A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I've more or less stopped following the news. A couple of weeks ago I unsubscribed from NPR's daily five-minute news-summary podcast, after four years of listening, and that basically severed me from the world of regular general-interest updates. Through the internet, and through internet-enabled friends, I find that most things I care about will filter their way to me through other channels quickly enough, while things I don't care about stop competing for my attention.

The danger here lay in shutting myself away from serendipitous discovery. You benefit from information that, while of no obvious value at first, nonetheless takes up residence in your brain, mingles with with other whims and fancies for a while, and eventually dope-slaps you with a freshly synthesized new Idea one day, while you're walking down the street. I live for this phenomenon, and I don't want to endanger its frequency in my own head by narrowing the flow of my information intake.

But I'm willing to wager that the time and attention I'll save avoiding non-genre news outweighs the risk that I'll miss any gems buried in the garbage heaps of trite infojunk. So long as I'm careful to stay plugged in, and keep my list of active info-channels well groomed, I think I'll be OK.

Excerpt from this past week's Gene Weingarten chat:

Alexandria, Va.: "We are heading for a period of indeterminate length where there will be insufficient eyes on our government, on business, and on the powers that be in, in general. Where official pronouncements will be accepted and printed as news. Where the heart-and-soul changing stories of human interest are going to remain unnoticed. I think it's bad, and I think it's going to take a while before we realize what we're missing."

Gene, you are so dead wrong about the effect of use of the Internet -- in fact, citizens are now armed with much more information about government, business and society than ever before. The only difference is that the WaPo, NYT and other major media are no longer the gatekeepers of information and have no monopoly on the questioning of authority. You should buy a copy of "An Army of Davids" and get ready for the new world.

Gene Weingarten: The army of Davids do not have people paid well to cultivate sources over years, people like Dana Priest, who will expose malfeasances via years of training as investigative journalists. With an army of Davids as protectors of the realm, I guarantee you Richard Nixon would have served two terms. Possibly succeeded by President Spiro Agnew.

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Gene Weingarten: I don't mean to overstate this, cause it sounds defensive, but: People who think we will be protected by bloggers really have no idea what they are talking about. David Simon made this point eloquently yesterday on WAMU.

He noted that when he recently broke a story about police malfeasance in Baltimore, he wasn't having to push past all the bloggers working the story.

This particular exchange has stuck in my head for several days. I find it very hard to dismiss, and rather chilling.

I saw this movie with dictator555 and classicaljunkie. I liked it, and indeed enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It gets a general recommend from me.

Now I will complain! ( Wheee! )

My least favorite scene was some knifework at the end that could have been kung-fu clever, but was instead made merely gratuitous by being shot on high-speed film and decorated by colorful animated blood-sprays at every slashed neck and wrist, of which there are many. For me, it managed to evoke both the zero-g assassination scene from Star Trek VI as well as Monty Python's Flying Circus ("And the blood comes out, psssssss! Slow motion!")

And as with The Matrix, I actually rather despise these nastily dance-party scenes of police getting killed in whoah-cool ways. It's not like they're orcs or even villainous men... they're just some poor sods taking their pay from the wrong side. If you've got to kill them to further your intriguing Machiavellian plot, Mr. anti-hero, fine, but don't get all snuff-fetishy about it plz.

"Day off" today, though I ended up spending some time putting out fires in the game finder... which, mind you, I set myself.

I saw "Syriana" and liked it a lot. Not surprised that it's been out for well over a month, maybe two, and is still commanding a full house at the Harvard Square Loew's. Buncha commies. I would recommend this movie to anyone. I want to go back and see "Traffic" now, from the same creators.

Some disconnected thoughts about it:

* Some parts are quite brutal and hard to watch, but was made more uncomfortable by a stranger sitting next to me who was literally whimpering during those scenes, and later started whimpering more as the story's overall tension came to a head and you knew that very large awful things were going to happen. I do not say "whimpering" lightly here. As the whimpering occurred, I thought: oh my gosh, this is real full-scale whimpering. I squirmed to see another adult in such distress, or anyway to hear it, since I never actually looked at her. So this weird discomfort chain going on between me, her, and the movie-people.

* I find it interesting that there are at least three more-or-less mainstream movies in theatres now that feature terrorism not in the more comfortable Tom Clancy/Die Hard way, but as an attempt to take a deeper look at real-life terrorism. There's this movie, "Munich", and the smaller one about Palestinian suicide bombers whose title I cannot recall. "Syriana" isn't primarily about terrorism but one of its sub-threads does look at it dead-on. I think that the path that character took seemed rather rushed, but they may have been trying to tell his story in shorthand... I know enough about the culture portrayed to understand what was being represented there.

I reflected how differently the portrayal of these characters in the film is from their popular portrayal in American conventional wisdom, that these are one and all freedom-haters whose primary drive is lust for their 72 virgins. The rejection of this caricature is probably a central reason why (my own mental caricature of) neo-conservatives probably hate this movie.

* I am not great at recognizing actors, and didn't catch any of the big names in this one, not knowing who they were going in. I must have subconsciously recognized Matt Damon, but totally missed George Clooney, despite his being probably the most interesting character in the picture.

* The people in the movie (both in speech and in subtitles) referred to the primary language of Iran as "Farsi". Never once did a busybody pop up to say Arrggh NOOO in English the language is called "Persian" you ignorant fools, proving that the movie was not the Internet.

Five more colossi slain. That's 13 down: three-quarters done, figuring in whatever nasty surprise is waiting for the last of the 16 idols to crumble. (No spoilers plz.)

"Camera Eit" is my new favorite video game term. Shmike introduced it Thursday when I was showing the game to some friends and he read aloud his own paraphrasing of on-screen camera-control instructions. "Use right analog stick to counteract Camera Eit. It will not work. But try anyway."

So tonight I shout EIT at my TV a lot. I actually enjoy shouting it more than other things I have been shouting. I am not sure if this is a horrible word in a language I do not know. Please tell me if it is.

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I need to revisit the long version of our business plan, after months of avoiding it; people have started to ask about it. Will finally look at aspartaimee's copyedits, which will sadly end the weeks-long passive-aggressive standoff with her about it. I'll have to think of something else to replace it.

I coulda worked on the plan today but I didn't feel like writing. Attacked the bug board instead; daerr threw a bunch up for me last week, and tonight I picked some off and deflected some others. He will be pleasantly surprised when he next checks his mail. Also finished a major task. Felt righteous. But now, I must write tomorrow, or I will be a stooge on Monday.

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Mood still thrashy. I wish I felt more comfortable writing about everything that bothered me, during those times when I am bothered. Maybe I would if I wrote them out just for myself first. I still suspect that much of it would overstep the present-if-undefined subject boundaries that lay about this journal.

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I did not participate at all in NaDruWriNi sadly. Actually I have drunked a lot (but not that much) almost every night this week except for tonight. For some reason.

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Saw Good Night and Good Luck last night. It was a tasty dish, but surprisingly not very filling. Very concise. Didn't have as much to say as I thought it would. I recommend it, but not in the quick-while-its-still-in-theatres sense.

I acknowledge but did not agree with one particular production decision: they appeared to use really-real CBS archival material whenever characters were screening or broadcasting footage. In one sense this was pretty cool, but unfortunately it begged the question why footage that was brand-new to the characters in the movie looked and sounded like it had suffered 50 years of decay. I was reminded of cheapo History Channel productions where guys in togas are trying to look period by wandering around Athenian ruins. X (Or rather wandering around in someone's backyard before the show transitions to stock footage of Athenian ruins... whatev.)

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My gmail spamtrap has caught 4,266 spams in the last 30 days.

Enh. I liked the premise but it needed a lighter touch. It felt disjointed and full of forced moments, many of which led to unintentional hilarity. (Particularly our exploration of Cronenberg's cheerleader fetish. The overt caricature of a school bully was a close second.)

I didn't really like any of the characters; they were either underdeveloped (wife, son) or made bizarre decisions for no clear reason (main character, repeatedly). I liked the very ending, though the youngest daughter looks like Frodo. (Probably moreso because of Viggo. He actually doesn't look much like Aragorn when he's all cleaned up, but when he talks in a low growl as any character he may as well be saying "He's been stabbed by a Morgul blade." Quite a handsome man though.)

The ultra-violent fights, and the tension leading up to them, were entertaining. There was probably exactly enough, for the kind of movie this was trying to be. The rest, though, had just too many chair-squirming moments for me.

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I want to note that Serenity made the number-two box office take last weekend (bested only by Flightplan), and has a sweet 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is far better than what some local learnéd SF folks had pessimistically predicted for the film. I would take another followup movie or two, though naturally I'd like a followup TV series. (It's happened before. Family Guy didn't even need its own movie...)

What I'd really like is a quality episodic show that doesn't need to kowtow to TV executives or broadcast patterns and yet still have a TV show's budget and schedule. Wouldn't it be sweet to have direct-to-video releases that were actually good? Maybe one two-episode disc going on sale every month? Holy crap.

Meh: romantic comedy; meh: "normal" people; meh: women incapable of conversation topics among themselves besides men. (I am being strict counting a (male) boss and a father as "men" here, but that was only one brief conversation apiece. Everything else was husbands & boyfriends, real & potential, which is all that movie-women usually ever have to talk to each other about.)

Kind of unfair because duh I knew it would be a romantic comedy and the latter two meh are formulaic elements thereof. I wanted to see it anyway because E&R loved it (though I find myself listening only to E these days, because R lately strikes me a total ass). I liked it for the same reasons they did, depicting how a truefan's obsession can get in the way of romance, especially when said fan can no longer walk away from it than he could his religion. Which is to say: he could, and many movies would take the easy love-conquers-all route, but this one doesn't play it like that, and it works. I guess. Speaking as one who hates romantic comedies. Which this was.

And I liked all the Boston stuff of course (loved the establishing shot of the old Hancock reflected in the new one; I mean, I see exactly that every time I ride the Red Line but it's neat to see it in a movie as a visual shorthand for "we are in Boston now"), and all the Red Sox stuff. There were some nice carefully researched bits, my favorite being the male lead's ballcap. He never talks about it but it's clearly his years-old lucky cap, just as you'd find atop real-life hard-core fans. It's filthy -- there are deep salt stains on it in mid-summer -- and according to jhango the "B" logo on it is old-style, without a white border. (His friends sitting beside him wear newer caps, as a clue to the viewer.)

Bonus meh for multiple "ball washer" jokes and uncomfortable-gay-moment jokes. Oh you Farrelly brothers, you couldn't help yourselves, could you. Minus half-a-meh for a great blooper reel, and the DVD's inclusion of the film's original ending, where the Sox lose. (We didn't watch it. Minutes later, the Sox won their game against Toronto iRL. Coincidence??)

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I am reminded that I really want to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which from all that I understand is an entirely un-formulaic romantic comedy. And therefore might not even be a romantic comedy even if it's funny and there's a romantic relationship as its driving force. I also have the intriguing comment from temvald that the main character in that one (Jim Carrey in one of his "no really it's not a Jim Carrey movie" roles (yeah, speaking of the Farrellys) (I think also I'm conflating him with Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love here but who's counting)) is reminiscent of me. Were I in that situation, anyway.

A Game of Thrones shoved me down, sat on my chest, and proceeded to slap me in the face repeatedly with a wet slab of totally awesome. I'm so happy there are three books ahead of me, the third of which is brand new. Looking forward to joining the ranks of groaning waiters for the next three.
( Some observations. )

My first thought (seeing this movie advertised in the paper) is "It's a parody of life on AOL, expressed through breakdancing, somehow." Then getting a closer look at the poster in color, I think, "Hey, it has the Standard Mode guy from DDR Max 2 in it."