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.