Breach (2007) and Hollywoodland (2006)

Sarahmac and I may be the only people who watched these movies simply to get our Caroline Dhavernas fix**.  Even better, by the time they percolated up to the top of the queue, we had forgotten why they were in the queue, so "discovering" that she was in the movies made us all the happier.

Breach is actually a pretty good little film with a solid story and performances all around.  My only, fairly minor, complaint is that they seem to have overstated Hanssen's cunning for dramatic effect; reading his wikipedia entry gives the impression that upper management's lack of ability to follow up on reported suspicions had more to do with Hanssen's success at avoiding detection than his own brilliance.

Hollywoodland has good performances, but suffers from a lack of people we can root for (aside from Caroline, but her character leaves a scene, and the movie, about halfway through).  Initially we kinda like George Reeves and Toni Mannix, but he gets jaded and surly over his lack of "real" acting roles and she gets creepily possessive.  The story of Louis Simo's personal life never manages to mesh with the noir mystery.

Now we're waiting for netflix to pick up Mars et Avril (which doesn't look particularly promising, but better than Passchendaele)...



** Wonderfalls was our first, and probably greatest, experience with the netflix recommendation engine, early in 2006, and we recently went back to rewatch the series, and it was just as much fun six years later.  I've found that I really like these short-lived, completed series because there's much less time investment*** than waiting... and waiting... for the next season of Game of Thrones, or even getting on the Buffy train for seven seasons.

*** especially once the series goes south.  It seems rare for a series to maintain quality for more than 2-4 seasons

Ahead full impulse

Oh, yeah, we're looking forward to seeing this, too...

The reality is that the entire movie could be Benedict Cumberbatch running around in a trench coat and giving a voice over and I'd watch.  But it will be SO MUCH MORE.

A couple more thoughts:

• From the trailer, I assumed that Alice Eve is playing a young Carol Marcus, but Sarahmac took one look and declared her Elizabeth Dehner based on the haircut.  It's so eerily similar that I hope she's right.
  
• What's most fun about Khan (or, whoever the villain is in this movie, nudge, nudge, wink-wink) is that, when played and written properly, he's a smart villain.  We want the villain to have qualities we admire, we want him to have tricks up his sleeve, we want to have moments where we can't help but "accidentally" root for them.  What we want, over and over, is the original Die Hard experience of an action flick with a brain.  And, given that Cumberbatch does a good Alan Rickman, is that really too much to expect?

7 seconds or LA-LA

I had wanted to wait for Nash to come off the DL before saying something about Mike D'Antoni coaching the Lakers, but that seems a while off, so before the iron goes completely cold...

In the first article I read about the firing of Mike Brown and hiring of D'Antoni, it said that Mike Brown was trying to run the Princeton offense -- with a team that had 2 bigs (one of whom needs to be near the basket in order to be effective**) and no one (except Nash) in the projected starting 5 who could shoot the 3***.  WAT.  These are not guys who can effectively run the Princeton offense (with, I think, the exception of Pau Gasol, who is IMO an ideal big man to put at the top of the key).

Even if D'Antoni runs the "right" offense with this team, I think it will be extremely difficult for him to overcome the following problems:

1. Howard has been worse than ever at the free throw line, and
2. This Lakers team is not very deep (just look at the bench's +/- numbers to see that they're regularly being outperformed by opponent benches).

** To be extremely generous to Brown, he apparently (see last paragraph in this section) made the decision before the Howard trade... but then again, it was also before they had Nash.

*** Kobe is a career .337 shooter on 3's.  That's not even in the top-250 all-time, and lower than 6th man's Antawn Jamison's career .346 %.  He's horrible for a shooting guard, but we have a perception that he's "not bad" because he's made some 3's in big games.  Artest is a career .341 on 3's.  

By contrast, Vince Carter (currently of the Mavericks) is the 50th best active player at .3738.  R

Three Lives; Gertrude Stein; 1909

The dust jacket** states:

"Simple material, but written with a directness that gives it immense force.  In fact, that simplicity and directness, both in style and technique, are what make the book."

This might be one of the most accurate statements I've ever seen in a dust jacket.  Unfortunately, what's missing is a plot, so this is one of those books that should be read as a writer's workshop exercise, and not as literature of leisure.  While I admire Stein's style and technique, there's no story here, so I stopped on page 70 (of 279).

** of the 1933 The New Classics, New Directions*** edition.

*** no, not this New Directions

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before..?

Before Sunrise made it on to our queue for reasons I no longer remember, and is that rarity in which Netflix predicted we would like it ever-so-slightly more than the average Netflixer.  It's a nice little film**, perhaps more special for us because at the time the film is set, the characters are roughly our age, and it was a time when I probably should have gone to spend a long weekend in Vienna with Sarah while she was in France on a Rotary scholarship.  

Still, I would be torn about giving it 4 stars if it weren't for Before Sunset, which is a little sliver of a film (it has a running time of 80 minutes, but 4 minutes are credits; it clocks in like a classic Disney animated movie) that tracks in real time a wonderfully bittersweet exploration of their relationship 9 years after the events of the first movie.  The two movies need each other; the first is a little rough with the lack of polish of youth, while the second shows a mastery of production that comes with full 30-something adulthood while retaining the vigor of youth.

It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, because the characters are "adapted" from the previous film.  That seems a rather arbitrary way to classify it, when the script is entirely new.  I haven't seen Sideways, so I can't comment on the choice of winner, but I definitely liked the script better than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won Best Original Screenplay (though neither were as good as the Incredibles).

I'm actually looking forward to Before Midnight, if not with same anticipation as the Hobbit.  This is a good feeling.

** I don't quite believe that Hawke's character is both so full of hope that he can convince a stranger to spend the day with him in Vienna, and also so deeply cynical.  I think they're trying to paint him as a romantic with a cynical streak (perhaps as a defense mechanism), and they almost-but-not-quite pull this off. 

Crackers, part II

I previously reported our children's attempts to crack our home computer password in order to play video games at 6am on weekdays.  Since then, on the weekends I've set the password to be the answer to a math problem in the hint text.  This doesn't really stop them from getting up at 5am to play, but while there are good controls on Vista and beyond, our desktop runs XP, where the parental controls are a little more crude.

But then I got tired of changing the password back and forth on the main account, and decided they didn't really need access to the account that has admin privileges (not that they know what to do with that, yet), so we finally created a second account on the box.  The problem: Steam won't run unless you have write privileges to the directory.  I read several unhelpful forum threads that indicated either no workaround or a complicated one, before stumbling across a link to Moving a Steam Installation and Games.  Perfect!  It can go somewhere under the "All users" directory or, better yet, to the external hard drive (which is 1TB, vs. 145GB on the main computer) -- and 30GB suddenly freed up.  w00t.  Now we'll just have to see if the gaming experience running across the USB connection is acceptable.

Avengers; 2012

We actually saw this a while ago, but I had nothing negative to say about it.  ;-)

Ahem, at any rate, I've now read that Pepper Potts was originally not supposed to appear in the movie.  (See last paragraph here; it references this article.)  This is shocking, actually.  It's hard to imagine the movie without Paltrow, because Pepper has to be there to make the scene where Tony is recruited to the Avengers work.  She smooths Phil Coulson's entrance and exit, and makes the transfer of briefing information plausibly hilarious ("that's all right, because I love being handed things") instead of awkward and confrontational.  And, of course, Paltrow and Downey, Jr. are amazing together onscreen and these few minutes they have together are brilliantly written.  It's my favorite scene in the movie; we went back and watched it again before sending the disc back to netflix.

Major kudos to Downey, Jr. for insisting on including her, and to Whedon for recognizing that it was the right thing to do, and being flexible enough to reverse his previously held position.

Kids' magazines

Let's browse through some magazines!

The December 2012 copy of National Geographic: KIDS has 42 interior pages, plus front and back covers (inside and out), for a total of 46 pages.  Of these:

• 16 pages are devoted to advertising (including 2 pages of ads disguised as an article)
• 20 pages are devoted to "factoid"-style articles, games, and reader-contributed material
• 6 pages are devoted to written articles
• 1 page is an interview with a "pop star"
• 3 pages are devoted to administrivia (the cover, the table of contents, etc)

... and the color schemes of the "content" pages and the "ad" pages are extremely similar, to make it as difficult as possible for a kid to tell the difference between ads and content.

Shame on you, National Geographic: KIDS!

The December 2012 copy of KIDS: Discover has 20 pages (they number 1 from the cover page).  Of these:

• 0 pages are devoted to advertising
• 2 pages are devoted to "factoid"-style articles, games, etc
• 2 pages are devoted to administrivia (the cover and back cover)
• 16 pages are devoted to what amounts to a magazine-long series of 2-page spreads that each cover some aspect of Antarctica.

I love you, KIDS: Discover!

Immortal Beloved; 1994

I can forgive ludicrously bad biographical inaccuracies (there is absolutely no way that the candidate the film puts forth as the "Immortal Beloved" is the true one, not to mention how they mess with the chronology of his later life's events), but only if the fictionalized history the film portrays is compelling**, or that the movie at least has some interesting visuals, preferably juxtaposed with some of Beethoven's music... but there's none of that.

** there simply isn't enough to keep us going until we get to the "reveal" at the end.

Prometheus [2012], you're no Alien prequel

There hasn't been a worthy sequel to Aliens in 26 years, so I guess it was time to try a prequel.  Even better, the start of the film features the Isle of Skye, home to Duncan House (our wedding bands are Flora's knot rings).

So, the movie looks gorgeous, and if we could have the original Alien with this kind of production quality (well, actually, I don't really know if would be that much better, because the 1979 visuals are sufficient to tell the story, and it's the story and character that are key, and sadly lacking in Prometheus)...  At any rate, I have difficulty taking a film seriously that features Charlize Theron being crushed by a rolling toroidal spacecraft.  That was the point at which I gave up, despite Noomi Rapace's heroic efforts to conjure Sigourney Weaver.

Ultimately, Prometheus will be remembered for the public mixed signals over whether or not it's an Alien prequel and another mesmerizing performance by Michael Fassbender.

It will be dark soon

As if it weren't bad enough that the days were getting shorter, daylight savings ends and instead of getting dusky-dark at 6pm, it's suddenly dusky-dark at 5pm and feels like it's time to go to bed when eating dinner. 

You said it, Torgo.  What we really need is some snow cover, so that what little light there is gets reflected.  And, maybe I could put off finishing the raking until spring.

Making trihexaflexagons

Having watched the Vi Hart hexaflexagon videos, Karyn Vogel and I have been talking about including them as a station at C.P. Smith's upcoming Math Night.  The limitation of Vi Hart's videos (for me, at least) is that they are inspirational, rather than instructive, so I needed to do some more research to figure out how we could make our own flexagons.  The problem is that while there are a lot of sites out there, most of the instructions are a little lacking.  As Karyn notes in her blog, one of the best sites for pre-made patterns is the Flexagons page of Aunt Annie's crafts, but even with the pre-made pattern, the instructions are a little lacking.

So, I'm going to give it a try:

• The following is an adaptation of Annie's basic black & white pattern. You can get a printable copy here. This removes the need to double and paste (Step 4).  

• As with Annie's site, you fold back and forth on all the solid lines.

•  It's the next step where Annie lost me.  So what you do is make a valley fold (i.e., fold towards you) along the marked line.

• Next, make a mountain fold (i.e., away from you) along the marked line.

• As part of the mountain fold, the piece that has just been mountain folded should end up on top of the piece that was valley folded. 

• It should now look like this.

• Flip the paper over (left to right or right to left).  If you plan to use paste, then put paste on the triangles that have the asterisks and fold them together.  If you plan to use tape, then cut along the marked line and tape the remaining triangle with the asterisk to the edge you just cut.

• It's now ready to flex.

Re-reading Karyn's post, I realize it's not entirely obvious exactly how to flex the flexagon.  Maybe that's another post.

Wintering the garden

I swear, I love my road bike, but this is really the last day I'm riding it this year, if only because I'm tired of taking it down off the hooks in the garage, just days after putting it up, thinking that *that* was the last nice day of the year I could do a quick errand by bike (today it was cold enough for my throat to and lungs to feel raw).

But now that the vegetables are done and ready to be pulled (with the exception of some brussels sprouts that I have hope for, and some sorrel that won't give up), I wanted winter rye and pulled out the bike to go to Gardener's Supply.  Sadly, they were all out of winter rye, but still had something that sounded like "hairy kvetch".  I'm... not familiar with that.  Turns out it's hairy vetch, which is an equally odd name, but supposedly just as good a winter ground cover as winter rye (and often used in combination).

I was going to post a picture, but there's not much to see right now except dirt.

Gettin' steamy with Henry Purcell

Oh, Henry!  Purcell's lifetime ovelaps with J.S. Bach, but his career antedates Bachs.  Bach seems so perfectly square to me that it's hard to remember that a classical composer of that era could author something so different and, yes, saucy.

 

The one taste they agree on is "Yuck"??

I have a stack of GAMES magazines from the 80's, and what's most striking is the sheer volume of deathstick and hard alcohol ads.  A lot of them are deadly dull, but this one, from the back cover of the October 1985 issue, has high quality 27-years-in-retrospect horror / amusement value, from the awful puns, to the awful clothes the guy is wearing, to the inclusion of the fur coat (because if you don't give a damn about your own body, you sure as hell won't care about some stinky weasels), to the size of the guy's hardware.

I think I'd like to see an update (not for cigarettes) with one person "into software" and another person "into hardwear".

The Princess Frog; 2009

Ukulele-playing layabout prince falls in love (for unclear reasons) with poor-but-hardworking Tiana; she, in turn, falls in love with the prince... apparently solely because he's in love with her..?!?!!  Seriously, Tiana shows no initial physical attraction to the prince, and during the time they spend together, he shows no redeeming qualities.  We thought the hero's character flaws in Tangled made him unlikeable, but Flynn Rider is sadly an improvement over ukulele prince.

In the end, this felt like a less-funny Emperor's New Groove with a poorly developed romance tacked on.  Meh.

Why couldn't ukulele prince have a motivation to mirror Tiana's?  Make him a lover of music whose desire to play jazz/blues trumpet** was quashed by his parents (he won't have time to be a musician once he's king), so he runs away to New Orleans with a new identity and a sack full of his parent's money.  He's a very good technical player, but never seems to manage to stick with a band because his playing lacks the feeling needed to be a great jazz/blues player.  He hasn't truly lived, loved, or suffered.  He and Tiana know one another, and there's a spark of attraction, but it has never gone anywhere because they have their own separate goals.  Maybe someday they could get together once they've reached their goals, but for now...  So he goes on playing, living reasonably comfortably until his seed money runs out, and *now* he has a hard choice: go home to his parents, starve in New Orleans, or declare his identity and marry money.  Once he declares his identity***, the debutantes come out in force, the royal parents descend on New Orleans, and the fun begins.  I think you could even remove the magical element from the story and have the "frog prince" be a metaphorical transformation****.


** Get rid of the alligator; or, if you keep the fantastical elements, keep the alligator and add a number of other swamp animals who all want to play jazz, and the prince forms his band with them?  One way or another, the freakin' ukulele goes.

*** Or, the better to build his character, he could choose to starve, and we twist Roman Holiday a little, and Tiana discovers his real identity and has to choose whether to "out" him a) because she doesn't want to see him starve, and b) in the hopes of securing a reward that would enable her to buy the space to open her restaurant.

**** That might not fly in a Disney movie, but I'd love for them to try, rather than leaning on magic all the time.  Missed opportunities.

Wind power in VT

GMD had an interesting post and good following discussion On Wind Power and "Destroying Vermont".  What's simple is that the large-scale wind farms appear less destructive than mountaintop removal.  What's missing from the discussion, and not clear at all to me, are the relative amounts of energy obtained by each method per area "destroyed", plus the costs of obtaining that energy.  I also suspect, but have no proof, that distributed wind and solar systems are cheaper and more efficient, but don't bring profit to "big energy" like large-scale installments, and so there's little will to pursue distributed systems.

The future of statistical journals

Larry Wasserman's Rant on Refereeing comes hard on the heels of Karl Rohe's excellent Tale of Two Researchers in the latest Amstat News.  

What's interesting to me is that the journals stopped being useful for keeping up-to-date on cutting edge research long ago; 15+ years ago, technical reports were readily available for download (in postscript format!) from departmental websites, and e-mail chains kept people within a field apprised of new work that was ready to be published.  By the time an article was actually published in a journal, everyone who "mattered" had already read it and weighed in on it, even if they weren't referees.  Things like arXiv are simply the natural evolution of this process.

So why hasn't the vestigial journal apparatus finally fallen away?  Presumably because it takes more than a couple of decades to change something that has been around for a few hundred years.  (duh)  Again, I think even 15 years ago, your fellows should have already known whether you're doing good work, regardless of where you've published**.  So is the real problem the administration, which only has where and how often you've published to go by when determining whether to give you tenure?  Even then, things like CiteSeer make it easy to count citations, even for unpublished work.

So... it's the researchers themselves who will finally have to kill the journals by refusing to submit papers to anything but arXiv (or equivalent)?

** then again, I've been out of academia for 14 years, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this and the field of statistics hasn't progressed in that time

"Human Nature" was written by Toto?! (things I was not meant to know)

I used to agree with Jeph Jacques that "Africa" was the best Toto song, but then, for reasons I no longer remember, I looked at the Wikipedia page for "Human Nature" and discovered that the best song on the Thriller album** was co-written by Steve Porcaro of Toto.

Sure, sure, the song desperately needed John Bettis' lyrics and Jackson's superior voice talents, but this is one of those things I can never unlearn.


** I will accept "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" as an alternative; these are the only songs on the album that I still really enjoy 30 years later.

Frigidaire introduces the latest innovation in cooking

It's a husband who gets dinner ready.  He doesn't even need potholders to handle the serving dishes right out of the oven!

Poster child for the problems with WAR

These are Adam Dunn's 2004-2010 seasons.  While I think that the 2004 season is his best and 2006 was his worst in this time period**, he was generally a model of consistency.  Unfortunately, while WAR and the human eye agree about his 2004 season, I can't wrap my head around the idea that 2009 was his worst NL season and 2010 was his third best.

GP	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	SO	SB	CS	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	WAR
161	568	151	34	0	46	108	195	6	1	0.266	0.388	0.569	0.957	4.4
160	543	134	35	2	40	114	168	4	2	0.247	0.387	0.54	0.927	2.6
160	561	131	24	0	40	112	194	7	0	0.234	0.365	0.49	0.855	0.1
152	522	138	27	2	40	101	165	9	2	0.264	0.386	0.554	0.94	1.2
158	517	122	23	0	40	122	164	2	1	0.236	0.386	0.513	0.899	0.6
159	546	146	29	0	38	116	177	0	1	0.267	0.398	0.529	0.927	-0.6
158	558	145	36	2	38	77	199	0	1	0.26	0.356	0.536	0.892	2.2

Looking at Dunn's Player Value -- Batters table on baseball-reference.com, the problem is the vagaries of DWAR.  The OWAR rankings of his seasons fairly closely follow OPS (I'm assuming any slight differences are due to the fact that what constitutes a "good" OPS changed slightly from season to season), and thus the wild variation in DWAR, which is due more to the small-sample nature of defensive statistics than any actual change in performance, dominates the year-to-year differences in WAR.

OWAR	DWAR
4.8	-1.2
4	-2.3
1.9	-2.4
3.7	-3.2
3	-3.2
3.7	-5.2
3.4	-2.1

While WAR isn't simply OWAR + DWAR, DWAR clearly plays an important role in devaluing WAR as an estimate of player worth in a given year, and I'd rather look at OWAR.  But if OWAR closely follows OPS over the course of a generation of players, then I'd rather simply look at OPS, which is more intuitive and immediately evident from the seasonal stats.

** I want to be absolutely, positively clear that we're talking about 2004-2010, and not looking at his 2011 season, which was arguably the worst all-time.

Fight, Fight, Fight, Parry, Parry, Parry

Because the kids are less than thrilled with the graphics in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord -- even I'm a little taken aback because the graphics are different from those on the Apple IIe -- they're not interested, and I'm free to do whatever I want with those characters, though I do plan on showing them the battle against Werdna. 

It's also even more brutal than I remember, possibly because we used the identify cheats back in the day.  The "evil" group died on the stairwell between the 4th and 5th levels, and then the "good" group, while getting strong enough to go after the evil group, died on the third level**, so a third group needed to level up to the point where they could recover the good group.  Finally, Gandalf (our original "good" mage) has learned Malor and we can start retrieving the evil group (because Gandalf will always try to save Saruman).

So let me back up a moment.  In some ways, Proving Grounds makes modern CRPGs look like they were designed for sissies, because nowadays you can always revert to a previous save.  OTOH, in modern CRPGs, you also only get one party/storyline, and if you make bad choices in character development early on, you can hose yourself down the road (Wizardry 8 and Dragon Age: Origins are especially guilty here), and starting over means a couple dozen hours of mind-numbing repetition of the quests you just completed with the first character.  By contrast, in Proving Grounds, you build up a stable of characters and can easily mix and match your party as you determine the "optimal" group, and leveling up a new batch of characters to where they're useful is only a few hours of mind-numbing dungeon crawling.

** the Samurai with 18 Luck keeps getting decapitated; after one battle in which he was beheaded, we ran for the stairs to the second level and were surprised by Rotting Corpses and Grave Mists.  Two characters paralyzed in round 1; the other three in round two; TPK.  Good times.

Inspired by the work of Kaja and Phil Foglio

The stairs are painted with chalkboard paint, and then decorated with the kind of text that Lucrezia Mongfish has on the steps leading out of her lab.   

A Separation; 2011

Man living in a society that oppresses women accuses his wife of cowardice, then foists his own difficult ethical decisions off on his 11 year-old daughter.

Lockout; 2012

Guy Pearce is cracking jokes and taking punches during an interrogation over his role in the death of a fellow (former?) agent (CIA? do we care?).  There's some briefcase that has some... what, evidence, or something?  Of... a mole in the CIA?... or... something?  It's all very unclear.  Guy has about as much a clue of what's going on as he did in Memento.  But he got the briefcase to his friend Mace, and he's trusting this information to the guy playing "good cop" in the interrogation.  Hunh?  Why does he trust this guy and not "bad cop"?  (we never find out, btw)  At any rate, there's some espionage going on in this film.

Meanwhile, the president's daughter is checking up on a private company that runs a prison on a space station, keeping the prisoners in stasis for the duration of their term, because she's heard reports about problems with patients kept in stasis too long.  I guess boosting a prisoner into space is less expensive than feeding them in the future?  Whatever, that can all be explained later, for now, this is awesome, and you could write a whole SF book or make the whole movie just about the ramifications of a prison in space.  I'm totally on board with this.  Or, at least, right up until the cliché "crazy inmate" being interviewed by the president's daughter manages to get hold of a gun, shoot a bunch of people, release all the prisoners (because, of course, a vital command center on the station would be readily accessible from the interrogation rooms), and (of course) threaten to rape the president's daughter.  Sigh.  Another, more sane, inmate takes over leadership of the jailbreak.

Back to Guy.  "Good cop" wants Guy to go rescue the president's daughter from the space station prison, because, incredibly conveniently, Guy's friend Mace accidentally shot a cop (fortunately after he put the briefcase in a locker) and was already arrested, processed, sentenced, and sent to the space station prison in stasis.  "Bad cop" is in charge of the situation, but brings along Guy just in case.

While assessing the situation, we discover that the space station prison has an automated defense system that shoots at other spacecraft.  Because, I guess, in 2079, everyone could easily get into space and break their friends out of jail.  At any rate, for a minute this movie suddenly became a Star Wars-style space battle.

On Guy's observation that the inmates don't realize they have the president's daughter captive, "Bad cop" nearly sneaks her out under the guise of "free a hostage as a gesture; any hostage will do, but injured women are best".  This is actually a really good scene, until cliché crazy inmate, who hasn't gotten a chance to rape the president's daughter, insists that they send home the president's daughter's aide, and (fatally) wounds her in an effort to provide an alternate injured female.  The inmates figure out that they're being hoodwinked (an inmate notices Guy wandering around outside in a space suit), and keep the president's daughter captive.  Then comes the turning point of the movie.  

Inmate Leader: [to crazy inmate]  Do something useful.  Go find that man and kill him.  I don't want to see you 'til it's done. 

Other Inmate: [after crazy inmate leaves, and speaking what we've been thinking since the start of the jailbreak]  Why don't we just kill that lunatic?

Inmate Leader:  Because he's my brother.

SERIOUSLY?!  You're going to pull something as tired as "he's my brother" on us?  Well, from here on out, tired clichés are the norm.  Guy manages to get onto the station through some outer hatch thingy and reach the president's daughter just ahead of the bad guys.  As they try to escape, every one of their scenes is a stereotypical "naive spoiled girl in over her head vs. world weary adventurer" conversation.  When they were in separate movies, I liked them, but when put in the same room, I hated them both.  While wandering through the ship, they discover a room in which inmates have been dissected and immediately conclude the company was doing medical experiments on them... because, the company couldn't possibly have simply done autopsies on inmates who died while in stasis.  They find Mace, who (of course) has fallen afoul of bad stasis, and can't tell Guy where the briefcase is.  "Bad cop" finally gets permission to blow up the space prison, but not before Guy and the president's daughter get into space suits, re-enter the atmosphere, and parachute into NYC!!!!!

Guy goes back into custody, but the president's daughter, based on comments Mace made, figures out where the briefcase is, and we discover who the mole is, but we really don't care, because the whole espionage plot felt tacked on to the real plot of the prison in space.  The president's daughter love-punches Guy in the face, and we don't even feel good about this because we hate both of them so much.

There is a great SF movie in here somewhere, but Lockout wasn't it.

Crackers

We had a minor issue to deal with recently, when the kids figured out that since they know how to turn on the home computer and start up their favorite games, they could get up earlier and earlier in the morning and play until mommy and daddy woke up.  They'd be cranky in the afternoon sometimes, which is more-or-less fine during the summer, but would be a problem once school started, so I put a very simple password on the computer.  

The other day we came downstairs to get the kids breakfast and make lunchboxes, and found a piece of paper next to the computer with cowsnocats, cowsascats, as dog no caps written on it.  This was bewildering, until I remembered that the password hint was "a's dog no caps".  I'm sorely tempted now to put a numeric password with a math problem as the hint, at least on the weekends.

We cater to your fears

I believe this ad is truthful in that they are, in fact, catering to Americans' fears... but I can't help but think that the message their advertising is really going for is more of assuaging your fears, or being sensitive to your fears.

John Carter (2012)

Oh, dear.  We watched this a couple of weeks ago, but I've had difficulty writing up thoughts about it.  

In the end, John Carter reminded me of The Black Hole.  A beautiful, visually and technically compelling at times, but ultimately empty, live-action Disney offering**... only John Carter would likely have been too visually and aurally intense for me at the same age I saw The Black Hole.  I don't think that's a good trend in the live-action Disney offerings.

** You could throw the first Tron into this bucket, but for Jeff Bridges' brilliance (that brief clip doesn't do justice to how he injects life into every scene, and is carrying Boxleitner and Morgan, who fall flat when they're by themselves.  I love that scene at Flynn's).  David Warner is also great, but so was Maximilian Schell.  Schell couldn't save The Black Hole; Warner wouldn't have been able to save Tron by himself.

dWAR

I like numbers, and not surprisingly, I like baseball.  More specifically, I like looking at the numbers that the game of baseball produces, and the statistics that researchers have come up with to compare player performance.

But I have difficultly loving defensive wins above replacement, particularly because dWAR is susceptible to wild swings from season to season, but especially if believing in dWAR means I have to believe that Dave Winfield was as bad a fielder as, or worse than, Manny Ramirez.  (scroll to the "Player Value" table and see that Winfield's career dWAR is lower than Manny's).  I'm just having a hard time with that idea.

638 Ways to Kill Castro; 2006

With a runtime of 75 minutes, that gives about 7 seconds on average to discuss each conspiracy, so even if they bundled several together under the same category, you would think that this would be a fast-paced and interesting documentary, perhaps full of slightly morbid British humor.  Not so.  Instead it's a tired and poorly organized mix of interviews, news footage, and reenactment scenes shot in black & white.

The Dragon Waiting; John M. Ford; 1983

Fresh off netflixing season 1 of Game of Thrones, it's more War of the Roses with fantasy trappings!  

I bought The Dragon Waiting as a book-by-the bag from the public library's annual sale.  It's not bad, and does a very good job, I think, in imagining a Europe in which the Byzantine Empire is still a power through the 15th century.  Ford makes no attempt to orient you within his changed history.  I generally admire this; it can be great when you have to learn about the world as you go, but in this case was frustrated by a seeming lack of information by which I could orient myself.  Perhaps I would have enjoyed the novel more if I knew more of the history of England in this period, but a critical piece of information to understanding the history of the world -- the fact that, in this world, the Byzantine Empire survived and thrived because Julian the Apostate managed to quash Christianity and Islam -- was not at all evident to me until the epilogue.

I also have an issue with the structure of the novel.  He begins with three chapters that give us the backstory for three of his main characters; the fourth chapter, in which they and the fourth main character meet, begins on page 109.  The novel should begin on page 109, and the salient bits of the main characters' backstories revealed over time.  At the very least, Hywel's chapter could be axed.  

This won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, which, frankly, has a really weird history (Silence of the Lambs was a fantasy?  Who knew?), and Gene Wolfe praised it on the back cover, stating, "It may not become a classic; but it will become something better -- one of those books that are always loved by people who love books."  I don't think I agree, but I also certainly don't regret having read it.