exasperated.  Either way, it arouses strong feeling.

Well, not quite.  It didn't excite the same level of response in me.  I like Obreht's writing, and enjoyed the fairytale of Natalia and her grandfather, including the stories of the Deathless Man and the Tiger's Wife.  But I'm not enthralled**.  IMO, the biggest failure in the book is due to poor editorial review -- Luka's***, Darisa's, and the apothecary's stories comprise about 10% of the words in the book, but add nothing to the core story of Natalia and her grandfather.  They are merely a distraction and should have been cut.  The Salon reviewer also noted this problem, but I have to disagree with the suggestion that "Obreht would have been well-advised to parcel out its constituent elements as stand-alone stories" because the other 90% of the book contributes to that core story.  Okay, this did exasperate me, actually, but with more of a sense of resignation than outrage.

** I'm biased because I know the author, but preferred 13, Rue Thérèse.  Both books are debut novels that are germinated from  childhood experiences.  Both feature slightly dull narrators who are researching/imagining someone with a far more interesting personal history.

*** this won't make sense unless you've read the book, but I can't help but wonder if there's any irony in the choice of his name.  Do you think someone of Obreht's generation listens to Suzanne Vega?