TreeInForest

Inception

2010-07-16T23:57:00.006-05:00

I knowingly make the following overstatement with the excuse that I just finished watching it: Inception just might be the perfect movie. It is certainly the only movie worth reviewing that I have seen since the last movie I reviewed almost exactly a year ago, and has almost as certainly earned instant placement on my Awesome list (at least 3 viewings are required for official recognition on that list, however).

What is so great about this movie:

The story is told with elegance, economy and utmost skill. I will not describe the story here. Don't try to read anything about it. I will give a couple examples that will not give anything away. First example: the natural and completely satisfying resolution of one of the core plots of the movie is nothing more than the expression on a character's face -- even a single word would have been too much. Second example: the scene with the top. Again, without a single word, the spinning of a top allows the audience to understand exactly what the top is for, but more impressively, what the top is for combines with what was learned in the scene before to illuminate just what fear the character has to contend with on a daily basis and the kind of life he leads, and does so more effectively than any on-screen conversation ever could.
It hits all the right notes. Literally. The music does a flawless job of maintaining the subtlety, urgency and unreality of the movie from beginning to end.
Everything in the hotel with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best executed and most imaginative action since The Bourne Ultimatum. My surprise at how believable Gordon-Levitt was was the only thing that took me out of the movie for even a few seconds.

This will be a movie I see more than twice. It should also be an Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay, Best Score, Best Visual Effects, and possibly Best Cinematography and several things in the various editing categories.

Lost...In Review

2010-01-24T14:27:00.003-06:00

The final season of Lost starts up in about a week. After over 100 episodes of flashbacks, flash-forwards, inter-cut and intersecting story lines, not to mention time travel, what is perhaps most impressive about the show as a whole is that it still makes sense, and all the pieces fit together. Lost still stands alone in the scale, ambition and complexity of its story, and in sheer magnitude of difficulty involved in successfully corralling all of the myriad parts that make up its much greater whole.

How successful? This video is a perfect example. It combines clips from nine different episodes across four seasons of the series edited together to tell the whole story of the 10 minutes preceding the crash of Flight 815. Kind of makes me wonder what a chronological edit of the entire series would be like, given that the whole show spans seven decades and several dozen characters.

We are workmen, not wordsmiths.

2009-11-15T13:36:00.004-06:00

2 Timothy 2:14-15
Keep reminding them of these things. Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

Too often we are wordsmiths rather than workmen. The Word is the tool God has given us for our work, not the fuel to feed our fiery debates or fancy rhetoric.

Making Car, Buying Easy

2009-08-10T21:22:00.008-05:00

I have recently been considering buying a new car, so this past weekend I did some internet research, including requesting some quotes from three dealerships in town. Today I received three emails from a gentleman at one of the dealerships in the space of four hours. They served as an entertaining reminder of the dangers of failing to proofread your form letters.

Here's an example (click to read):

I took two years of algebra in high school (and passed both times), and I still can't figure out the price he quoted me there, and I have to wonder if the sentence in the fifth paragraph is in bold to highlight the fact that it's the only sentence in that paragraph without a typo. I also find the second sentence in that paragraph to be exquisite, for the simple fact that it's so easy to understand what he means as long as you don't pay any attention whatsoever while you are reading it. Once I actually read the sentence, however, I am suddenly unsure. I think he might simply be trying to inform me of the possibility that someone I know is trying to sell a car, but only if I'm trying to sell one too:

"So if you have a trade or just need to sell your vehicle, maybe you know of someone trying to sell there [sic] vehicle."

I also greatly appreciated the other email he sent me with the subject line, "I Have Your Answers", but which consisted almost entirely of questions and ended with the line, "If I have not already contacted you, I will do so soon."

It is in that same spirit that I take my leave by informing you of the following: if I have not already posted this for you to read, I will do so soon.

Psych is Officially Genius, Part II

2009-07-26T22:13:00.003-05:00

Just saw this promo for Season 4 of Psych tonight:

I guess it's not as funny if you haven't seen The Mentalist. See, Psych is about a quirky guy who uses his keen powers of observation to pretend to be a psychic and help the police department solve crimes. The Mentalist, the original series that just finished its first season on CBS, is about a quirky guy who used to use his keen powers of observation to pretend to be a psychic, but now uses them to help the police department solve crimes.

See, they're totally different.

View at your own risk

2009-07-25T16:11:00.004-05:00

What's so scary about this picture? I'm about 99.9% certain that I only ever bought one of these.

Half-Blood Prince

2009-07-19T00:38:00.007-05:00

Had you asked me a couple of hours ago, I would have said that no, I would never post a review of a Harry Potter movie on my blog. Why not? — because I know the widely diverging points of view about the acceptability of these movies held by the three or four of you who still read my blog; in the face of those opinions, these movies simply aren't important enough to write about. However, this post does exist and I defend its existence by saying that this is not exactly a review; it, in fact, cannot be for the simple reason that there is so much about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that defies reviewing. This post is instead a reaction, not to the content of the stories, but to the choices made by the filmmakers in the creation of this entry in the series.

I have seen all of the first five Harry Potter movies (Half-Blood Prince being the sixth). Independent of any opinions about the content, I find them all to be entertaining and sufficiently well-made — they are all good, but none has anything spectacular that marks it as great. One thing that did always stand out to me about the five movies is that despite having four different directors, they all did a fairly solid job of maintaining a consistent tone and style. Even the darker entries in the series have the same earnest energy, and the same wide-eyed sense of adventure. The only way I can think to say it is that they are all crafted very much like a story being told in present-tense; I can only hope that later in this post I can make that statement sound less stupidly obvious.

In contrasting the sixth movie in the series with the first five, the only reaction I can have is that, for many reasons, it's just odd. I'm not even sure if that's good or bad, and I'll attempt to explain why. The first five movies form a 4.5 billion dollar franchise. It has always been in the studio's interest to make movies that have the best chance of cashing in on the interest of millions of readers of the books worldwide. That they have been successful is undeniable, and my instinct would have been to assume that for the three remaining movies in the series, they would try to stick to a pattern that works, i.e., maintain the same energy, maintain the same visual style, maintain the same musical style, etc. It seems like it would just be good business sense, just as much as it would be good artistic sense — a consistent style and feel makes for a unified series that flows well together (see the Bourne trilogy, for example).

Thus my perplexity with this sixth entry: it seems that in no way did they do any of these things. Where the first five movies emphasized humor and cheerfulness contrasted with the darkness of conflict, this movie, in spite of being the setup for the climax of the series, possesses a markedly subdued tone throughout. The tragic events which were in this movie addressed with powerful but quiet sadness would have been presented in the previous movies with far more violent emotion. As the book series progressed, the books only got longer, necessitating more and more plot cuts when presented in movie form; the first five movies always cut minor or less exciting portions of the plot in favor of the more action-oriented plot points. This sixth movie seems to do exactly the opposite, preserving the character-oriented and emotional story lines while sacrificing some of the most dramatic portions of the book's action (this is probably the reason why most negative reviews of the movie call it "boring"). In both visual and musical style this movie is also very much different from the rest of the series, straying away from the vivid colors, sharp focus, bright lighting and dramatic themes in favor of, again, a more subdued style. In comparison with my memory of the previous movies, the shift is abrupt; within five seconds of the Warner Brothers logo fading from the screen I was thinking, "This is very different." With a grittier look, more neutral colors and so much soft focus, I almost had to wonder if there was something wrong with the print or projector. The storytelling is also significantly different, in a way that is hard to describe: where the first five movies played out like a story being told in present tense, this story plays out like one of the characters' painfully sad recollections — it's possible that this impression is due in part to the visual style which at times had me wondering if the scene I was watching would turn out to be a dream sequence.

Is any of this bad? No. It's simply odd. It's especially so considering this movie came from the same writer who wrote four of the previous five movies, and from the same director who directed the fifth movie. I think if this were a stand-alone movie, I would like the creative choices that were made. Taken as a member of the series, I can only say that I haven't seen enough to decide, while I continue to puzzle over the possible reasons for the decisions that were made. What do I mean when I say that I haven't seen enough? I think that in any long-running franchise — especially one with multiple directors — there is at least one point in the franchise where a significant shift in style (and, as a result, subjectively perceived quality) occurs, and I think that often results in the viewer thinking of their favorite part of the series and wishing the rest of the series had been done to match (The Matrix trilogy and the Star Wars trilogies come to mind). I actually find it intriguing to wonder if this new style will remain consistent through the rest of the series, and if it does, which part of the series will we wish had been done differently? Another question I find interesting deals with the fact that David Yates, who directed the fifth Potter movie, also directed the sixth, and will also direct the final two movies in the series: I have to wonder if this significant shift in style came about (or was made possible?) when the decision was made to give this one director effective control over the rest of the series. I'll phrase it a little differently: the sixth book in the series is very much a setup for the climax in the seventh (on which both of the last two movies are based), and I have to wonder if this sixth movie is intended in much the same way for the last two movies. I have to wonder if, after completing the fifth movie in a style consistent with the previous, the director who would direct the entire remainder of the series was given the freedom to produce the last three movies in a way that presents them as a coherent stylistic whole. If it is, I am already fascinated to know how well this chosen style will work as the climax of the series. If it is not, I am curious to know exactly how much of a sore thumb this film will be in the franchise as a whole.

On a side note, I continue to be impressed by how many of Chris Columbus' (director of the first two movies) choices regarding design and casting continue to hold up through the subsequent movies. He cast a fleet of adult actors and a dozen or more unknown child actors (the oldest of whom was perhaps 13 at the time of filming the first movie) including an 11-year-old on whom the entire multi-billion dollar franchise would hang and eight years later I can't think of a single role that has had to be recast (with the exception of Dumbledore, due to Richard Harris' death), or a single actor who has failed to present a consistent character year after year. Even the plot developments of the later books in the series (unknown at the time of casting the first movie) continue to be believable with the original actors. So much of the work Columbus and his crew did continues to define the look of the series, from character and costume design all the way up to the look of Hogwarts itself. It's really a remarkably rare achievement, and those commonalities will serve to bind the series together as a whole, regardless of what stylistic changes may occur.

Fair Park Fourth

2009-07-05T00:49:00.006-05:00

I watched the Fair Park fireworks show from the top of the parking garage in my apartment complex tonight. I managed to take about 150 pictures in 20 minutes, but none came out really great; in fact, even the best were marginal. It's amazing how much vibration the speakers of an SUV can cause in a parking structure.

Since I didn't have any good shots to post, I instead decided to play around with layering some of the best shots. Below are the results. The first two are each composed of two layered images, and the third is composed of three layered images. I think I like the third picture the best.

Set Phasers to Awesome

2009-06-11T21:20:00.011-05:00

I know I have written here before about movies that I liked, and some about Story in general and my particular way of thinking about Story. One thing I have never felt able to define is any specific type of story that I prefer; I can't even decide on a "favorite" movie. The reason for this was pointed out to me recently when another friend commented to me — after I summarily dismissed a pair of recent movies as "just plain ordinary" — that because I have seen so many movies, I only like the ones that are in some significant way unique or "out of the ordinary." He's right.

I have seen a lot of movies; as soon as I had the means to do so, I devoured them. I could estimate a number, but I think it would be embarrassing. What I have discovered is this: good isn't good enough. In a large sampling of movies, there are a lot of good movies. Speaking of a simple binary state, good vs. bad, where I regret the time I wasted watching the movies that are "bad" and don't regret the time I spent watching the movies that are "good," there are a lot of "good" movies. So many in fact that a movie's potential to be "good" is no longer a compelling reason to ever watch it, and thus over the past couple of years I have found myself seeing fewer movies and liking fewer of them.

So my friend is right and as he realized, perhaps before I did, I do have a preferred genre after all: I believe the common term for it is "Awesome". I prefer "Awesome" movies. Its sibling genres, "Really Great", "Great" and to a lesser extent "Very Good" definitely have their place, but "Awesome" is really what does it for me. The good news is, I find that those four genres combined total perhaps 50 to 100 movies. The bad news is, I find that there are perhaps two or three people in the world who would agree with me on what those 100 movies are. The other good news is, these genres are completely made up and entirely subjective, so I am guaranteed to be right.

What is it then that identifies a movie as falling into one of these genres? As my friend said, the distinguishing characteristic is uniqueness. Whether it is a familiar story told in an unexpected way, or a type of story I usually disdain told in such a skillful and compelling way that I am powerless to resist, or a story that purposefully breaks a cinematic "rule" with spectacular results, or just a simple story that achieves such genuineness that all other similar movies fail by comparison, each of the movies in these genres has some particular aspect of its storytelling that is unlike anything I have seen before.

That being said, I can now make a stab at answering my other friend's question: what is my favorite movie? Since I now know that to date only seven "Awesome" movies have been made, I can tell you without a doubt that my favorite movie is one of these:

The Bourne Ultimatum
Empire of the Sun
The Iron Giant
Meet Joe Black
Pride & Prejudice
Primer
Strings

The candidates for "Really Great", "Great" and "Very Good" are harder to define, but I feel sure they include this list.

Two recent movies have exhibited this quality of uniqueness. In fact, if it were possible for a movie less than one month old to earn such a distinction, I might almost say they were "Awesome"; certainly they are "Great" and perhaps even "Really Great." These two movies are Star Trek and Up.

Star Trek — finally someone managed to make Star Trek into a movie and not just a two hour television episode. (I'm not exaggerating: I saw the two hour premiere of Enterprise in an actual movie theater, and the experience wasn't that much different from the movies.) Ironically, many of the people responsible came from television; particularly gratifying is the fact that the director, composer and several of the producers and editors also brought us Lost. Watching the end credits of Star Trek I couldn't help thinking that it's no wonder Lost is so great: the people making it are capable of producing work like Star Trek. I watched Star Trek on TV for years; I have seen all of the movies. Though some were entertaining, they all shared these qualities: they never surprised me, they never went anywhere new, and they never surpassed my expectations. This Star Trek is something new, something surprising, and just flat out fun to watch. I can't remember the last time I had that much fun in a movie theater. The action is exciting, it's visually stunning, the special effects are top notch, the actors have chemistry and talent, and — wonder of wonders — the humor is genuinely funny (and not just to people who show up to the theater in Starfleet uniform). My one aching regret is that it was not produced in RealD 3D, but then again I don't suppose the biggest movie of the year really has to be.

Pixar as well has risen to new heights with Up — and no, I do not apologize for the pun. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but Pixar succeeded in producing a story that moves from genuinely touching to laugh-out-loud funny with seamless ease, all centered around characters so natural that by the time you think the words "suspension of disbelief," it already happened five minutes ago. It was a joy to watch. I should also mention that Partly Cloudy, the short film that preceded the movie, continues to display Pixar's genius with dialoge-free storytelling and lives up to its long line of great predecessors (Geri's Game, For the Birds, One Man Band, Lifted, Presto). I did see the movie in 3D, which was nice. I don't think the 3D played quite as large a part in the whole experience as it did when I saw Monsters vs. Aliens, but it didn't really have to.

Of Semi-thoughts on Community, and Other Thoughts on Others' Semi-thoughts

2009-06-03T22:05:00.006-05:00

I know I haven't posted in a while. It's not because I have nothing to post, it's because I have nothing worthwhile to post — there's a subtle difference there. I have been mulling over some thoughts about community and its role in the church, but that's a very ambitious topic (possibly over-ambitious), especially for me, and when it comes to putting anything down on paper — so to speak — my mulling turns to circling. You can help me out though by commenting on this post. Let me know your thoughts on the following:

What is your definition of the word "community"?
How do you think that applies to the church?
How do you think that applies to you as a member of the (universal or local) church?

I don't have fully formulated answers for the second two questions, but here is the best answer I have been able to come up with for the first one:

community: a group of people who both interact individually and act corporately because of and/or in service to a unifying identity, purpose or goal

Discuss.

I'll leave you with these fun items I encountered this week. First up, is a real-life example of a new business principle I had never heard of before: "Don't drive away customers, guilt them away." Earlier this week I got dinner at a local Chinese food chain. At the end of my meal, I cracked open my fortune cookie and found this bit of ancient wisdom in all caps:

WORK ON IMPROVING YOUR EXERCISE ROUTINE

True story.

Also true is this item found in the help section of the MusiChristian.com web site (it still exists as of this posting):

So I place a phone order by...sending an email? I must be missing something. (I will point out, however, that in every way that matters the company and their service is completely satisfactory — I have been shopping there for years. Though I have never tried to place a phone order.)

The Torments of a Somewhat-Blind Man, Episode IV: The Escape

2009-05-01T23:19:00.005-05:00

I am now officially moved, though I won't say completely settled. Last Friday, I returned the keys for my old apartment, and tonight I unpacked the last of my boxes. Alright, so I didn't actually unpack them. I'm actually not quite sure what happened. I had three full boxes, then I opened two and took a bunch of stuff out of them, and somehow I ended up with three full boxes still. It's like Elijah and the jar of oil, except with boxes of random junk. I gave up trying to empty them and just piled them in the closet.

As confused as I am though, this month has been much more confusing for the cats. After two weeks of watching everything in sight disappear into a pile of boxes, the actual move was the final straw. At the end of moving day, the cats were among the last few things left in the old apartment, and I think Pete had had enough. I walked into the bedroom to find him hiding behind the only thing he could find: a stack of about ten CD's — he refused to budge. Mason was no better: when I opened their cat carriers in the new apartment, the first thing he did was get out of his carrier and go straight into Pete's.

I am very pleased with my new apartment. In two weeks I have only found one thing about this apartment that is not better than the old apartment, but one of the benefits far outshines all of the others: for the first time in over a decade I can do my laundry without having to go outside. This is the life.

3-D Follow-up

2009-03-28T22:05:00.004-05:00

A couple posts ago I said I was going to take the first opportunity I had to see a movie presented using RealD Cinema 3D. Tonight I went with a couple of friends to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D.

RealD's take on 3D technology uses, instead of differently colored lenses, circular polarized lenses, one polarized clockwise and the other polarized counter-clockwise. Alternating differently-polarized frames are then projected onto a reflective screen specially designed to preserve the polarization. The point of using circular polarization instead of linear polarization is so that the 3D illusion is preserved when the viewer's head is tilted.

Based on this first impression, I have to say the 3D presentation worked surprisingly well; it's certainly a great improvement over other 3D technologies I have seen. First and foremost is the lack of eye strain. I watched the 3D episode of Chuck this past January, which used Intel's ColorCode technology (brown and blue glasses), and at the end of the hour-long episode I was glad to take the glasses off. One of the two people I went with tonight experienced a little bit of eye fatigue, but I myself experienced none. The second major improvement is in the representation of finer detail. ColorCode's use of layered colors in a single image to make the 3D effect has the limitation of being unable to effectively display differences in depth of small objects and texture — the result being that the larger objects in the scene (buildings, people, furniture) are rendered much like cardboard cutouts in a diorama, even on an HDTV. RealD Cinema's use of two completely separate images was much more effective in presenting finer details like facial features, surface contours, and even clouds of individual dust particles or grass clippings as naturally 3-dimensional, with the surprising result that surfaces one would expect to have texture but didn't (for instance, the Missing Link's scaly skin) stood out like a sore thumb. As a display technology, RealD Cinema lives up to its promise very well.

As with any new technology in the film industry, good implementation is key. There are still some quirks to the 3D effect that cinematographers are going to have to learn to work with. Objects that intersect the left and right sides of the screen still exhibit a flickering effect, and fast horizontal movement produces an unintelligible image much like looking in a vibrating mirror. Extreme variations in depth or objects placed very "close" to the viewer also lose the 3D effect, and objects flatly perpendicular to the camera's line of sight still exhibit the cardboard-cutout effect. I have a feeling that further refinements to how scenes are laid out (and perhaps further refinements in the technology itself) will overcome these issues.

Overall, the movie itself was a surprisingly natural-seeming 3D experience, with few exceptions. The experience was so natural, in fact, that I find myself struggling to imagine what the movie would be like had I seen it in 2D. I found it easy to forget that I was wearing 3D glasses, and I thought the movie made fairly good use of the technology as an experience rather than a gimmick (although there was a somewhat amusing incident with a paddle ball that, I admit, made me blink). On the other hand, I think the movie probably would not have been as entertaining without the additional fascination of 3D, and probably wouldn't hold up under multiple viewings — certainly not multiple 2D viewings.

So, overall it was a very positive experience. The RealD Cinema technology gets a 9 out of 10, the implementation of it in this movie gets a 7.5 out of 10, and the movie itself gets a 7 out of 10. I'm looking forward to seeing how the technology progresses, and especially interested in seeing it used on live action. There are currently 34 more movies scheduled to be released in RealD Cinema between now and 2013, but as best I can tell, all but two are either computer animation or stop-motion animation; the other two are horror movies I won't be seeing under any circumstances.

Evil

2009-03-27T14:37:00.000-05:00

I was sent a story this week about a professor who tries to demonstrate to his students that the idea of a perfectly good, all-powerful God is a logical impossibility. I'm not sure where the story originated (or even if it depicts an actual event), but it was interesting and it raised some thoughts I wanted to present here.

In the story, the professor argues that since evil exists, then if God created everything, God must necessarily be evil. The story ends with a student's response. The student proposes that cold does not exist: thermal energy (heat) exists and, theoretically, has no upper bound; if cold exists as the opposite of heat, it must have no lower bound; since there is an absolute zero, "cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it." The student argues similarly for a definition of darkness as being the absence of light (not its opposite), and then extends his argument to evil:

"Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

The problem I see with the student's argument is that it mistakes the quantifiable phenomenon "heat" (measured against the standard of absolute zero) for the subjective description "hot," and the quantifiable phenomenon "light" (presumably based on the presence of photons in the visible spectrum) for the subjective description "brightness," and then applies the same misconception to the problem of evil.

Evil is not a subjective description. There are no varying degrees of evil, nor is evil simply the absence of God's love — evil is opposition to God himself. Both the professor and the student made the same mistake: they judged good and evil based on their own human perception rather than on the true standard, God himself. The professor thinks, "these things exist and are evil, so if God created everything, therefore God must be evil," an argument which places God's actions, plans and motives under man's judgment instead of the other way around. The student's argument ignores the fact that evil originated in a choice — our choice not to serve and obey God but instead to turn against him and serve ourselves — and that as a result of that choice, we are incapable of true goodness until the enmity is erased completely.

Lost, but not lost...

2009-03-19T22:28:00.005-05:00

Four and a half years ago, almost to the day, I and about eight of my college friends crowded into the 5 foot by 7 foot living room/office of my apartment behind the South 14th Street Discount Market to watch the premiere of a little show called Lost. It was a memorable episode that launched a two hour long discussion of the many weighty philosophical questions raised, including: "Where did the polar bear come from?", "What was Kate's crime?", "What's in Sawyer's letter?", "What is the monster?", and "Who is the French woman?" 93 episodes later, have these questions been answered? Yes, yes, yes, sort of, and yes, respectively, but dozens more have been raised in their place — and that's just the way we like it.

Lost is now in its fifth season, and has mastered and then reinvented the art of answering questions with questions. Far too many shows attempt this; Lost achieves it in a way that fascinates and so completely defies prediction that I have long since stopped trying. What other show could lead four grown men to spend four conversations in a single day pondering the revelations produced by a ten year old boy bringing a sandwich to a prisoner in a jail cell?

Lost's other great skill is its ability to deliver on the promises it makes to the audience and the questions it makes them ask (thus inspiring confidence that the questions that haven't been answered yet will be answered eventually). Last night's episode, the ninth of the fifth season, is a perfect example. The previously mentioned sandwich delivery shed more light on several questions, some from as far back as the middle of season 2, while ominously foreshadowing other events that we saw happen in season 3. The rest of the episode tied in perfectly to briefly mentioned events from seasons ago, added yet more insight into the histories of long-running minor but pivotal characters, deftly juggled two plot lines separated by decades and, of course, raised yet more questions. The best part? Even if you didn't catch on to any of these connections, it was still great TV.

A Survey of Film History, Parts XX-XL

2009-03-14T13:12:00.011-05:00

I realized today that I haven't done one of these in over four months. This time the movies range from 1936 to 1956, and include everything from film noir to romantic comedies to musicals. There are far to many for me to do a thorough review of each and every one, but I'll add comments where I can, and hopefully will keep up with this better in the future. I am pretty much officially out of the 1940's now; after Adam's Rib, which I have not yet watched, there are seven movies still in my queue from prior to 1955, but they are all listed as "unavailable" or "very long wait".

The Very Good:

Midnight (1939) - I found this movie thoroughly entertaining; great characters and very funny.

Suspicion (1941) - My queue (in addition to today's post) features a disproportionate number of Hitchcock movies, because I haven't seen very many before. This movie should probably be in the next category down, and would be except for what I learned from the DVD special features about the plot of the original novel. Consider this movie to be in the "Very Good" category for what might have been, rather than for what is.

To Catch a Thief (1955) - This Hitchcock film is an example of a mystery done right. It features interesting characters, sufficiently surprising twists, and is overall very satisfying.

The Good:

Sabotage (1936) - This Hitchcock film had some pretty tense scenes, but very little in the way of compelling characters.

All About Eve (1950) - well acted and, consequently, a captivating story; however, not the kind of story I'd like to watch over and over again.

Pat and Mike (1952) - a charming romantic comedy, entertaining as most of Kathryn Hepburn's movies are. It simply lacks the spark that made Midnight such a standout.

Dial M for Murder (1954) - another Hitchcock film; great tension, but with a somewhat anticlimactic ending, and told with a sense of detachment that made it hard to relate to the characters. (See below for further, semi-related discussion.)

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - James Dean knew melodrama. It's a fairly unremarkable storyline made compelling by the storytelling.

The Merely Bland:

The Awful Truth (1937)

Road to Morocco (1942)

Lifeboat (1944) - yet another Hitchcock film. Too homogeneous in its pessimism to be interesting.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

State of the Union (1948)

The Third Man (1949)

Stage Fright (1950) - Hitchcock again; a compelling story brought down by a disappointing ending.

Singin' in the Rain (1952) - I prefer the kind of musical where the music is organic to the story. This movie is an approximation of that kind of musical, being that it is about Hollywood stars making a musical movie, but the songs are trite and the storyline is weak. One extremely bright spot is Jean Hagen's hilarious portrayal of Lina Lamont.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) - Here's an example of the wrong kind of musical: the kind where people pause and burst into song and dance for no apparent reason (except perhaps to cover up a weak plot). Howard Keel's vocal performance is a pain point for me too.

Moby Dick (1956)

The Bad:

Spellbound (1945) - one last Hitchcock movie. As much as I like Gregory Peck, I couldn't stand his performance in this movie. An overdone performance in a movie that offered little else of interest.

Harvey (1950) - I can't figure out if this movie is portraying a serious psychological condition as a heartwarming farce, or doing a very poor job of telling the story of a magical creature mistaken for insanity. Whatever the case, I could not wait for this movie to end, mostly because of Jimmy Stewart's clumsily earnest performance.

The most interesting thing about this movie is that Jimmy Stewart's invisible friend Harvey was the inspiration for the naming of the neural clone of Scorpius that existed in John Crichton's head in Farscape, a name that was first used by fans in online message boards and later adopted by the show's producer's and written into the script.

Sunset Boulevard (1950) - The worst kind of story reveals its awful ending at the beginning, and then forces you to sit through two hours of unredeeming story. This is a prime example.

An interesting fact about Dial M for Murder (1954) is that it was originally filmed in 3D. What makes that notable is that the film is in no way a "spectacle" or gimmick film, as were most movies that were being filmed in color, widescreen or 3D. I only saw the 2D version of the movie; I'd be interested to see the 3D version to see how it came out. This was the time of the rise of in-home television, and color, widescreen formats and 3D were the features that still made the movie theater distinctive from free television. Color and widescreen eventually became commonplace and are now artistic decisions rather than economic ones, but 3D all but disappeared due to the limitations of the technology. A format couldn't be produced at the time that was comfortable for extended viewing without headaches and eye strain.

A 3D image requires some technique of delivering different input to each eye. The most common technique is the well-known red and blue glasses, or the more recent brown and blue variation (Intel's in-home ColorCode variation of their InTru 3D technology; go to the link and click the "3D HP Showroom" link on the right). This technique, used recently in a Superbowl commercial as well as an episode of Chuck (reported to be the first ever full-length TV series presentation in 3D), is basically unchanged since the 1950's and is the only method of 3D presentation that can be used on standard in-home equipment. Other new techniques involve using electronic glasses with lenses that flicker in sync with a high-speed projector that displays a frame first to one eye and then the corresponding frame for the other eye, or RealD Cinema, the similar but reportedly more natural-seeming technique of using glasses with differently polarized lenses to view two differently polarized images projected by a high-speed projector (this display technology is utilized by InTru 3D and claims to eliminate the eye strain caused by previous techniques). Neither of these techniques can be implemented in the standard household, which means that movie theaters once again have the advantage of being able to present an experience that cannot be found for free at home. This advantage, combined with the relative ease of converting computer animated films to any available 3D format and the widespread availability of in-home high definition large screen content, may explain the recent increase of 3D movie theater presentations. According to the InTru 3D web site, "DreamWorks Animation has committed to producing all of its feature films using InTru 3D technology beginning in 2009."

At this point however, 3D is still little more than a gimmick. It provides to the viewer a unique viewing experience, but that in itself is not enough to give the technology from eye-candy to valuable tool. This has been seen before with film technology innovations like the bullet-time effect created for The Matrix, and computer-animated movies in general. Much like the flurry of 3D movies in the 50's, both of these technologies had an innovator, followed by innumerable followers who used the technology simply because it was the next cool thing. However, if the movies that used these technologies were memorable, it was not because they used those technologies — it was because there was something distinctive about the story, the characters, the filmmaking or, for the best, all three. If the popularity of 3D continues to grow, as it looks like it will thanks to easily implemented comfortable technology, masses of filmmakers will jump on the money-making bandwagon (there are currently 37 movies scheduled to be released using the RealD technology in 2009-2013). What the technology is truly waiting for, however, is for a filmmaker to use the technology to do something other than throw objects at the audience.

I'm going to take the first opportunity I get to see an InTru 3D movie to see if the technology is as groundbreaking as they claim. However, the first truly great 3D movie will be the movie where the filmmaker uses 3D technology as a medium and as a true component of the cinematography rather than as a gimmick; the movie where the audience forgets that they are watching a 3D movie, and is simply captivated by a story told in a way that was never possible before. That movie is the one I am truly looking forward to.

Experimentation

2009-03-14T10:28:00.006-05:00

I experimented a little with stereo images on the plane to Vancouver last September, with varying degrees of success. Here are some of the better results. To view, cross your eyes until the two images overlap.

Fun, In Quotation Marks

2009-03-12T21:58:00.004-05:00

This week has been full of interesting quotes, some of which I am compelled to share here. Prepare to be surprised, perplexed and maybe even a little bit befuddled. First up is a quote from a sign I saw tonight in an AT&T store while I was pondering my bi-yearly upgrade options. The sign, formatted as seen below, advertised a $70 "accessories bundle" which includes:

"...a bluetooth headset, a car charger and your choice of carry case.* *($30 value or less)"

Also tonight I stopped by the vet to pick up some flea medication. Because I bought two packages, I got an extra dose free. All three items received an instructional sticker (to justify the price), and all three items had the following instructions:

"APPLY CONTENTS OF 1 TUBE DIRECTLY TO SKIN AT BACK OF THE NECK ONCE MONTHLY."

Don't think about it too hard; that wasn't the interesting part. I can only assume there is something extra super special about the free extra dose, because it and it alone had these additional, extra super special instructions:

"WAIT 24-48 HOURS BEFORE AND AFTER BATHING BEFORE APPLYING."

OK, hold on a second, let me figure this one out. I have to bathe my cats, then wait two days, then apply the medicine, right? No, that's not right, I have to wait two days first, and then bathe them, then wait one day and then apply the medicine. Why can't I bathe them now? That can't be right. Maybe I should bathe them now, then apply the medicine, then wait two days. For what? I'm confused. What if I don't want to bathe them? Is it required? Forget it. I'm just going to wait a week, slap it on, and hope their hair doesn't fall out. This is what I get for accepting free medications.

Next up is a quote from the same .NET certification study guide I complained about before. It's actually the very last review question in the book, and it topped the entire reading experience off with a resounding "huh??" I suppose I should thank someone. See if you can figure it out:

Which tool can you use to create performance counters? (Choose all that apply.)
An HTTP header
A file
A time span
A registry key
Another object in the Cache

Believe it or not, the correct answer is actually: "F. None of those things. What's wrong with you?"

The following is a quote from the lease for my current (and soon to be former) apartment. I stumbled across it just now while taking a break from writing this post and, looking back on my previous experiences with apartment management, I find it utterly sublime, particularly the first sentence of the second paragraph:

RELEASE OF RESIDENT. Unless you're entitled to terminate this Lease Contract under paragraphs 10, 16, 23, 31 or 37, you won't be released from this Lease Contract for any reason--including but not limited to voluntary or involuntary school withdrawal or transfer, voluntary or involuntary job transfer, marriage, separation, divorce, reconciliation, loss of co-residents, loss of employment, bad health, death, or property purchase.

Death of Sole Resident. If you are the sole resident, upon your death you may terminate the Lease Contract without penalty with at least 30 days written notice. You will be liable for payment of rent until the latter of: (1) the termination date, or (2) until all possessions in the apartment are removed. You will be liable for all rent, charges, and damages to the apartment until it is vacated, and any removal and storage costs.

If you're wondering why I stopped in the middle of this post to read my apartment lease, it's because I received a voice-mail today from my apartment management saying, "I am just calling to let you know that we will be showing your apartment tomorrow at noon," and I was reading my lease to determine if they had a reasonable expectation of actually doing so (as it turns out, they do; it's right there on the 18th line of paragraph 28.2).

In contrast, this last quote is the conversation (paraphrased) I had this week with the "Leasing Consultant" at the apartment complex I am moving to:

LC: "I needed to call and let you know that the resident that is currently in the apartment you reserved needs to extend, and so we won't be able to lease you that apartment."

Me: "Oh. Well, OK."

LC: "So would you mind if we put you in an identical apartment for $55 less per month?"

Winds of Change

2009-03-01T19:44:00.007-06:00

Hope everyone likes the new design; I've been wanting one for a long time now. In case you hate it, here's a taste of what used to be:

Old and Busted:

New hotness:

New Design

"It's not that hard."

2009-02-28T13:19:00.002-06:00

As promised, here is a quote stolen from a friend and taken dreadfully and deliberately out of context:

"You just have to build the universe and deliver it to the users. It's not that hard."

Psych is Officially Genius

2009-02-14T12:54:00.013-06:00

At the end of last week's episode of Psych, a commercial came on that seemed like a pretty standard horror movie trailer. It started with a shot of the entrance to a kids' summer camp, Camp Tikihama. I thought, where do I recognize that name from? Ah yes, it's the name of the summer camp that Shawn and Gus made up in the "Bounty Hunter" episode a season and a half ago; this must be the commercial for the new episode of Psych (it was).

What is Psych? Psych is a comedy/mystery show that airs on USA Network about Shawn Spencer, who uses his finely honed skills of observation to pretend to be a psychic (with his partner Gus and his psychic detective agency called Psych) and help the Santa Barbara Police Department solve crimes. Psych's genius has never come from taking cliché and turning it on its head. On the contrary, Psych's genius has always come from taking cliché head on at full speed and looking you straight in the eye while they do it. That, and a taste for complete and utter ridiculousness. And their obscurely relevant pop-culture references. OK, I'll stop.

This week's episode, written by series star James Roday, was a spoof of the Friday the 13th movies, airing on Friday the 13th, and titled..."Tuesday the 17th". Does it bother me that the camp Shawn and Gus made up is now the setting for an episode which features in its soundtrack the camp song the fugitive made up on the fly? Not a bit — the circle of obscure references is now complete. Also undimmed this week was the characters' penchant for obsessing over irrelevant trivialities, as evidenced by the closing lines from this week's episode:

Gus: "I'm sorry I ditched you and made a piñata with Jason Cunningham."
[Long pause.]
Shawn: "Apology accepted."

Don't worry. It was funny in context. For a taste of Psych, watch some of the recent episodes on the USA Networks web site, search Psych on YouTube, or watch this video, made to advertise the premiere of season 3:

In other news, I have been preparing for the second exam in my MCPD certification track. In working through the Microsoft study guide, it has been difficult for me not to set the book on fire. Repeatedly. It's not the major concepts that are being taught that I have a problem with, it's the examples they give of how to implement them. Here's one of the offending passages:

"When a user control is dropped onto a Web page, you always position it using some of the same techniques as you would use to position other controls using Flow Layout, such as placing the user control in an HTML table.

You'll soon find that you cannot position the user control using Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) to set the absolute positioning using the Style property because the user control does not automatically add an outer tag for the contents of the control that could be assigned a Style. You can set the positioning using DHTML if you add a Panel control to the Web page and place the user control into the Panel. This allows the Panel and its contents to be positioned."
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Web-Based Client Development, pg. 398

Don't see the problems? Take a closer look. Certainly the ideas in this passage that are just wrong, wrong, wrong are not actually the concepts that are the main focus of the lesson, but if you're an expert writing a book, why recommend practices that are in no way even remotely "best"? What they recommend here is the equivalent of hanging up your shirt by nailing it to the bedroom door, when there is a perfectly good hook right there (or even if there isn't a hook, an acceptable second best could be hammering the nail into the door and then hanging the shirt on it). I dread the fact that someone somewhere (who will no doubt write code that I will have to see) could take the entire passage as best practice and then get a certification legitimizing his adherence to practices that are just wrong, wrong, wrong. Very wrong. And bad, very bad. So bad that I am reduced to a second grade vocabulary and filled with a desire to grab something hard and start hitting people with it. Or set the book on fire.

I'm just saying.

Nominee

2009-01-30T22:42:00.004-06:00

And the award for Most Awkward Occurrence of Contextual Ambiguity in a Name goes to: the Overcoming Faith Christian Center. In fact, they're already a front-runner for next year's award in the same category as well, because as I was writing this post I saw on their web site that they use the phrase "adjectival participle" in trying to explain what their name means.

Yes, the title of this post is a pun, but not the obvious one. Think about it. You'll get it.

On a side note, here's a four-word phrase that promises unbounded excellence (and probably unbounded verbosity on my part): Bourne Trilogy on Blu-Ray.

Addendum: Less and Less Charming as Time Goes By

2009-01-25T12:18:00.004-06:00

In July I made this post about a leak in my apartment that caused a light fixture to fall out of the ceiling in my kitchen. A few hours ago, the glass cover for that same light fixture fell out of the ceiling once again, this time entirely and with such force that I found shards of glass in my bedroom.

End result, I just spent the entire morning cleaning up glass and cat blood.

The Torments of a Somewhat-Blind Man, Episode III: The Musical Christmas Episode About the Wookiees

2009-01-02T15:01:00.010-06:00

If you want to understand the full history of this post, you should first make sure that you have read this earlier post. That post tells the story of how I discovered the true definition of "She credited you a little extra", straight from Webster's Dictionary of Unskilled Apartment Management: "She didn't actually credit you a little extra, I just didn't want to have to admit to having done the math wrong again."

I found out today that the new edition of Webster's DUAM contains a new alternate definition: "We know we didn't really credit you anything the first time, but as it turns out, we should have. Our bad." I got an email today from someone whose job title is "AR/Evictions" informing me that, while reviewing the ledger for my account, she had noticed a problem. Surprising as that may be — the noticing being the surprise, not the fact that there was a problem — it turns out that for the last six months (i.e., ever since the most recent time they evicted me for not being charged correctly by their accounting department), I have been overcharged $55.00 per month, hence they will be deducting $330.00 less from my bank account in the January billing. The writer of the email also informed me that she had left me a voicemail with the same information, and assured me that through "the remaining [sic] of your lease we will deducted [sic] the correct rent amount." If I remember correctly from my Greek six years ago, that particular conjugation of the verb "deduct" is the Future Almost Perfect tense.

All in all, despite this occurrence of a sixth accounting error making the occurrence of a seventh that much more likely, it's not such a bad thing to find out. However, I did discover a rather odd offer when I went to check my voicemail: "If this credit is a problem and you want us to deduct more, we can of course make an additional withdrawal on Monday. Just let us know if you want us to do this." Ridiculous as that sounds, it may not be such a bad idea; it's not entirely unlikely that six months from now after my lease has expired and I have moved out, they "will discovered" yet another mistake and try to evict me again for an "unpaid balance."

Benjamin Button

2008-12-28T01:37:00.003-06:00

There are some movies that, soon after it starts, I begin looking at my watch to determine how much time could possibly be left until it is over; there are other movies that, after it has ended and for as long as possible, I consciously avoid reading a clock so that I will not involuntarily calculate how much time has passed. The movie I saw tonight is one of the latter.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (view the trailer) — I find myself struggling to decide what to say about it. It is a beautifully told fantasy, richly and finely layered with metaphor; the filmmaking is artistry, pure and simple. One of the most memorable sequences is a stunningly lyrical fantasy-within-a-fantasy; it is a sequence that tells a story that is increasingly and candidly unlike what actually took place, and it does so with such skill and impact that its final image, because it depicts what did not take place, elicited audible gasps from the audience.

This movie is a work of art. When the Academy Award nominations are announced in a little more than three weeks, it will be listed multiple times: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Actress (as well as Best Makeup and Best Score) — and it should win. Cate Blanchett certainly should win; Brad Pitt very well could win. In any case, see it, and enjoy.

Good Medicine

2008-12-23T21:48:00.005-06:00

From an advertisement for Eckman's Alternative, on the back of a newspaper clipping found in a book; from the contents of the clipping, I can conclude that the newspaper was printed around 1915:

What Causes Tuberculosis
In the opinion of many medical authorities, tuberculosis is aided, if not actually caused, by a loss of lime from the system. "Where there is a decalcification, the lime salts must be supplied medicinally," says Dr. J. W. Carhart, of San Antonio, in the May, 1913, issue of "Medical Progress." ...

Wikipedia: Tuberculosis

Family Secrets

2008-12-22T21:40:00.010-06:00

Today at work someone promised to bring in fudge for all of us tomorrow. I was reminded of a similar promise made once, long ago, in a time that has now become (urban) legend. In honor of the season, I thought I would take a few minutes to share with you this heartwarming Christmas tale of yesteryear...

The tale begins around a lunch table, shortly after noon several years ago. Several of my coworkers and I were eating together, and the conversation turned to unique family recipes. It wasn't a competition, but had it been it would have instantly ended when one person shared with us the key ingredient in her family's traditional recipe for chocolate fudge. The inclusion of this particular ingredient in a recipe for chocolate fudge (or any variety of fudge, for that matter) was so, shall we say, unexpected that we quite simply did not believe her; nevertheless, she insisted it was so and, furthermore, insisted that the resulting fudge was not merely edible but good and, furthermore, promised to make a batch and bring it in so that we could try it. Time went by, and memories faded, but every now and then the lunch table conversation would return to this unusual chocolate fudge and its as-yet-unproven existence, and our coworker would renew her promise. Eventually, however, our coworker moved on to other employment, and we came to accept that the mystery would probably remain forever unsolved.

Several months later, Christmas came and brought yet another of our coworkers to the office where a friend and I were having a conversation (work related, of course). She bore news: our former coworker had at long last fulfilled her promise and sent with her a batch of the unusual fudge. My friend and I were to be the first to try it, she said — it was more of an imperative than an invitation. We journeyed with her to where the fudge awaited, in the mini-fridge in the corner conference room. Approaching the conference room, we caught a whiff of something evil; it did not bode well. Our coworker proceeded on and, powerless, we followed. Opening the mini-fridge introduced us to a truly malicious stench, the kind of reek one might expect if something had died in some undignified manner, lain somewhere and rotted for a week, and then gotten up and chosen the mini-fridge as the place to store its malodorousness while it went Christmas shopping; we were somewhat relieved to find that the stench originated from the fridge itself (which was empty except for the fudge) and not from the fudge. We retrieved the fudge and retreated to a safe distance — i.e., back to my friend's office — where we recovered from our ordeal.

To be fair to the fudge and its chef, I'd like to point out the fact that, as all cooks throughout history have discovered, sometimes things just don't come together exactly right no matter how good you are. This particular batch of fudge was an example of this unavoidable fact, being, as we found when we unwrapped it, not entirely solid (thus the reason it had to be kept in the fridge). However, procuring spoons, we proceeded with interest to taste it. Doing so, we found ourselves surprised: despite the uncommon makeup of the recipe, the fudge was actually rather good — except. Yes, in spite of its goodness, there was one final aspect of the experience that my friend and I decided it would simply take a lifetime to overcome, having not grown up with this recipe as our former coworker did. The exception was this: after having tasted the goodness of chocolate fudge and swallowed, we were left with the unmistakable tang of the secret ingredient. What, you ask, was the secret ingredient? I am tempted to make you guess, but since this is a Christmas story, I will end by telling you its name: Velveeta.

Some of you might be interested in this video from Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (co-creator, writers, and co-executive producers of Lost), in which they explain why Lost was canceled:

(I love that they went all out, as you can tell if you read their T-shirts.)

When 2 = 1; or, A Story That Makes 2 Hours Seem Like 30 Years.

2008-12-13T18:15:00.005-06:00

From a trailer in a movie theater:

"...in theaters for one night only on December 17th, with an encore on December 18th."

In addition to taking liberties with mathematical axioms, the trailer was completely nonchalant about the rift in space-time inherent in its claim that the story to be told on the night of December 17th "has taken thirty years to tell."

I am such a nerd.

2008-12-09T21:44:00.002-06:00

I confess. I laughed at this joke. Out loud.

Q: Why didn't the trigonometry problem get the apartment it wanted?

A: Because tangent wouldn't cosine.

The Advent of Hope

2008-11-30T20:28:00.003-06:00

Today marks the beginning of advent, and the candle that was lit in church this morning represented hope. The first few verses of John 1 were read; it's a familiar passage, but part of it stood out to me in a way it never has before. I highlighted it below.

John 1:1-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

It's such a simple phrase and it reads as merely the conclusion of the paragraph, which is perhaps why it has never stood out to me before. But it not just a simple sentence. It is in fact the witness that John was giving; it is the very declaration of our hope.

Our hope as Christians is entirely built on the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, on the fact that God made a promise and fulfilled it as He does all of His promises. The birth of Jesus is the advent of our hope, which will be fulfilled in His return. I am looking forward to further reminders of that fact this Christmas season.

Imposition?

2008-11-18T20:34:00.005-06:00

A friend of mine said to me earlier tonight, "I don't want to impose on you...but I have to keep reminding myself that you like that." In a way my friend is right, but the truth is, I simply have a different perspective on imposition. There are practical and sentimental reasons for this, but the philosophical reasons are more interesting, so I will limit myself to those tonight. Before I begin, allow me to be self-referential for a moment and bring up some things I said long ago, to provide some context for the rest of this post:

"Think about the relationships in your life and you will see that these connections are more than just a line connecting the dots, more than just the chain in a global chain gang. There are (consciously or unconsciously) obligations we must meet, expectations we have, rights we grant to others, rights we assume for ourselves. When we enter into a relationship with someone, we are throwing open the gates to our personal city. To whatever degree, that connection gives them a certain amount of power to affect us. No wonder relationships are so scary, and no wonder they affect us so strongly!"
— talk about blast from the past: I wrote that two and a half years ago in this post.

"In as few words as possible, here is my definition: work is that action which exceeds what we are pleased to contribute in a relationship."
— from this post.

In a rather sloppy and markedly cynical post last year, I somewhat dismissively defined politeness as adherence to social conventions (Answers.com gives a similar definition, though with less dismissive intent: "Polite and mannerly imply consideration for others and the adherence to conventional social standards of good behavior"). I also stated that the rules of polite behavior "serve only to give us the illusion of 'control' over our own lives while simultaneously isolating us from others." While the first part of that statement is not entirely accurate, I hold to the second part (though without my earlier cynical interpretation): in practical application, one of the major effects — perhaps even intents — of the rules of polite behavior is the delineation or recognition of boundaries between people. For example, when a friend of mine wanted to interview a well-known professor for his thesis, he first sent a letter outlining his request, then followed up with a phone call to schedule the interview. The letter and the phone call were his adherence to social convention for the purpose or with the effect of showing respect both to the status of the professor and to the non-existence of any relationship between them: elaborate politeness in recognition of significant boundaries between them. (On the other hand, it should be noted that the elaborate politeness was for the purpose of crossing those boundaries.) Would the professor expect such overtures from a friend? Personally, I would hope not. For a friend, I am told, it is customary to expect a phone call or some other interaction before a visit: lesser expectations in recognition of lesser boundaries (again, for the purpose of crossing the boundaries). Taking the example another step further, what would be expected of the professor's children? It seems reasonable to think that a mere knock on the door would suffice, if even that. Finally, what of the professor's wife? The two are one flesh — surely no letter of introduction is required, and she should only have to knock if she forgot her key.

In short, and mathematically speaking, my interpretation of the rules of polite behavior as regards social interactions can be summarized thus: the elaborateness of the social precautions required is directly proportional to the measure of the boundary to be crossed.

Note that I said interpretation, not application. The above argument is simply a matter of convenience. If my friend had been stranded on the highway, I hope that the professor would not expect a letter and a phone call before stopping to help. Practicality and urgency trump all of these niceties. That being the case, one might refer to all of these rules as either pretenses or tools, depending on one's level of cynicism. On the one hand, politeness can be viewed as playacting, jumping through hoops (and requiring others to jump through hoops) in the name of satisfying each others' expectations; on the other hand — and I think this is the better perspective — politeness is a means by which we express our respect for others. So then, to my interpretation of the rules of polite behavior I add my application: politeness is something expressed to others, not expected from them.

At long last, I get to the point: over the past few years, I have discovered (developed?) in myself a perspective on relationships that as far as I can tell is rather unusual: because I tend to view politeness as a recognition of interpersonal boundaries, elaborate politeness on the part of people I view as close friends is actually a source of disappointment for me, sometimes even frustration. If it helps, imagine that one of your friends drew an invisible ten foot circle around you and always made a point of stopping to ask permission before crossing into it. Polite? Sure. Excessive? I would think so.

That's only half of the oddity: logically speaking, if politeness is a recognition of interpersonal boundaries, then imposition is a rejection of interpersonal boundaries. Now imagine that your friend sees the invisible ten foot circle around you but the thought of asking before crossing into it never occurs to him because he thinks that even if your relationship doesn't give him the right to enter the circle, it should. Believe it or not, I actually see that as a good thing, and that is the perspective my friend was talking about tonight.

I have never understood it when one friend says to another, "I didn't ask, because I didn't want to bother you," first and foremost because it assumes that the other is incapable of saying "no" when necessary. Now if only I could get myself to stop saying it. What can I say? I'm a hypocrite.

A Sense of Proportion

2008-11-18T20:17:00.005-06:00

I remembered a little while ago that I used this picture last week to illustrate scale when I was telling a friend about my vacation; I thought it might be interesting to other people too.

Vancouver Island

2008-11-12T21:35:00.012-06:00

I know, I usually string this out more but I had a day off and I made it through all of the rest of my pictures. So here they are, in four galleries. Please enjoy.

Pantheon

2008-11-11T22:32:00.001-06:00

Coup

2008-11-04T19:52:00.004-06:00

I've been watching political drama tonight, but it's not the election, it's The West Wing; not only that, but I'm about to start the last episode of the fourth season, one of my favorite episodes of the entire series.

I've taken a break from watching though to hit refresh on the CNN home page and to attempt to write down something I have been thinking about today. I'm not really worried about who wins tonight; I certainly disagree with one of the candidates on some issues that are important to me (so I voted for the other one), but I believe that God has a plan for whoever he has chosen to put in office-elect tonight. So the thought that has kept coming back to my mind today isn't who is going to win, but rather something that I heard, or read, or saw somewhere sometime that I can't quite remember exactly. I'm leaning toward it being from a movie or a TV series, and it's a story told by a guy about the time he took his kids (or his father took him?) to stand outside the White House on election night so he could talk to them about how the most powerful man in the land was on that night going to watch someone else be named to his office and do nothing to stop it. A coup was taking place at the highest levels of government, and they were perfectly safe to stand on the street where it was happening because not a single shot would be fired.

Tonight, dozens of the most powerful officers across the land will simply be replaced, and in the midst of this massive governmental upheaval the biggest problem most citizens are worried about is whether or not it will start raining before their part of the line gets inside the polling place. We have a system that works, and, despite its problems, works better than any other system in the world. That's something to appreciate and be grateful for, no matter which candidate wins.

Fishing Trip

2008-10-31T16:12:00.007-05:00

While on Vancouver Island I had a great opportunity to go bear-watching. It wasn't a very rural location, and there were several other people there (as you can tell when watching the videos), but it was a great experience. Photos and video below.

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Surveys, a History of Film, a Survey of Film History (Parts XII-XIX), and Oh Yeah, People Can't Seem to Stop Stealing My Cable.

2008-10-25T12:41:00.004-05:00

So I went and voted yesterday. On the way in, I was given a survey to keep me entertained while I waited in line; the survey was supposed to tell me what my political leanings are. That's the opposite of what I would have expected, but if you're curious you can take the same quiz online. There was also a guy there who was running for Congress by standing one foot outside the line beyond which no campaigning is allowed (X feet from the polling location) and handing out fliers that said essentially nothing about him. It was a moot point, because as it turns out he is a Democrat and I live two blocks outside his district.

Also this week I had the joy once again of being robbed of services legally mine by right of purchase. There is something about the apartment upstairs that drives people to patch into my cable. The first of my neighbors did it twice, necessitating two visits from a cable technician to restore my service (both times he removed a splitter from my line, which was later replaced with a new one "accidentally"). The new residents also found it more convenient to put a splitter on my line than to pay for service of their own. A technician once again removed a splitter from the line four weeks ago. Most recently, I removed another splitter from the line myself earlier this week, hoping to avoid the three day wait for a technician to come out. No such luck, because as it turns out, this was no ordinary piracy. This time, the thieves upstairs moved out (it's interesting to note that with less than four weeks remaining in the apartment, they still felt the need to resume stealing my cable) and, having decided they were done stealing from me, somehow managed to have a cable technician come out and disconnect my service altogether. That, at least, is what the technician found when he came out three days later to check out the problem. So the irony is that at the exact moment I noticed my service go out, there was a technician 100 feet away actively disconnecting it.

Finally, over the past couple of months I have managed to make further progress in my survey of film history (via my Blockbuster queue), but that same progress will likely be soon undone. I say that because on the second to last day of my vacation, it rained for 12 hours. Coincidentally, that same day the owner of the B&B I was staying at, knowing I am interested in film, had brought me a book she had run across at the local library. It was a 300-and-something page coffee table book, American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, by Jeanine Basinger; I read the entire book. It began with an analysis of the aspect of filmed storytelling that fascinates me most, the use of the "invisible" technical aspects of filming to manipulate the audience and further the story, but pulled a bait-and-switch and became a detailed history of the development of the film industry and the Hollywood studio system. Still very interesting, but not quite as interesting as listening to someone agree with me for 12 hours. The author said many things in the first two chapters that I agree with, and I'm still wishing I could have read the book that should have followed them. In any case, thanks to that book I may now be adding as many as 16 new movies to my queue. Movies seen since the last update:

Two very similar movies in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), starring Gregory Peck, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), starring Jimmy Stewart. Taken on face value, these two movies may not seem that similar; Gentleman's Agreement is about a reporter who goes "undercover" as a Jew to write a story about anti-semitism, while Mr. Smith is the much-loved classic about a Boy Scout leader appointed to congress; however, both tell the story of a passionate individual encountering corruption and fighting to stop it. Where the two films diverge the most is in my opinion of them: Gentleman's Agreement was spectacular; Mr. Smith was barely mediocre. The reason, I think, is that Mr. Smith is a wide-eyed, golly-gee love poem to a hyper-idealized version of the founding fathers and American democracy; it's more of an over-dramatized PSA than a story. Gentleman's Agreement on the other hand takes a (comparatively) realistic and very human perspective on a very human problem; it very much deserved its three Oscar wins (including Best Picture) and its five additional nominations.

I also surprised myself by very much liking Casablanca (1942); I honestly didn't expect to.

The Philadelphia Story (1940), starring Kathryn Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Entertaining and well-made; recommended.

Also viewed: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Brief Encounter (1945), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). These movies were all good, but not particularly outstanding.

The West Wing

2008-10-12T22:33:00.003-05:00

I recently told someone that The West Wing received 96 Emmy nominations over its 7 year run. That number was inaccurate: there were actually only 95. In the interest of full disclosure, here they are (* indicates a win):

* 2000 - Outstanding Art Direction for a Single Camera Series
* 2000 - Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series
* 2000 - Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series
2000 - Outstanding Costumes for a Series
* 2000 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
* 2000 - Outstanding Drama Series
2000 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
2000 - Outstanding Main Title Design
* 2000 - Outstanding Main Title Theme Music
2000 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series
2000 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series
2000 - Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Drama Series
2000 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (John Spencer)
* 2000 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Richard Schiff)
* 2000 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
2000 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
* 2000 - Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2000 - Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2001 - Outstanding Art Direction for a Single Camera Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
2001 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Drama Series
2001 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Oliver Platt)
2001 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
2001 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Rob Lowe)
2001 - Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore)
* 2001 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Single Camera Sound Mixing for a Series
* 2001 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Bradley Whitford)
2001 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (John Spencer)
2001 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Richard Schiff)
* 2001 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
2001 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
2001 - Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2002 - Outstanding Art Direction for a Single Camera Series
2002 - Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series
2002 - Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series
2002 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
2002 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
* 2002 - Outstanding Drama Series
2002 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Mark Harmon)
2002 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Ron Silver)
2002 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Tim Matheson)
2002 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
* 2002 - Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
2002 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series
2002 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series
2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Bradley Whitford)
2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Dulé Hill)
* 2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (John Spencer)
2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Richard Schiff)
2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Janel Moloney)
2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Mary-Louise Parker)
* 2002 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
2002 - Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2003 - Outstanding Art Direction for a Single Camera Series
2003 - Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series
2003 - Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series
* 2003 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
* 2003 - Outstanding Drama Series
2003 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Matthew Perry)
2003 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Tim Matheson)
2003 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
2003 - Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
2003 - Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series
2003 - Outstanding Single Camera Sound Mixing for a Series
2003 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Bradley Whitford)
2003 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (John Spencer)
2003 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
2003 - Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2004 - Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera Series
2004 - Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series
2004 - Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series
2004 - Outstanding Drama Series
2004 - Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Matthew Perry)
2004 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
* 2004 - Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
2004 - Outstanding Single-Camera Sound Mixing for a Series
2004 - Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series
2004 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (John Spencer)
2004 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Janel Moloney)
2004 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
2005 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
2005 - Outstanding Drama Series
2005 - Outstanding Single-Camera Sound Mixing for a Series
2005 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Alan Alda)
2005 - Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Stockard Channing)
2006 - Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
2006 - Outstanding Drama Series
2006 - Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Martin Sheen)
2006 - Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Allison Janney)
* 2006 - Outstanding Multi-Camera Sound Mixing for a Series or Special
* 2006 - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Alan Alda)

Vancouver Island Vacation

2008-10-08T23:39:00.003-05:00

I found out that some of my older posts are not displaying at all, either on the monthly archive views, or on the label pages, which is how I have been linking to them before. So, here's a list of all my posts with pictures from my Vancouver Island vacation:

Fun With Gastropods

2008-10-07T21:11:00.006-05:00

Of the many species of wildlife I saw during my vacation, perhaps the most unusual was the Banana slug; it also featured prominently in one of the most unusual human encounters I had during my vacation.

The Banana slug is the second largest species of slug in the world at up to nine inches, varies in color from yellow to green to black, and looks for all the world like...well, like a turd. I found myself oddly fascinated by these creatures, and on one occasion I couldn't resist bending down to get a closer look. I even waved my finger around in front of one that was crawling across a hiking trail to see if or how it would react — I got a reaction, but not from the slug. A couple of minutes after I walked away from the slug, I was standing by the trail taking a picture (or ten) and I was passed by a middle-aged couple who walked up behind me. The woman stopped, hesitated, and then walked back to me and said in a strong, indeterminately European accent, "I see you bahck dere...looking at dee poop-poop?" Mildly shocked, I could only say, "what?" She repeated, "looking at dee poop-poop." I had the sudden realization that from where she had been on the trail, it could only have looked to her as if I were not only looking at the "poop-poop," but also poking my finger around in it. I quickly tried to reassure her: "No, no...it was a slug. It was a slug." It didn't work. Unconvinced, she said, "Oh," gave a short, nervous "ha-ha," and then turned and walked quickly away from the crazy American poop-poop handler.

I'm back.

2008-10-07T20:14:00.007-05:00

"Back from where?" you ask. Well, unbeknownst (fun word) to you, in mid-September I went on vacation for 14 days to Vancouver Island.

Total number of pictures taken: 1,851
Total number of emails waiting for me when I got back to work: 11,763

It was a relaxing vacation, though one that I probably should have researched better. I stayed for twelve nights in Ucluelet, on the west side of the island. It turns out that to get 50 miles south of Ucluelet takes about 6 hours, and the two options are either dirt-and-gravel logging roads impassable by car, or driving across the middle of the island, down the east side to the south end of the island, and then back up the west side of the island. The Ucluelet area was very nice though, and it gave me the opportunity to basically do anything I wanted for as long as I wanted for two weeks. It also means that I still have plenty of new places to see on Vancouver Island next time I am there.

I spent my time in Ucluelet, Tofino (closest town, 40km away) and the Pacific Rim National Park between them. Thanks (really) to the owner of the Radford B&B where I stayed, I rented a small car (see below) to get around, and between the various beaches and hiking trails in the area and the eight books I read while I was there, I was very pleasantly occupied.

I still haven't finished going through all of my pictures, but I'm making progress. I'll offer the disclaimer that because the area I stayed in is largely unvarying in terms of landscape (though unvaryingly beautiful), a significant portion of my pictures from this trip will differ from what some of you have come to expect, so be prepared.

Houston, We Have a Problem.

2008-09-07T20:17:00.007-05:00

Tell me if you see it:

With Respect to the KJV

2008-09-07T14:20:00.003-05:00

For those unfamiliar with the issue, KJV-onlyism refers to the opinion (or belief, depending on the person) that the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible is the only English translation that anyone should read. That description covers a wide range of sentiments on the issue, ranging from "I prefer to read the KJV," to "the Textus Receptus, on which the KJV is based, is God's perfectly preserved Word," to the more extreme "the translators of the KJV were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and thus the text of the KJV supersedes all other texts including, the Greek."

As you may remember, a while back I mentioned an issue that I hadn't quite decided how to respond to; this is that issue. The fact that I hadn't decided on a specific mode of response doesn't mean that I hadn't come to a conclusion about the issue or that I was unsure of my conclusion, but rather that the arguments I was presented with were mostly unanswerable. There were two main reasons for this: first, a large percentage of the arguments had demonstrable lack of foundation in logic, fact or both; second and more importantly, the more well-formed arguments presupposed assumptions I do not accept.

My intention with this post is to address the first of the reasons listed above by explaining the problems I see in some very common arguments and styles of argument, and address the second by responding to one of the better arguments. At that point, hopefully, my conclusion will be foregone, if it isn't already. This is admittedly an extremely long post, so please feel free to skip to my conclusion if you simply want the summary.

I will use three sources as a fairly representative sample of the arguments I reviewed in favor of the KJV as the only valid English translation. The first two I include because they were the two sources I was specifically asked to review, and I will try to address the logical, factual and methodological problems that prevent me from accepting their arguments. I include the third because it is the clearest and most rational presentation of a KJV-only position I have come across, and thus is the easiest to respond to. The three sources are:

Why We Stay With the Old King James Bible, by Pastor DeWayne Nichols. If you are interested in reading the whole booklet, you could probably obtain a copy by writing to:
Liberty Baptist Church
7421 Marbach Road
San Antonio, Texas 78227
New Age Bible Versions: An Exhaustive Documentation Exposing the Message, Men and Manuscripts Moving Mankind to the Antichrist's One World Religion, by G. A. Riplinger. You can find quite a wealth of information about the book here.

Why the King James Version?, by Charles V. Turner, Ph.D. This multi-part article is available online.

First, I will look at the booklet Why We Stay With the Old King James Bible, by Pastor DeWayne Nichols. The author begins the booklet by explaining his position on the terms "inspiration" and "preservation," states his thesis that "we have the preserved Word of God in the English language in the King James Version" (p. 4), briefly addresses six common arguments made against the KJV, and then presents six arguments for the superiority of the King James Version. Interestingly, the author's thesis as quoted above is one I actually agree with; I believe that the King James Version is God's preserved Word. However, I do not agree with the unstated corollary to his thesis, which is that all other English translations are not God's preserved Word. I also do not think that the author is successful in either countering the arguments made against the KJV or in presenting valid arguments in favor of the KJV.

Briefly, the anti-KJV arguments the author addresses are among the weakest of all arguments against the KJV, i.e. attacks on the character of King James, references to revisions in the KJV, the archaic language, etc. — I agree with the author that these are not valid arguments against the KJV, and in any context they are simply reasons that someone would prefer a different translation.

However irrelevant these arguments are, the author did address them, so let me give a specific example of why the author's counter-arguments are insufficient. The last anti-KJV argument the author addresses is the archaic language that is "so difficult to understand." (p. 10) The author's counter argument is to list six examples where the KJV uses a word or phrase that is easier to understand than the corresponding word or phrase from one modern version (a different modern version for each example). He concludes his counter argument by stating, "I have a deep suspicion that the problem that most people have with the KJV isn't that they can't understand it; it is that they understand it only too well (and don't like what it says)!" (p. 11) For the author to dust off his hands in this way and declare his argument completed is insufficient. A thorough response to this argument would require more examples demonstrating greater clarity in the KJV over all of the versions the author is trying to counter, as well as a lack of derogatory statements about the morals of those who don't agree with him. Far better would be to simply admit that the KJV is more difficult for an unfamiliar reader to understand and let the point rest; since the author believes the KJV is God's intended text, the reading level should be irrelevant.

The more important arguments presented by the author are the six arguments in favor of the KJV. The author gives reasons for the superiority of the KJV on the basis of the text it was translated from, the culture of the time it was translated, the character of the translators, the process of the actual translation, the theology it contains, and the people who read it. I will not respond to all of these in detail on this blog, but here are some examples:

Regarding the text from which the KJV was translated, the author paints a black and white picture of history in which an oppressed church defends a holy and pure collection of documents from the Catholic church with its severely corrupted collection of documents created by heretics. This skewed view of history is combined with a flawed understanding of textual criticism: regarding the documents on which the KJV is based the author says, "the good manuscripts of the Bible were used and used and used by the people of God until they were worn out, therefore there will be very few, if any, truly ancient copies of the pure manuscripts because they will have been worn out long ago by usage", but the documents used in the modern translations "are older because they were rejected by the people of God as being corrupt, therefore they were not used, therefore they were not worn out, therefore they lasted longer than the pure manuscripts. Their age is a point against them, not a point in their favor!" (p. 17)

A common logical fallacy when arguing in favor of idea A and against idea B is a practice I have started to call, "The Best vs. The Worst." Specifically, it is the practice of finding a few examples related to idea A that are undeniably good things, finding a few examples related to idea B that are undeniably bad things, setting the two lists side by side and declaring, "Aha! Thus it is proved; A is clearly superior to B." The author engages in this fallacy when arguing in favor of the KJV on the basis "that the KJV translators were far above the translators of the modern versions when it comes to spirituality" (p. 23). From the dozens of scholars involved in translating the KJV, the author chooses four examples — a missionary, a man who was disinherited for leaving the Catholic church, a preacher, and a man who "in his diary, condemns himself for such sins as letting his mind wander during prayer" (p. 23) — and from the dozens of translators involved in each of the many modern translations, he chooses four examples — a man "involved in the worship of the Virgin Mary" (p. 24), two men who reportedly believed false doctrines, and "how about the lesbian who was on the translation committee of the New International Version! What a wonderful group of spiritual people gave us these modern Bibles!" (p.24).

A further fallacy the author falls into in his argument concerning spirituality is that of the gross generalization. In discussing the translator who was disinherited for leaving the Catholic church the author asserts, "This is a far cry from most of those involved in the modern translations, who have never given up one single thing in order to take a stand for God." (p. 23)

A final fallacy I would like to point out is that of referencing as proof evidence that is irrelevant to the point in question. As his final argument in support of the KJV, the author lists historical events as proof that "the KJV has been honored of God as has no other translation" (p. 33). Namely:
- Two examples of KJV translators who were martyred "for the sake of the Bible" and no examples of modern translators being martyred — I'd like to point out, these were two men who lived during a time when people in English speaking countries were being martyred, as opposed to the modern translators who did not.
- The KJV brought us the Protestant Reformation, gospel songs, the Great Awakening, and Spurgeon's sermons, while the modern translations brought us the Charismatic Movement, Benny Hinn and Christian rock music.
- "The fact that KJV people tend to be different from other people" (p. 34). KJV churches as well, because "generally when you find a church which practices the twofold Scriptural admonitions of soulwinning and separation, it will be a King James church" (p. 35), soulwinning and separation being terms commonly used by independent Baptist churches to describe specific methods of witnessing and relating to worldly influences. Since the preference of the KJV is also a defining characteristic of independent Baptist churches, what this particular point boils down to is essentially the circular argument that "the KJV is proven to be superior by the fact that people who share our particular set of doctrines believe it is superior."

I list all of the above points in an attempt to demonstrate the pervasive factual bias and logical problems in Pastor Nichols' booklet, however well intentioned; for the reasons I listed, I cannot accept Pastor Nichols' argument.

The second book I was asked to review, New Age Bible Versions by G. A. Riplinger, turned out not to be written in defense of the KJV as the only valid English translation after all. Instead, that is the author's premise as she attempts to demonstrate that the translators of modern Bible versions were operating in collusion with Satanists and New Age religions to corrupt Christianity in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist. I'll simply be honest and say that I have not finished and never intend to finish reading this book. A reliable witness was in the room when I first began to read it, and can attest to my increasingly dumbfounded comments regarding not the point of the author's argument (though I do disagree with her), but rather the utter subjectivity and painstaking misrepresentation with which she goes about attempting to prove it; past the first hundred pages or so I have only skimmed.

The book is filled with highly selective, fragmented, out of context quotes from various theologians and translators whom the author wishes to represent as having the same views as Satanists and New Age spiritualists (often "proving" her point through the mere coincidence of two writers having used the same word or phrase), and for a book that on its cover calls itself an "Exhaustive Documentation", said documentation is surprisingly sparse. Pages of tables containing comparisons between words that the KJV uses and words that modern versions use are either completely devoid of references to the verses being compared, or else do not specify which of the numerous modern versions the author is arguing against contains the textual difference she is pointing out.

Of the many examples I will list only one before moving on to my next source: on page 17 is a table of word comparisons that implies that the modern versions strip explicit mentions of God from the Bible for the purpose of "preparing mankind to receive the Antichrist and 'worship the dragon'". One example she lists is Matthew 22:32, in which she claims the KJV uses the word "God" where the modern versions use "He". She is in fact correct in this, as you can see in the verse as quoted in full from the KJV and the NIV:

Matthew 22:32 (KJV)
I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Matthew 22:32 (NIV)
'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.

As you can see, the KJV does in fact use "God" where the NIV uses "He"; however the author either didn't notice the four other occurrences of the word "God" in both translations of the verse, or deliberately chose not to mention them. Neither did she point out that never at any point in the verse from the NIV was the identity of God in doubt. I am confident in calling this example a representative sample of the author's methodology.

For a much more educated evaluation of this book, I recommend the review written by Dr. S. E. Schnaiter in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal.

The third and final source is an article titled Why the King James Version?, written by Dr. Charles V. Turner of the Baptist Bible Translators Institute. Dr. Turner states that the KJV is "the most accurate and reliable translation in the English language today" (p. 4) and "the only translation in the English language that is free from the presuppositions of modern Gnosticism [referring to modern textual criticism]" (p. 19). He argues this based on the Greek text from which the KJV is translated, the Textus Receptus (Received Text). Dr. Turner describes the origin of the documents that make up the Textus Receptus as follows:

"The letters and books of the New Testament began to be copied and passed around to other churches in the first, second and third centuries. Of course, in the copying of these books and letters, there were small errors made in the copying. ... but it was always a simple matter to correct an errant text by comparing it with the faithful inerrant copies held in trust by many faithful churches. This brought the errant copies back to the standard set by the original text. The only thing the churches had to do was check with several other churches and find out what the reading was in the other church copies. By doing this, the churches insured [sic] a valid text, and by this means, the text was preserved in its original form." (p. 6)

He describes a collection of "faithful inerrant" documents copied and recopied through a "simple, but completely accurate method" (p. 9), that is, "the checking of manuscripts with those of other faithful churches to insure [sic] that the text was transmitted without error" (p. 15). Dr. Turner offers the reader two choices:

"It comes down to two choices: accept the text handed down by faithful churches for two thousand years or accept the findings of modern textual critics, no two of which fully agree." (p. 13)

"He declared that his words would not pass away. We have his promise on it. We may believe Jesus or the textual critic whose basic assumption is that the New Testament is hopelessly corrupted." (p. 19)

The second point he argues based on Matthew 5:18, saying, "In this verse, Jesus declares that it is easier for heaven and earth to be destroyed than it is for the smallest part of a letter of Scripture to be destroyed."(p. 19) Letter for letter preservation is a very specific reading of that verse and one which, in the context of Matthew 5, I don't think applies.

Allow me to explain where I believe the flaw is in Dr. Turner's larger argument. Dr. Turner repeatedly refers to a majority of texts that agree with each other, and states that this majority of texts matches the original text "without error". This implies that there is a large collection of documents on which the KJV is based that exactly match each other word for word, which would make any attempt by modern scholars to alter that text very objectionable indeed. However, his implication is simply not true. We do have a very large collection of Greek documents substantiating the text and in the majority they do agree, but it is in the majority of each document's text that they agree, not as a majority of complete documents. What we in fact have, and indeed what was available when the Textus Receptus was first compiled, is a vast collection of documents, no two of which are exactly identical in their texts; all have minor variations from the others.

This leads me to the second point on which I have to disagree with Dr. Turner: in the quote above, Dr. Turner argues against "the textual critic whose basic assumption is that the New Testament is hopelessly corrupted." He takes the academic term "corrupt" to mean that the message of the text has been altered or damaged; in fact what the textual critic means by that term is very different. Dr. S. E. Schnaiter addresses this in the review I linked to above, saying about the difference between "pure" and "corrupt" in textual criticism:

"There is a purity with regard to the wording of a text that is different from the purity of the message. This merely recognizes that the same thing can be said reliably in more than one way. For example, there is no effect on the meaning of a statement like 'she denied her daughter permission to go,' if the wording is altered to read 'she refused to permit her daughter to go.' For a textual researcher who is trying to determine which of those was the original wording of a particular author, it is a question of wording purity. He may thereby refer to one text as 'corrupt' and the other as 'pure' without reference to the substance of the passage." (p. 113-114 in the published journal, p. 9-10 as numbered in the linked PDF)

I highly recommend reading Dr. Schnaiter's article for his description of the textual criticism process and the topic of preservation in general, which he describes much better than I, and in much more detail. Returning to my point, the textual critic may consider a document "corrupt" when in actuality he is making a determination not about the meaning of the text but rather its precise wording. Dr. Turner presents us with a choice between a textually flawless (meaning word for word identical with each other and the original) majority of documents that does not exist, and another nonexistent collection of documents fundamentally altered in meaning by modern scholars.

We do not have a majority of documents that are in perfect agreement word for word with each other or with the originals, nor was such a majority in existence when the Textus Receptus was compiled and the KJV translated; that idea is historically and evidentially untenable. What does this mean for us about our ability to rely on Scripture as God's preserved word? Precisely this: we can trust that the compiled Greek texts we have today represent God's preserved word because while they do not agree with each other when compared on a word for word basis, they do agree in content, and there are no differences that affect major doctrine. This is the third alternative that Dr. Turner does not present: the great magnitude of historical documentation that we do have, a collection that is unprecedented (though still undeniably imperfect) in its textual consistency but more importantly, unaltered in meaning. I will conclude by referring to Dr. Schnaiter once again:

"God has not seen fit to indicate to us in any objectively verifiable manner which of the various manuscripts exhibits the one true text. Since none of the autographs exists (a point which no one disputes) and since, as far as one can discern from the textual evidence, there does not exist any single, absolutely flawless copy of the autographs, it may be justly concluded that God is satisfied that His Word remains undisturbed amidst those variants." (p. 112 in the journal, p. 8 in the PDF)

Google Fun, Part 2

2008-09-06T18:10:00.005-05:00

I have been trying out the new Google browser this week. I'm actually liking it. It has some new features I like — the "Omnibox," the automatic assimilation of search boxes from other sites and the ability to drag and drop tabs, to name a few — and it lacks most of the annoyances that other non-IE browsers have. Namely, that Firefox and Safari take four or five times longer than IE to open (Google Chrome is even faster than IE) and they both have numerous little UI quirks that just make my life harder. Google Chrome is different from IE in big ways, but still keeps enough of the IE-like behavior I prefer — at first glance, the better parts of both worlds.

One potential issue I haven't experimented too much with yet is the fact that Google Chrome is based on the same rendering engine that Safari is based on. Hopefully the Google team have managed to avoid creating the same kind of intellectually challenged rendering I have so much enjoyed coding around for Safari.

As with every new Google product, experimentation turns my mind to thoughts of analytics, and Google Analytics is always good for an hour or so of entertainment. Highlights from the keywords that have brought visitors to my blog in the past month:

blockbuster movies that were duds (another number one listing)
nuclear total destruction
outer space trip report (I'm second, but I'm right above a listing for this blog — which, coincidentally, I just rediscovered a couple days ago when I was digging through old links — by a guy who actually has been to outer space...or at least he played someone who did on TV. Language alert, though.)

Proximity and Priority

2008-09-02T21:53:00.010-05:00

This post is a quick addendum to this earlier post. A friend of mine suggested that I make a point that was implicit in the earlier post a bit more explicit by, well, explicating a bit.

Specifically, the implicit point was this: I categorize doctrines into groups by importance. Perhaps that sounds bad to some of you; maybe you'll forgive me if I humbly suggest that you do it too. For instance, if someone came up to you with a gun, pointed it at your head and said, "Admit the possibility that the rapture may happen at the end of the tribulation rather than the beginning or the middle, or I will shoot you in the head." — would you cry as Patrick Henry did, "Give me premillenialism, or give me death!" or would you simply admit the possibility? I would do the latter because, on that particular doctrinal question, I'm not particularly sold either way and, more importantly, I don't think it affects whether or not you are a Christian.

Basically, I break my categories down like this:

Doctrines that indicate whether or not you are a Christian: doctrines in this category are pretty vital, and include things like God is Trinity, Jesus Christ is fully man and fully Divine, salvation is by faith alone, the authority of Scripture, etc.. If you and I disagree on doctrines in this category, then you and I do not worship the same God, and if you and I do not worship the same God, then we are not both Christians: we need to sit down and have a conversation.

Doctrines that indicate which church you should go to: these are doctrines like Calvinism, infant baptism, church government and the role of women in ministry. They are important to a lot of people and if you have a strong disagreement with a particular church on one of these issues, perhaps you should join a different church — none of the doctrines I place in this category affect whether or not you are a Christian.

Doctrines that indicate whether you are trying too hard: I hesitate to call these doctrines, but I will for the sake of consistency. Doctrines falling into this category include __millenialism, styles of music, and flavors of fried chicken (if you're a Baptist). If you get into an argument about any of these issues, then you're probably in sore need of a vacation.

A Survey of Film History, Parts V-XI; Also, Enthusiasm for Points and Points for Enthusiasm

2008-08-17T21:00:00.007-05:00

The ghosts of cinema past haven't finished making their point yet:

Stage Door (1937) - has charm, a good performance by Kathryn Hepburn and the unexpected (by me) bonus of Lucille Ball in a supporting role.

The Thief of Baghdad (1924) - the earliest film on my list, and the second of only two silent films. It made number 9 on AFI's list of the Top 10 Fantasy movies. Overall, a good movie, and the special effects are impressive for the time. However, it lacks the skill of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) - a thriller starring Humphrey Bogart. It made #31 on AFI's top 100 films of all time, and #6 on their Top 10 Mysteries. It didn't turn out to be exactly what I was expecting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good movie.

Woman of the Year (1942), Holiday (1938) - two more Kathryn Hepburn movies; it's not a coincidence, she's the one actor I looked up by name when building this list. Woman of the Year was fairly good (with an extremely funny kitchen scene) but the ending lacked; of the two, I enjoyed Holiday much more. There are two categories of stage-to-screen adaptations: those directed like stage plays, and those directed like movies; Holiday falls into the former category, but doesn't really suffer for it.

It Happened One Night (1934) - starring Clark Gable, it made AFI's Top 10 Romantic Comedies (#3), Top 100 romances (#38) and Top 100 Movies (#46), and was also the first movie to win all of the five major Oscars: Best Movie, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay. I divide romances into three categories, in descending order: Films, Chick Flicks and Girl Movies. To list examples would be to admit that I have seen movies that fall into the Girl Movie category; I'll simply say that It Happened One Night is a Film. Recommended. Clark Gable also starred in the next movie on my list:

Gone With the Wind (1939) - although nearly four hours long, I found this movie surprisingly short. The historical aspects were interesting, some of the plot points less so. Of the ending, I will simply say: weak, very weak. On a scale from "Girl Movie" to "Recommended", this movie gets a "Worth Watching Once".

I surprised myself this week by getting very interested in the Olympics. The first hour of the opening ceremony was supreme artistry (watch the entire hour here), and on a couple of occasions I found myself involuntarily talking to the TV: first, during Alexander Artemev's pommel horse routine in the men's Gymnastics prelims (view the same routine from a different night here, at about 4:17) when he kept the US team in the running for a team medal — not once, but twice — and second, during the last few seconds of Michael Phelps' seventh gold medal race — the one he won by 0.01 seconds (view coverage here; watch the whole first four minutes of the video, including his mother's reaction). Sadly, NBC's obsession with Michael Phelps was also one of the low points of their Olympic coverage, as they insisted on asking every US gold medal swimmer how they felt about Phelps' performance, and even characterized the relay team's gold medal performace as being "for Michael" — to their faces.

Not quite so Olympian were the feats of advertising that went on in between the interesting stuff, the most outstanding example of which was a commercial for a certain electric company. The commercial featured a spokesperson who "loves to read" — an admirable trait to be sure, but she listed her three favorite genres as follows: "fiction, non-fiction, and autobiographies about people."

That reminds me: I'd like to point out that my favorite things to eat are food, beverages, and pineapples that are fruit. And if I can contrive to eat them while reading an autobiography about a pineapple, all the better.

Convenience

2008-08-02T07:02:00.004-05:00

As I was getting ready for work this morning, I heard my cats making the noises they only make when there is something to chase. Upon investigating, I discovered that what they were so interested in was the two inch long cockroach that had crawled in under the front door. Taking advantage of the distraction I provided, it ran and hid — under the heel of a shoe.

Problem solved.

"You know, that's actually a misconception," replied the voice of experience, "the third time is actually not the charm."

2008-07-28T21:27:00.005-05:00

Yeah, it happened again. Apparently the word "fix" acquires a more liberal definition within a thirty foot radius of my apartment.

On the other hand, the fact that there is water all over my kitchen and office means that those caked-on footprints have had plenty of time to soak.

There are hard water stains on the light bulbs in my ceiling fan.

Even if the third time is the charm, I'd rather not find out.

2008-07-26T22:50:00.009-05:00

Take a moment to look at the Before & After image above. Now, imagine a light fixture exactly like the "Before", except filled with tea-colored water and soggy chunks of drywall, and swinging on a three foot long wire below the "After", distributing the aforementioned water and chunks in wide arcs all across my kitchen. The sound of that event beginning is what woke me up this morning five minutes before my alarm went off.

In order to explain, I will have to back up. At about 1:45 this morning, I was roused from my bed by an all too familiar sound: rain. Coming out of the ceiling fan above my desk. Yes, again. I rescued my chair and my computer (again), distributed buckets and towels (again) and proceeded to call the emergency maintenance line (again). There was no one upstairs, so I couldn't turn off whatever was leaking until the maintenance guy showed up. The recording said I would be called in an hour, so I waited, and while waiting, fell asleep. I woke several times, but no call.

Eventually, one of the light fixtures in the kitchen gave up the ghost and fell out of the ceiling. I went out into the kitchen/office/living room and found that not only was there dirty water and fragments of drywall everywhere in the kitchen, but every single drywall seam in the ceiling was highlighted by a water stain, and water was dripping from two additional places in the ceiling as well as forming a six inch diameter bubble behind the paint on the wall. (I also found out later that water was leaking out of the bottom of the wall in my closet, and that my closet door is now unwilling to open when closed and equally unwilling to close again once opened.)

I called the maintenance line (again). Finally, after six hours the maintenance guy showed up only to reveal that the line to the ice machine in the refrigerator upstairs had broken (again). Yes, the same one they "fixed" before. I was delighted to see a six foot diameter puddle patiently waiting to proceed downstairs into my apartment. Maintenance guy leaves, maintenance guy returns half an hour later with a shop vac and cleans up the puddle, maintenance guy cuts down the light fixture in the kitchen, maintenance guy leaves. His parting words? "Some one will come on Monday to paint."

If anybody needs me, I'll be spending tomorrow in my apartment cleaning up the boot-shaped patches of drywall that are everywhere in my apartment.

Aged to Imperfection

2008-07-19T00:47:00.012-05:00

I have a fascination with old books. Whenever I go to Half Price Books, the one section I have to visit is the Nostalgia section; in fact, on a couple of occasions lately it has been the reason I go in the first place. There's something about reading, for example, a 1927 leatherbound copy of Jane Eyre that just gives the work a different feel — literally (no pun intended) and figuratively — than reading the same text out of a shiny new $6.99 paperback from Barnes & Noble. (Not to mention that most of the time they're cheaper than a new book anyway.)

Most of the time if I end up buying anything it's because there's a particularly good copy of a book I know, but that's not always the case; sometimes I end up buying a book I have never heard of on the basis of some particular quality that captures my attention. In the case of Vagrant Viking, the autobiography of Peter Freuchen, it was the chapter titles:

Chapter XVIII: "I Did Not Manage to Leave Russia without Getting Arrested."

Chapter XXII: "I Confessed at Once, Explaining How the Human Heads Had Come into My Possession and Swearing I Had Played No Part in the Victims' Beheading."

Chapter XXVII: "I Was Cross-Examined for Hours, I Was Beaten, Slapped Across the Face with Wet Towels, and My Artificial Leg Was Taken Away."

In the case of Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson, it was the following dedication:

My Dear Sidney Colvin,

The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world, — all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,

R.L.S.

However, in the most unusual of cases, it is not the text of the book itself that so captures my attention that I cannot put it back on the shelf. Today for instance, I did not buy the 1852 edition of Dr. Martin Luther's Hauspostille because of anything it said, for the simple reason that it is written in German. No, sometimes something about the book tells a different story altogether:

The handprint is quite small; I can't help but try to imagine what the scene was 150 years ago when it was made by an infant whose great-grandchildren have by now died of old age.

Incidentally, in my brief research on this work, I ran across this quote from it:

"We should not be offended at God's Word, even if it sounds astonishing, false, and impossible, but we should firmly hold that if God has said it, it will of necessity come to pass. For no one should ask whether it is possible, but only make sure whether God has said it. If God said it, He is also mighty and truthful enough to do it. Therefore we should believe it. He who does not believe it, blasphemes God mightily. We should diligently guard ourselves against this sin of doubting God's Word (God grant it), no matter how full of lies it appears to be. For what God says is most certainly true."

A Survey of Film History, Parts II - IV; Also, The Preponderance of S

2008-07-06T14:44:00.011-05:00

Here begins my demonstration of the "approximately chronological" nature of my Blockbuster queue. In viewing order, I present:

The Lady Eve (1941), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. This was apparently one of the top ten films in the box office that year. It is described as a "screwball comedy," but I just didn't see it ("it" being the comedy, not the film). All in all, the film is a rather pedestrian affair; ironic, considering it's about an affair that begins on a cruise ship and ends on a train.

City Lights (1931), written and directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is notable for being one of only a few silent films released after "talkies" had become the norm; it was Chaplin's last silent film. It is also widely considered to be his best film, and it topped AFI's list of the top ten romantic comedies of all time. I can readily believe it; it's a work of art. Highly recommended.

Alice Adams (1935) is a simple and bittersweet but not outstanding romance, starring Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray. One line is a particular standout, and may in my mind justify Hepburn's Oscar nomination, but in all other respects this film gets a shrug and a "meh."

I have noticed this before in record and movie stores, and I noticed it again this weekend as I was going through my CDs trying to get rid of the ones I no longer listen to; it's a disturbing trend that appears to have been going on in the entertainment industry for quite some time now: there's a distinct bias toward artists and movies whose name begins with "S". Yes, that's right, the entertainment industry is letterist. Once I noticed it I had to find out for sure, and it turns out that of the artists whose albums I own, over 20% have names beginning with "S", and the same is true of the movies. Not only that, but movies with titles that begin with "S" are apparently also more likely to get sequels. Need proof? Spider-man, Superman, Star Wars and Star Trek are just four examples.

I smell a conspiracy, and it's people with speech impediments who are going to suffer for it.

Rationale and Rationality

2008-07-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

A topic has come up recently for a second time that I feel this time I am obligated to address. However, the rationale I am being presented with is such that I simply don't know how I should respond. That being the case, I have decided to start by taking a step back. I will explain what the topic in question is and what I think about it in a future post, but for now I think I need to discuss a larger, more general and more basic question: how do I discern which things are absolutely true?

I am a Christian. I am a very imperfect person very imperfectly serving a living, supreme and personal God who in His very nature defines perfection. He is triune, being Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He created and sustains all things that exist. All humans have sinned, and by sinning have earned the just punishment of eternal death. God in His mercy sent His Son to live the perfect life that we could not, atone for the sins we committed by His death on the cross, and through His resurrection redeem those who would believe into eternal life in His kingdom. God will absolutely never abandon those He has redeemed. The Bible is God's inspired word, the one and only sufficient and authoritative source of truth given to teach us about Himself, about how we can honor Him with our lives in response to the things He has done for us, and about how He has related to us in the past and will relate to us in the future. I hold these things (and more) to be absolutely true.

Why? Is it because the Bible says these things? The circular logic is immediately apparent: I believe that the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true. No, the true reason is deeper than that: I believe that the Bible is true because God has given me the faith to believe it. The faith that saves me allows me to hold steadfast to the truth that is written in the word He has given us.

Believing then that the Bible is the one sufficient and authoritative source of truth given to us by God, where does that leave everything else that is known or believed (including things about which the Bible says nothing explicit), and how am I to judge things that claim to be absolutely true? In regards to (extra-scriptural) prophecy, the Bible says, "Test everything. Hold on to the good." (1 Thes. 5:21) The same is true of all knowledge, as any scientist can tell you. Everything that is known or believed that is not directly contained in the Bible is known or believed as a result of observation and judgment, and must be tested. When something is claimed as a moral or doctrinal truth, we should hold to it only as firmly as it can be proven by Scripture; when something is claimed to be absolutely true, it must be absolutely proven by Scripture — anything less and it is simply a conclusion, an opinion. To say it another way, the truth or falseness of a statement is never partial, but the degree to which we are certain of either may be, unless it is based on explicit Scripture.

Being Christians does not free us from the need for logic or rationality; instead it corrects the basis on which we make our judgments and the means by which we make them. Seek the truth, seek wisdom and understanding — it's what we are called to do as Christians.

Proverbs 23:23
Buy the truth and do not sell it;
get wisdom, discipline and understanding.

Open Casket

2008-07-04T15:39:00.002-05:00

I didn't get to this before one of the cats sat on them, so they look even worse than before.

Hydration

2008-06-29T22:38:00.001-05:00

A Survey of Film History, Part I of LXXX-something; Also, Public Display of Hostility

2008-06-22T01:57:00.009-05:00

The recommendations feature of the Blockbuster online rental service is very nearly useless — at least in my case. A significant portion of the movies they recommend to me are movies I have already rated (i.e., already seen). Another useless feature is the "Don't show me this movie again" level in the rating system; it apparently has no bearing on whether you will actually avoid seeing on the site again, as a number of these show up in my recommendations as well (which makes the "We think you'll like..." heading on the recommendations page more than a little ironic). The saving grace of the Blockbuster online rental service is their vast library.

Last week, after having received no useful recommendations in recent months and seeing that my queue had 7 movies remaining, I went through a number of AFI "Top 100" lists and "Top 10" lists (which inexplicably had different contents than the top ten of the "Top 100" lists), as well as the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" list and added anything I hadn't seen that was major or sounded interesting to my queue. The end result: my queue now contains an additional 80+ movies (yes, 80 out of over 1000) ranging from 1924 to 1989 which I will be watching in a sequence that will approximate chronological order, some or most of which I may have something to say about.

Somehow, first up was a light comedy produced in 1938 called Bringing Up Baby. Starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, it was a rather spectacular box office failure at the time, and came near the end of a string of unsuccessful movies that actually succeeded in putting Katharine Hepburn out of work for a short time. However, it is now considered a classic and has made a number of "Top X Movies of All Time" lists, including #14 on AFI's Top 100 Comedies. Well, they were right. I think I laughed more at this movie than I have at the past five recent comedies that I have seen combined. Katharine Hepburn was fantastic and, well, I never knew Cary Grant was funny. Very entertaining and definitely recommended.

The following glimpse into the seedy underworld of grocery store clerking was being (unintentionally?) broadcast over the loudspeakers to the entire parking lot as I exited Tom Thumb tonight:

Female Voice: "— called you five minutes ago and you haven't answered my question yet. All I wanted to know is whether there are any plastic bags back there so, are there any plastic bags back there?"
Male Voice (thirty seconds later): "Tiffany, 10 minutes is all I ask.

Ah, such angst. A series of bleeps followed, but I think it was a phone being dialed, not anything actually being censored.

The Torments of a Somewhat-Blind Man, Episode II: The Landlord Strikes Back; Or, Adventures in Property Management

2008-06-16T19:41:00.007-05:00

I got evicted this weekend. It's OK though, because I went and knocked over all their bikes and said, "You better take it back!" and they did.

Alright, so that's not exactly how it happened. Read on.

I got home from work at about 6:20 on Friday and found a letter in my mailbox from the property managment company that owns my building. The letter was written mostly in capital letters and said that because I had an upaid balance of $406.00, I was required to vacate the premises within three days. This was rather surprising, given the fact that sometime last year they required all of their residents to sign up for automatic debits, thus taking me out of the loop altogether. The note held out one ray of hope: "HOWEVER, IF YOU WISH TO DISCUSS REINSTATEMENT OF YOUR RIGHT TO CONTINUE LIVING IN THE DWELLING, PLEASE CONTACT US." Contact them I did, only to find that anyone remotely important went home at 6:00. When would they be back? "Maybe Saturday. If not, then definitely Monday."

I proceeded to leave voicemail messages for several different people demanding (alright, requesting) an explanation, and sending an email to another, making a point of noting in each message that the first I had heard of any problem was an eviction notice. I repeated the process on Saturday, only to find that the person who sent me the letter on Wednesday was no longer employed there on Saturday. As my friend and I both said, "Hmmm, that's telling."

Cut to Monday morning at 9:30. My fourth attempt to get ahold of someone led to the following conversation:

Landlord's Employee #1: "It looks like they just charged you some month-to-month fees when they shouldn't have. I'll take those off and send you a copy of the ledger showing a zero balance."
Me, very doubtful: "Zero? Are you sure?"
Landlord's Employee #1: "Yes, I'm sure."
Me: "Any idea why no one contacted me earlier about this problem? The first I heard of it was the eviction notice."
Landlord's Employee #1: "Yeah, we don't have a 'friendly' letter. The one you got is the only one we send out."

Imagine my shock to find that the all-caps (paraphrasing) "GET OUT OR WE'LL BUTCHER YOUR FINANCIAL FUTURE" note wasn't the "friendly" letter. Think that's the end of it? No? I guess the "#1" gave it away. Well, five minutes later, one of the people I had left a voicemail for called me back, and we had the following conversation:

Landlord's Employee #2: "Well, since you never signed a new lease, you have to pay a $100.00 month-to-month fee."
Me, not very surprised to be having this conversation: "Actually, I did sign a new lease in February, and I have a copy. In fact, when I signed it and turned it in in February, I gave it to you."
Landlord's Employee #2: "Oh really? Well, let me look then." [Pause while she did the research she evidently didn't do before.] "Yeah, here it is. OK, then it looks like they just charged you some month-to-month fees when they shouldn't have. I'll take those off, and then you'll have a balance of $6.00."
Me, very doubtful (again): "$6.00?"
Landlord's Employee #2: "Yes, $6.00."
Me, playing along: "OK, where is the $6.00 coming from?"
Landlord's Employee #2: "Let me see. When you signed your new lease your rent went up and your utilities went up so, yeah, that's where the $103.00 is coming from."
Me, tasting bittersweet vindication: "Wait, $103.00?"
Landlord's Employee #2: "Yes, $103.00. They billed you incorrectly in May and June."
Me: "How about I drive over to your office and we can take care of this there?"

I had anticipated this outcome over the weekend, so I had two blank checks with me (sorry, you're too late, you should have mugged me sooner). Twenty minutes later, after I finished filling out a new auto-debit form, Landlord's Employee #2 and I had the following conversation:

Me: "So, how much do I need to write the check for?"
Landlord's Employee #2: "$96.00."
Me, no longer even slightly surprised: "You're sure?" (The last thing I wanted was to get evicted again in August for having a $7.00 balance.)
Landlord's Employee #2: "Yes, $96.00. She credited you a little extra."

For future reference, judging from the copy of the ledger they sent over later, "She credited you a little extra" is apparently property manager code for, "She didn't actually credit you a little extra, I just didn't want to have to admit to having done the math wrong again."

And, scene.

In case you were wondering, no, my ex-optometrist Dr. ______ still hasn't gotten me my new glasses.

The Torments of a Somewhat-Blind Man; Also, Adventures in Formatting. And Spelling. And Punctuation. And...

2008-05-30T20:35:00.015-05:00

My glasses passed away on Wednesday. I was cleaning them, and — twang. I super-glued them with super-glue that turned out not to be such super glue after all: it fell apart. They are now held together with electrical tape, but sit at a slight angle so that it is uncomfortable to look through them for long periods of time. And they cause people to burst into sudden fits of laughter when I am seen wearing them. To make a long story short, I took a long lunch today and visited an optometrist.

My last visit to the optometrist involved a glaucoma test that required me to remain still while a javelin-like device approached and made physical contact with my cornea, but thankfully today's glaucoma test was of the much less Olympian air-puff variety. The eye exam commenced with me being handed a spatula and asked to cover my left eye and read the writing on the wall; unsure of which blurry white block I was supposed to be reading, I simply replied that I couldn't read any of it. The optometrist informed me that I was looking in the wrong place and made an adjustment, but still nothing. We repeated the process several times with growing consternation on his part until finally he said, "I'm sorry, you're supposed to be wearing your glasses for this test." We continued on through an explanation of why he considered it good business to ask personal questions of his patients and advice on budget-conscious menu selections at Maggiano's Little Italy. As we began determining my new prescription he asked, "Can you read that?" and, once again, I had to reply, "No." "No?" he asked, surprised. "No," I replied, "I'm sorry, but your head is in the way." It all worked out well in the end, and I should have my new glasses in 7-10 days.

As if all of this wasn't excitement enough, the optometrist's office also introduced me today to a document so spectacular that I cannot help but wonder at its origins. It is the optometrist's Notice of Privacy Practices, and each and every fascinating line of it so fills me with wonderment that I actually kept and read it. Oh, you doubting Thomases, must you see to believe? Very well, here it is, "de-identified" (click for a larger view):

What, you ask, are the particular spectacularities this document has to offer? I give you a brief selection:

On the third line begins a sentence that reads in full: "THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW MEDICAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAYBE [sic] USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION." I dare you to find all of it. I double-dare you not to laugh.
The entire document is so completely centered that it actually serves to emphasize the only element on the page that isn't: the web address.
I point this out separately because I had no idea it was even possible: the second set of bullet points is both centered and justified (each point at different widths), and at least two paragraphs are centered, justified and first-line-indented.
The apparent disdain on the part of the author for the period, and a compensating affection for the comma, even at the end of paragraphs.
Even excluding the words following the rejected periods, the apparent randomness of capitalization almost makes me want to pull out all of the capitalized letters to see if they spell out a secret message. Included (mid-sentence) are a number of instances of the words "You", "Your" and "We", at least one instance each of the words "To", "And/or" and "For", and the following phrase used as a complete sentence: "For Public health Purposes."
Some typos that may actually introduce legal problems, for instance in the following sentence: "We respect your legal obligation to keep health information that identifies you private." Speaking from five years of experience in the medical insurance field, I am not sure that HIPAA would agree with the substitution of the word "your" for "our".
The misspelling in one instance of "Notice of Privacy Practices" as "Notice or Privacy, Practice".
A pretty jim-dandy use of the word "fur".

On a side note, please let me know which you prefer: one of my new designs, or this (not designed by me). Make sure you have your speakers on when you pull it up. As the site says, view it in Internet Explorer for full effect.

Not everyone at Walden Media thinks you're stupid.

2008-05-18T08:48:00.002-05:00

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian works too.

Walden Media think you're stupid; the Wachowskis are just inconsistent.

2008-05-10T16:54:00.008-05:00

I'll start with the good news: the Wachowskis are inconsistent. I am of course referring to Larry and Andy Wachowski, the writer/director/producers of The Matrix, a thoroughly entertaining movie and groundbreaking at the time (nine years ago?!). However, they are also the writer/director/producers of its unfortunate (for us) sequels and, to the great indifference of nearly everyone, the writer/producers of V for Vendetta. The inconsistency is this: I just saw their latest movie, and I was thoroughly entertained. Is it ridiculous? Yes. A little cheesy? Sure. Gaudy? Yeah. Really, really over-the-top? Oh yes. But it works in a way that no other movie has so far this year. Don't know what movie I'm talking about?

Speed Racer.

I'll wait while you recover. Done? Sure, it's a movie based on a cartoon, and it looks like an LSD-trip, but it has a genuine, beating heart that had me smiling involuntarily within the first three minutes. Here's the clip that first made me wonder if this movie could actually be good:

Incidentally, it also uses contextually relevant flashbacks to an extent that is ironic only because the movie co-stars Matthew Fox.

Now for the bad news: Walden Media really do think you're stupid. Last year they released a movie called "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising", based on the book "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper. I first read the book seventeen years ago, and it is, along with the other books in the series (it's actually the second in the series), one of the few books I read as a kid that I still enjoy now. It is set in England sometime in the 60's or 70's, and is about Will Stanton, a British boy who on his eleventh birthday discovers that he is the last of the Old Ones, and will play a key role in the final battle against the Dark. Judging by the movie that was actually produced, however, Walden Media thinks you're too stupid to get that story. Here's a partial list of improvements made:

Will Stanton is an American living in England. (Americans won't pay to see fantasy movies about British kids.)
It's set in the modern day, and includes an extended scene in a mall. (To make American kids feel more at home.)
There's a ~16-year-old love interest for Will.
Will is 14. (Presumably so that they can make his attraction for his love interest sexual without it being too icky.)
A deep, dark family secret.
A long-lost twin. (No, I'm not kidding.)
Lots of action sequences.
And on...
And on...

I'm going to stop before it sounds like I'm ranting. I'm not against book-to-movie adaptations; I'm not even against book-to-movie adaptations that make significant foundational changes to the storyline (remember the Bourne trilogy?). I'm simply against changes that try to cater to an imaginary audience that is dumber than the audience that actually exists, and against changes that result in a movie that is just plain bad.

Textual Criticism

2008-04-30T23:23:00.004-05:00

The textual critic seeks to determine the original text of a document or a collection of documents, which the critic believes to come as close as possible to a lost original (called the archetype), or some other version of a text as it existed—or was intended to exist—in the past.
— Wikipedia, Textual criticism

If you have been wondering why my posting has decreased from 2-3 posts per week to 2-3 posts per month over the past several months, perhaps the following may pass for something resembling an explanation.

The meaningful part of my title at work is "Programmer Analyst." People who have asked me that before often follow up with, "Oh. What's that?" The "programmer" part is easy: I build "stuff". ("Stuff" varies, and may be anything from database queries to web pages.) The "analyst" part is somewhat more complicated.

One of our major projects at work over the past few months has been a complete redesign/refurbishment of our account management website. What that basically means is that in 5-6 months we are trying to rearrange, update and in some cases completely rebuild hundreds of thousands of lines of code that are the result of seven years of continuous development by several dozen programmers. That's where the analysis comes in. In order to rearrange, update and rebuild without misplacing or breaking functionality along the way, we first have to determine what exactly the existing code does when and why, as well as what it is supposed to do (in rare cases those are two different things). Determining every last detail of what the code is intended to do gets exceedingly complex when dealing with code that has been worked on by a number of different programmers with different styles, different goals and different levels of familiarity with the languages involved. So, for instance, the process I started rebuilding a week ago started out as about 4-5,000 lines of code, became 10-15 pages of handwritten notes and a carefully drawn, labeled and color-coded whiteboard diagram and, hopefully, will in the end become 500-1,000 lines of brand new C#.

It doesn't happen without a lot of work though, and that leaves little time for much of anything that might inspire a post. On the other hand, all of the above is exactly the part of my job I enjoy most; I'm not obsessive, I'm Analytical Analytical.*

*Never heard of Wilson Social Styles? This guy I don't know apparently falls into the same category as me, and has a pretty good explanation on his blog. The usual disclaimer for these situations applies: I take no responsibility and make no promises for any other content that may be on his blog beyond the page I linked to.

Reading Rainbow

2008-04-28T02:31:00.013-05:00

Tonight I finally finished reading The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis. I think I probably started it sometime around the beginning of December. I can offer no reason why it took me so long to read 141 pages, other than that is simply my habit. Sometime last fall I went around my apartment and gathered up all of the books that were laying around, individually and in piles, on shelves, desks, chairs, various parts of the floor and even in my bed into three piles: fiction books I had already started reading, fiction books I had not started reading yet, and non-fiction books. The piles were actually of nearly equal height, which could be measured in feet (or perhaps only foot). Now at the end of April I have whittled the two fiction piles down to five books, all of which I have already started — though when I will finish them, I cannot begin to guess. The dynamic nature of my piles is such that even though I returned six or so partially-read books to the shelf (a reluctant gesture of defeat) and returned half a dozen never-to-be-started books to Half Price Books, I made up for them by reading the seven most recent Jack McDevitt books and the Fire of Heaven trilogy by Russel Kirkpatrick (and of course not finishing four of the remaining books which have been in the stack from the very beginning).

I think Jack McDevitt has by now earned the position of my favorite currently writing (and living) Sci-Fi author. I have read eleven of his books now, and while they are all easily digestible (in the literary sense, not the literal), they are also unfailingly entertaining. He also has a gift for describing scenes, painting vivid mental pictures with scant few words whose result is somehow greater than the sum of their parts.

Russel Kirkpatrick has earned the same post on the Fantasy side; his Fire of Heaven trilogy is a 1900-page epic (is that a redundancy?) that on the continuum of Fantasy sits about halfway between The Lord of the Rings and the reality of the Middle Ages. It's one of the more original works I have read in the Fantasy genre, in part because it is perhaps the only Fantasy work written in the last 50 years that doesn't include the words "elf" or "dwarf". It is also unusual in that its major theme draws parallels to Christian theology that are so strong as to be nearly allegorical. I emphasize the word nearly because the "Most High" in his novels differs from the Christian God in some subtle but important ways; however, his very thorough and matter-of-fact handling of a very Christian-like faith makes me curious as to what his beliefs actually are.

In any case, now that I have finally finished The Four Loves, next in the stack is another epic: John Calvin's two volume 1500-page Institutes of the Christian Religion, which has been waiting to be started for a few months. Perhaps I will have some (most likely confused) thoughts on it to post sometime.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). ... The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. ... Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. ... One knows nobody so well as one's "fellow." Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves.
....
The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be devoted to affairs!
....
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing — or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God — the buzzing cloud of flies around the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. ... Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.

— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Over-qualified

2008-03-24T21:25:00.003-05:00

Set-up: What do you get when you hire marketers straight out of law school?

Punchline: The following tagline seen today on a bottle of antibacterial hand soap:

Kills 99.9% of most of the germs that may make you sick.

Think about it for a second.

Here's what the tagline really means: "We are almost (but not quite) certain that the germs this soap manages to kill almost all of will outnumber the germs it has no effect on whatsoever, though the germs it does kill may or may not be the ones you were worried about in the first place."

Recommended Usage Level: Moderate (3-5 hours daily)

2008-03-22T19:23:00.004-05:00

I bought a new chair today. For some of you that will come as a terrible but not unwelcome shock; the rest of you will have no idea what the big deal is. To the latter, let me explain what distinguishes you from the former: you have never at any point in your life found yourself clinging for dear life to the desk in my apartment while trying to figure out how to disentangle yourself in a dignified manner from a chair that was apparently strongly disinclined to be sat upon. To the former, let me offer you this comfort, such as it is: you weren't the only one it happened to.

For myself, I would just like to say that it wasn't entirely my fault. The three wheels broke entirely of their own accord (one completely off, two only partially), and I am so used to it by now that I completely forget to warn guests. The fact that the chair broke in June, 2005 is completely irrelevant. I tried twice in those two and a half years to replace the chair, and I blame OfficeMax, Office Depot and Target for my failure to find a suitable replacement.

Today, however, I drove past the new Office Depot by my apartment, saw that they had finally opened for business, and decided to give them one last chance. As I looked at each of the chairs I noticed that each of them had in their attached list of features a line for "Recommended Usage Level." The majority were marked "Moderate (3-5 hours daily)", and all of the chairs over $500 were marked "Intensive (6+ hours daily)". Thinking that surely the rating couldn't be based on price alone, but on some determination of ergonomic comfort, I became increasingly curious to see what sort of chair would rate below "Moderate." I understood when finally I found it, the lone example, a poor pathetic thing diplomatically rated "Casual (0-3 hours daily)". I did not actually sit in it (a usage level that apparently falls within the manufacturer's recommended range), but I will describe it for you: it was copper. Half copper vinyl, half glittery copper-colored nylon mesh, with copper-colored metal accents and supports. I tried not to stare.

Much like shopping for baby toys, it didn't take me long after that to narrow down the set of chairs to the two (both rated "Moderate") that had any hope at all of being purchased, and I knew I had a winner when I sat in the second and apparently sat for so long without realizing it that a salesperson came and offered his help. I am pleased to say that twice tonight I have sat in this chair without unconsciously searching with my foot to rotate the missing wheel to the front. I definitely should have thought of this sooner.

Confessions of the Lame Uncle

2008-03-16T21:35:00.009-05:00

Barely more than six months, and already I have made myself a liar. I have already broken the commitment I set forth in this previous post: I bought an electronic toy that says "I love you." Can I consider it a mitigating factor that I at least bought the abomination for someone else's child, not my own? Or is that worse? Please, put away the millstones; I'll try not to let it happen again. That's what I get for not playing with the toy enough in the store.

Here comes the "Lame Uncle" part: I buy educational toys as gifts. Worse, I have an established methodology for doing so. I go to the toy section and find the educational toys; the ones that teach the most stuff (no, I'm not kidding) get a 5 second auditon. If I can turn on the toy and listen to it for more than 5 seconds without experiencing feelings of emptiness and despair or a desire to flee or wash my hands repeatedly, the toy goes on the "Toys I Might Consider Buying for a Child of Someone I Like" list. That's usually a pretty short list; in case I ever end up with two items on that list, I'm sure eenie-meenie-minie-moe will suffice. (Thus my as yet not entirely proven Forest's First Law of Inanimate Objects: "No two electronic baby toys are not abominations.")

What helps out a lot however, is that apparently education is such a big thing now that nearly every toy attempts to market itself as educational and has a list on its package of things it can teach your child. Some of my favorite examples of toys that just plain try too hard to be educational (the names of the brands and toys have been indecipherably altered to protect innocent children from receiving these toys as gifts):

The Tadpole Laugh'n'Learn Electronic Telephone: it teaches your child letters, numbers and "Wacky Sounds". (Really, what child do you know of who needs to be taught to make or recognize wacky sounds?)

The Tiny Tots Farmer Brown Farm Set: it teaches your child "Imagination". (I actually have nothing against molded plastic livestock as long as Bessie isn't programmed to express undying affection for me, but a plain brown cardboard box rates higher in the "Teaches Imagination" category. Cue the "When I was young, all we had were rocks with the word 'cow' written on them in chalk..." speech.)

The B-Tech Abomination Puppy: this plush atrocity teaches your child "friendship by asking for hugs and expressing affection". And it says "I love you."

I think I now know what I'm getting my nephew this year: a rock, a piece of chalk, a cardboard box, a raspberry, and "I love you."

On a side note, here is proof, taken from a letter accompanying an application to be a Student Athletic Trainer, that two wrongs do make a right (almost):

"To be apart of the ______ High School Athletic Program is to be apart of something greater!"

Looking Upward at a Downward Spiral

2008-03-08T18:50:00.004-06:00

Re-found this in my archive today, and wondered if I could resuscitate it in black and white. This is of the spiral ramp you descend when leaving the Vatican Museum. I am surprised to say that this was taken a year and a half ago.

Cutting Edge Reporting

2008-02-22T22:21:00.004-06:00

From the news network that brought us this genius tidbit now comes the stunning revelation that the TV show Lost isn't real.

You can read the full story here, but be warned that it contains major spoilers for seasons 3 and 4.

[Note: I post this link with the assumption that if you and your spouse are about to borrow season 3 from me, neither you nor your spouse will click the link until six days after you have borrowed it, by which time I am sure you will be done.]

When Cats Destroy the World

2008-02-15T02:00:00.003-06:00

Quotes of the Week

2008-02-10T14:45:00.000-06:00

"SHUT UP HIPPY!"

— From a bumper sticker demonstrating the maturity and professionalism of the Young Conservatives of Texas.

"When God tolerates evil Pastor Bowen Feb 18"

— From a church sign whose complete lack of punctuation may cause problems for some readers.

"El Paso is closer to California than it is to Dallas"

— From a billboard whose only purpose seems to be pure state pride (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course). I find it illuminating that the city of Dallas is placed on the same level of the geographic hierarchy as the entire state of California.

"Eww, gross. Give me your napkin."

— My mom, after discovering she had accidentally come into contact with ketchup at the Fort Worth Zoo. In fact, I don't blame her a bit: what they were passing off as ketchup would be more accurately described as a paste than a sauce; suffice it to say, peanut butter now has competition in the "Extra Crunchy" and "Sticks to the Roof of Your Mouth" categories.

"If a man’s from Texas, he’ll tell you. If he’s not, why embarrass him by asking?"

— For Dan, from a writer named John Gunther.

Pictures from the Fort Worth Zoo this weekend:

Nominees

2008-01-22T22:20:00.000-06:00

I'm rather pleased. My three favorite movies of last year have all been nominated for Oscars. In somewhat indeterminate order (they are all very different movies, so it's hard to rank them), the nominees are:

The Bourne Ultimatum

Achievement in Film Editing
Achievement in Sound Editing
Achievement in Sound Mixing

August Rush

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)

Ratatouille

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Achievement in Sound Editing
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Original Screenplay

I highly recommend all of these movies. August Rush isn't out on DVD yet, but give it a couple months.

Mystery

2008-01-21T23:24:00.000-06:00

Great talk from J.J. Abrams (creator/writer/producer/director of Lost, writer/director of Mission Impossible III and producer/director of the upcoming Star Trek movie) about the value of mystery in storytelling, among other things. It's about 18 minutes long.

Convenience, Alas, Is Dead.

2008-01-18T22:25:00.000-06:00

I drove past my usual movie theater at about 10:00 tonight, and it was dark. No lights, no cars. It is closed. This is the theater that in three years (sadly and ironically, to the exact day) I have never known to be sold out, even on opening night — which is probably why it is closed. Now the closest theater is the one that has been sold out three of the only four times I have tried to see a movie there (mainly because it seats less than half as many people at a time), which means that on occasion I may be forced to drive as far as the Valley View Mall. This is a travesty whose magnitude varies in direct proportion to your particular degree of inertia (not an insignificant consideration in my case).

Apparently it was sold, and will be replaced with a shopping center/apartment complex. I had been noticing a distinct, nay, even severe shortage of shopping centers and apartment complexes here in Dallas, so to hear that we are getting not one but both of these rarest of facilities is doubly thrilling.

Unexpected Ways

2008-01-06T15:38:00.000-06:00

Scattered showers, turning into light drizzle later in the morning. Possibility of lightning early on. Use caution when boating.

I prayed last night that God would give me an opportunity to talk to my upstairs neighbor. I think I should have been a little more specific, or at the very least I should have watched the weather forecast. I woke up this morning to the sound of rain. Proceeding out of my bedroom to investigate, I found that it was indeed raining — streams of water were pouring out of the ceiling fan directly onto my office chair. It was also raining in the kitchen.

My first thought, like any sensible person, was, "It shouldn't be doing that." My second thought — again, like any sensible person — was, "Move the computer to high ground." With the computer safely relocated to the living room, I shut off the electricity in my apartment (I'm pretty sure there's a warning label on my ceiling fan that states, "Do not use in shower."), called the emergency maintenance line — "fire or flood" as they say — and was told it would be an hour wait. I proceeded upstairs to investigate (broken pipe), and my neighbor and I had a good hour and a half conversation.

All in all, a pretty good morning.

Take 2: Surface Tension

2007-12-23T23:45:00.000-06:00

Three-peat

2007-12-18T20:19:00.000-06:00

Yes, I admit it, I was that guy this weekend, the guy who walks around in public with a fever and a cough. In my defense though, I was only out looking for Motrin and a thermometer (successfully and repeatedly unsuccessfully, respectively), and I spent the rest of the three and a half day weekend on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

However, as you may be surprised to discover, my diseased excursions were not the highlight of my weekend. What was, you ask? Well, as soon as I failed to roll out of bed on Saturday, I decided that Sunday would be the perfect day for my long-awaited Bourne triple-header: by then I would likely be well enough to stay awake for the whole thing, and yet still sick enough to justify not doing anything else.

My worry going into this undertaking was that watching all three of the Bourne movies together would reveal them to be a mishmash of varying creative styles and disjointed plots, but in fact the opposite turned out to be true. For three movies filmed separately at three year intervals (with two different directors, even), they make a surprisingly coherent and consistent whole, a true trilogy. Each leads smoothly into the next, and each adds further color and depth to the story without feeling contrived (even in the case of the end credits, where the extra dimensions are literal). The common musical themes help to tie the movies together as well — again, even in the end credits, where the same song is used for all three movies.

The third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, did an especially good job of finishing off the trilogy. It tied in well to The Bourne Supremacy, touching on two of its major plot points and reframing one of them in a different context that was a genuine (and much enjoyed) surprise to me when I first saw it in the theaters. It also bookended Supremacy well, having several scenes that were the reflection (and the opposite) of earlier scenes in The Bourne Identity. It says a lot that the action highlight of Ultimatum is a masterfully paced and imaginatively staged eighteen minute long search-chase-boom-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-fight sequence.

So am I an action movie fan? Only when they're done like this...

[The more detail-oriented among you are now thinking, "That only accounts for about 6 hours of the weekend, what did you do on that couch the rest of the time?" Well, I also watched Lost, Season Two. Turns out Michael was always a psycho, I just couldn't see it at the time.]

Sold

2007-12-17T20:55:00.000-06:00

I'll try not to make a habit of this, but Pixar already has me looking forward to their next movie, which comes out at the end of June, 2008. The character work alone in the trailer I saw today is amazing.

Check out the trailer for WALL-E

Take the advice of a faithful friend.

2007-12-09T21:09:00.000-06:00

Yes, another title right out of a fortune cookie (literally), but hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I came across an article a while back entitled "How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise." It's a fairly lengthy article, but a very interesting one. (If you don't read it, then the rest of what I say here will probably make even less sense than usual.) I started reading the article simply out of curiosity about the title, but as it went on I was struck by how closely it mirrored many of my own experiences and actions.

Throughout my education I was labeled one of these "gifted" children. It was a label I hated, and in each new situation I tried (and to some extent, still try) to avoid it for as long as possible because the way I was treated always changed the instant it was applied, but still I grew up with words like "smart," "gifted" and "genius" (hardly accurate) being bandied about. It wasn't a description I subscribed to myself (still don't), but even so, the idea that success was expected of me stuck, and my response to the possibility of failure or embarrassment was more often, "How do I get out of doing this?" than "How am I going to accomplish this?" The things that were easy for me, I did, and the things that were hard for me, I simply "wasn't capable of." (For the record, my mom never let me get away with it when she caught me — the absolute right thing to do.) That the result of many of these wrong choices has landed me in a situation I fully believe is where God intends me to be is evidence of His grace, not my success.

The fact I couldn't ignore is that all of the things I am most thankful for right now are things that I had specifically intended to avoid, had God given me the chance. It took me sixteen years to realize that my way wasn't working. It took me another eight long months of refusals before I finally submitted to God and committed to doing something about it. I resolved that "I don't want to" and "I'm afraid to" and "It's hard" could no longer be reasons for not doing something. It was a resolution I instantly broke and continue to break, though, by the help of God, not every time.

It's a terrifying thing, to no longer say "no" based on those reasons. Because of it, I have had to commit to doing some things (even tonight) that have caused me no end of apprehension. Even though I now, with hindsight, do not regret these things at all, and though every time I have trusted God to enable me the result has been success, saying "yes" still hasn't gotten any easier, and it may never.

Going back to the article, I think the spiritually "gifted" encounter this struggle as well. Those who are continually praised for their "faith," "joy," etc. without a realistic emphasis on the process of failure and forgiveness that is universal in the Christian life find it hard to confide those failures to their Christian brothers and sisters for fear of losing face. When victories are lauded at the expense of encouraging perseverance, the result is an inclination to hide pain, doubts and struggles rather than share them as a community is supposed to do. The solution lies in not focusing only on the desired results, but instead encouraging each other toward effort, diligence, dedication and openness (as well as in being open ourselves).

In the end, the responsibility is mine: do I crave the good opinion of fellow men, or do I crave the good opinion of God? The answer is usually "yes" and which one wins out in the end depends on where my focus is at the time. That is where the community comes in (a fact I have not yet mastered), and so perhaps a good way to end this post is to say "Seek the advice of a faithful friend."

Some Googling led me to the article "Is There Anything Good About Men?" by Roy Baumeister (the researcher mentioned in the previous article), which presents some interesting speculations, not all of which I agree with. It is very much a speculative article though, with very little hard evidence being offered. I don't really have much to say about it, I just wanted to share this quote. It is both amusing and hard to argue with:

"All those retarded boys are not the handiwork of patriarchy. Men are not conspiring together to make each other’s sons mentally retarded."

Close-up

2007-12-08T12:05:00.001-06:00

Hitting the big-time

2007-12-06T22:11:00.000-06:00

For the moment, if you Google "autostitching photos," this blog is listed as the very first result. Apparently Google considers me quite the reliable authority...how should I use my new-found power?

Other fun search terms that have led visitors to this blog from as far away as Norway, Korea, New Zealand, and Bahrain:

cat head butting
"señor rossi"
oddest looking animals [another number one!]
adc55558a30b8aafe65f47994bc4c3c394ed614d7273d01b18 ad86dbd05f7d0e73f1f30d303c988a
tomcat treestands
relationships 4 life
xmen fact or fiction
illusionistic ceiling
animated movies versus cgi
everything there is to know about forests
sweet superman [and yet another number one]

Need vs. Want

2007-12-04T19:05:00.000-06:00

It is a distinction that causes me a lot of trouble, and I think part of the problem lies in the definitions I have come to hold for these ideas over time. These aren't definitions I just sat down one day and thought up, nor am I even claiming that they are morally or technically right, they are simply the ones that best describe the way I tend to behave. The things in my life that I consider "needs" are those things which can be neither done without nor done myself; everything else falls into the category of "want". Those definitions may not seem all that strange to you, until you consider just how narrow that definition of "need" is. If I can do it myself, or if I can survive without it...it's not a need. Because of this, I have little difficulty asking for help with "needs," while I almost never ask for help with my "wants." To contrast, if I were to hazard a guess at a more traditional definition, then the difference between a need and a want might be more a matter of importance, like the difference between a "car that drives" and a bright red Ferrari, or the difference between "food" and a medium-well New York strip steak with garlic mashed potatoes and a Diet Pepsi.

I bring this up because of the struggle I have had over certain recent events. It came as somewhat of a surprise to me that while I had no trouble at all asking a friend to feed my cats every day while I was in Colorado, I went through a huge internal debate before I could finally bring myself to ask some friends for help with a landscaping task, something I technically "could do myself."

I didn't grow up in a community. My needs were met by my parents, or not at all. There simply was never anyone else (human, not God) to turn to, and over time, perhaps I stopped looking. Lately it seems that everywhere I go people are talking about community and their claims, combined with recent events, lead me to wonder whether there are some ideas I hold (consciously or not) that are not entirely Christian. The ideas these people are proclaiming I would in the past have dismissed as laughable idealism, and yet I now find myself in the midst of a community, an actual community that is so much closer to that ideal than anything I have encountered before that that ideal no longer seems so idealistic. That's not to say I am finding it at all easy to believe, or accept, or adjust to. I find no difficulty in giving to this community, because I love them, but I find incredible difficulty in allowing the community to give back. Allowing that would require me to humble myself past insisting on doing everything myself, and I find that, perhaps, that is the whole point.

On a side note, here is a good article written by the wife of a long-time friend of mine: One Love.

Random Non-events, and the Words that Inspire Them

2007-12-03T21:01:00.000-06:00

Strange things happen in my brain sometimes, especially when I have been without food for going-on 9 hours. For instance, tonight the following occurred somewhere in the region of my left frontal cortex:

Nonchalantly.
Nonchalantly.

What does chalantly mean?

Don't ask me why that word popped into my head; I couldn't even begin to explain. In any case, it became my mission to find out when I got home, which is right now. It's not as exciting as I was hoping; apparently it comes from the French word chaloir, meaning "to be concerned." Stay tuned for future uses of the word "chalant" right here on this very blog.

And for those who know who they are, Answers.com says the phrase "pass muster," "originally meant 'to undergo a military review without censure,' muster referring to an assembling of troops for inspection or a similar purpose." That agrees with what I thought, so obviously no further research is necessary.

For those who are still in denial, the correct use of that phrase with the word "mustard" is as follows: "That mustard won't pass muster. I think I'll pass on the mustard."

Fire, Ice and Rhapsody

2007-11-24T00:18:00.000-06:00

Today was my day off. More than that, it was the middle of my four-day weekend, and I had nowhere to be, which is why I purposely did not set my alarm. And yet still I was woken up this morning a little after 8 a.m. by the loud, insistent, piercing beep...of my smoke detector. Don't worry, I'm O.K. It was just the battery dying, but is it insensitive of me to wonder why after three years of my living in this apartment, if it's going to die, can't it do so at a decent hour on a day when I hadn't gotten up my hopes of sleeping in? Because after I got out of the warmth of my thrice-blanketed bed into the cold of my forgot-to-turn-the-heat-on-last-night apartment, pulled the thing off the wall and turned on the light to figure out how to open the secret compartment on the back to remove the criminally self-centered attention-seeking battery in question...well, by that time I'm already up, so I might as well go check my email. And get the temperature above 50.

Not that cold is a bad thing. Brace yourselves: I went to a hockey game this week. Free tickets, good company, never been to one before — none of these were reasons to say no, so I said yes. Turns out I actually enjoyed it. The seats were high enough that I could see what was going on and close enough that I didn't need binoculars, and the game moved at a pace that wouldn't cause a snail named Ennui to die (very slowly, of course) of boredom. There was also air-conditioning. Any sport that comes with air conditioning has at least one thing going for it. (See? Football, no air-conditioning — definitely evil.)

This week was Thanksgiving, for those of you who didn't know, and so I spent some time thinking about the things I am thankful for. My church — never before have I met, let alone had the opportunity to be a part of, such a loving and giving group of people. My job — it's fun...what more can I say? But the one that takes the takes the marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes at the moment I didn't even think of until tonight: I thank God for giving me the ability to be moved by music. Tonight, I went to see August Rush. The movie is about a boy gifted beyond words with musical ability, trying to write the music that will help him find his parents. It plays out like a modern day fable about the power of music. It is deft in its simplicity, and absolutely gorgeous in its portrayal and use of music. August Rush is easily the best movie I have seen this year (yes, even better than The Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille); I highly recommend it.

Illegal Proceedings

2007-11-09T20:22:00.000-06:00

From a Swiffer commercial:

Woman on the witness stand: "I came in and the evidence was all over the floor."

Prosecutor: "Could you please point to the defendant?"

Woman: "He's right over there."

If you don't see the objection coming a courtroom away, ask me later.

I encountered a rather perplexing situation this week. My internet was barely functional for 8 days. (By "barely" I mean that I could get to most sites very, very slowly, except for the sites I actually wanted to get to, which I could not get to at all.) It turns out that part of the problem was my upstairs neighbor, who had attached a splitter to my line and was, to be blunt, pirating my cable. Making this situation even more disappointing was the cross attached to his front door with the word "Believe" written on it.

Here comes the perplexing part: after the cable repairman left, my neighbor put the splitter back on. How do you approach someone who professes to be a Christian and ask them to stop stealing from you again? His excuse: he wanted to watch the game.

Maybe football is evil after all.

A Long Awaited Party

2007-10-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

My moment of triumph came at last tonight. Let me explain: my DVD player has a "Position Memory" feature by which, through the means of holding down a button for a period of one or two seconds, it is able to store in its memory your current position on the DVD you are watching. You can then turn the player off and when you play the disc again later, it will resume where you left off. In fact, the player can store a position for up to five discs at a time. Where the problem comes in is that in addition to turning off the DVD player and resuming again later, you can actually remove the disc entirely from the player, and still pick up where you left off when you put it back in. Apparently I have on at least three occasions stored a position for a disc, taken it out of the player and never put it back in again, with the result that I have had three stored positions on my player with no simple way to clear them other than to find the disc they pertain to and reinsert it. As you can imagine, it has been a source of great torment for me, and has been such for a period measured in years.

Well, a few days ago I managed to clear one of the three by a process of deliberately overloading the memory. Tonight, a further triumph was accomplished: I discovered (no pun intended) the identity of one of the two remaining mystery discs. It was the theatrical edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I am crossing my fingers that the remaining mystery disc is one of the six discs of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Otherwise, it is a movie that I started and never finished, and haven't watched since I moved to Dallas. Given the current size of my collection and the number of movies I have sold back over the past couple of years, I am tending toward despair.

This all leads me to a bad theological joke my friend Jonathan would probably highly appreciate: this immovable yellow dot on my position memory menu is evidence of a movie unseen.

Rocky Mountain National Park

2007-10-27T23:31:00.000-05:00

I spent the last several days of my trip in Estes Park, right outside Rocky Mountain National Park. I highly recommend the trails up to The Loch and Mills Lake. Below are two of my favorite pictures from the trip. Click for more.

Gallery 3: Rocky Mountain National Park, Part 1

Gallery 4: Rocky Mountain National Park, Part 2

Colorado Trip, Days 1-5

2007-10-23T21:12:00.000-05:00

Four of the first five days of my trip involved several hours of driving; the other involved several hours of walking. I spent two days getting to Crested Butte, where I did some hiking and scenic driving, and a lot of sitting around doing nothing — very satisfying. Crested Butte, when not covered by snow, is a very odd town in some ways. Immaculately rustic houses with electrically heated driveways sit in the middle of manicured squares of lawn which transistion abruptly into wild grasses, giving the impression that they were placed there only recently. Even so, it's a nice place to relax for a few days (and there are some really good restaurants).

Gallery 1: Destination Colorado

Gallery 2: In Crested Butte

Panorama-rama

2007-10-19T20:50:00.001-05:00

It kind of feels like this week has been about 19 days long, but I'm looking forward to having a break on Sunday afternoon. I did have some fun this week though, doing something I have wanted to do for quite some time: rewrite the javascript I use to display my pop-up galleries. They are now more flexible and a lot easier for me to use. In fact, it used to take me an hour or two to set one up, like the one in the previous post. The gallery in this post took five minutes.

I have come to love taking panoramic pictures, now that they come out well with Autostitch, and in Colorado it's almost impossible not to take panoramas. In that spirit, click below for the panoramas from my trip.

Elk, and Other Astounding Creations

2007-10-15T20:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was introduced for the first time to an ingenious contrivance dubbed a balloon squawker. As the name hints, it involves a balloon which is essentially attached to the business end of a primitive whistle. The end result is that once inflated the balloon produces a marvelous atonal din for as long as there is sufficient air pressure to sustain it. It is somewhat equivalent to a tornado siren, but portable and completely lacking the tornado siren's musical qualities. It must be said however that the entertainment value of this device is completely subjective, and if you are not one who can be entertained by decibel-power alone – or if you are a parent – then you would do better to exchange your $2.00 (plus tax) for an 8-count package of some other cheap plastic party favor.

Also, tomorrow the first Jars of Clay Christmas album will be released. By the wondrous marvels of the internet and pre-ordering, my copy arrived tonight. I still haven't heard all of it, but what I have heard is really good.

Finally, one night toward the end of my vacation in Colorado, as I was leaving Rocky Mountain National Park I came up to a crowd of cars along the side of the road. I parked, and joined the group of people who were watching the small herd of elk that were about 100 feet from the road. Having just filled my first 1Gb card for the day, I was very glad to have rembered to bring the second, because over the next hour we got to watch the Elk version of prime-time drama. The herd consisted of a male, several females and some babies. The after a while the first male was chased off by a second, who proceeded to agitate the herd. The first male then came back and, after some posturing, they fought (behind a patch of bushes unfortunately). Oddly, they then split the herd between them, and one group headed away from the road, while the other group came up and crossed it. Fascinating stuff. As always, click below for pictures.

Colorado Vacation

2007-10-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

Filed under 'N' for 'Not Very Encouraging'

2007-09-24T21:44:00.000-05:00

Not-so-fine print in a TV commercial for an allergy spray:

The way Veramyst works is not entirely understood.

I think I'll hold off on spraying this particular chemical up my nose until they know exactly what it does.

"...would you say that I have a plethora of chipmunk pictures?"

2007-09-23T19:08:00.000-05:00

Alright, so some of these may technically be squirrels or some such.

Click for More

Marcellina Mountain

2007-09-22T17:25:00.001-05:00

Aspen

2007-09-20T23:43:00.000-05:00

Another one I like. I have narrowed them down to less than 300 now, still more to go.

Vacation

2007-09-18T13:11:00.001-05:00

Well, I am back from vacation in Colorado.

Days spent: 11
Miles driven: 2,417.2
Pictures taken: 1,126

Hopefully I will have more pictures ready to post soon. For now, here is one that I like:

Marketing Mishaps, Part Deux

2007-08-22T22:04:00.000-05:00

I saw a sign on the back of a truck tonight that was attempting to advertise employment opportunities at the trucking company. It had a white stripe that was labeled — yes, actually labeled — "The Road to Success." Branching off the road to success was another line labeled "Exit to [Trucking Company Whose Name I Don't Remember]." I understand the intent of this sign; however, what this sign actually says is that once you accept employment at [Trucking Company], you are no longer on the road to success.

On a similar note, during the three days it took me to compile my previous post I thought of a fact I wanted to include, but forgot it before I reached a computer. A friend reminded me of it tonight, and I think it is a message too important to leave unspoken: electronic toys that say "I love you" are unholy perversions of nature. As such, they horrify me. No child of mine will ever own one.

Tagged

2007-08-12T22:46:00.000-05:00

I got tagged. By Dan. And he lured me out of my apartment so he could do it without me knowing.

The Rules:

I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules. (**if you’re a non-blogger, you can email them!)
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And now, the news:

I have really bad ankles. They are very loose, and have a habit of giving out at extremely inopportune times, often causing me to fall flat on the floor for no apparent reason. However, an ironic side effect of this is that I practically never injure them. A few weeks ago I rolled my right ankle while bowling, ending up flat on my face as usual (though I still managed to get 8 pins down). My leg hurt for a week, not because of any injury to my ankle, but because I apparently rolled it far enough to pull a muscle in my calf.
I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in exactly eleven bites.
I find great enjoyment in the ridiculous and irreverent in nearly all areas of life. For example, ranked highly among the most entertaining gifts I have ever been given are a bass fishing action figure (the ultimate physical embodiment of an oxymoron), and a plastic pig (given to me on Valentine's day) that, for lack of a better way to describe it, poops jelly beans — chocolate flavored. Both currently sit in a place of honor atop my desk.
I am a spectacularly deep sleeper. When I am deciding what time to set my alarm, I have to allow for the time it will take for me to wake up after it starts to go off. I also have to keep it at least four feet away from my bed, so that I am forced to get out of bed to shut it off. This is because I have, on at least one occasion, turned off my alarm, engaged in a conversation with my roommate, reset my alarm for a different time and turned it back on, and then laid back down — all without waking up.
I can cross each of my eyes independently.
I am strongly in favor of abolishing the penny. Pennies, much like the weights underneath my bed, are worthless pieces of metal that I pay for but which do me absolutely no good because I always forget to use them.
Despite my name apparently meaning "God's gift," I have never been on a date.
I know exactly one joke that is funny and I can't even tell it, because telling it properly involves more theatrics than I am usually capable of engaging in.

I am running out of blogging friends who have not been tagged already, but I will tag Sean, Amber, Trey, Sarah, Rob, Amy, Jonathan (not me), and Max.

Ambiguity

2007-08-06T22:55:00.000-05:00

Learn to broaden your horizons, day by day.

Thus read the "fortune" in my so-called fortune cookie tonight. I find it rather ambiguous. Am I to be daily learning to broaden my horizons, or is daily broadening my horizons the skill I am to be fostering? The first sounds repetitive, the second merely redundant. In either case, it is phrased in the imperative; if I am to be receiving orders from a pastry, is unambiguity too much to ask in return? On the other hand, it is at least readable, unlike this rather marvelously (and memorably) dysfunctional fortune I received several years ago:

You will be happy be receipt of good news.

Is there a hotel in the world large enough to host our social conventions?

2007-07-30T20:59:00.001-05:00

Let me first say that I am writing this only after at least a minute of internal debate over whether to sit down and write, or sit down and rewatch an excellent movie I saw this weekend. (In case you think watching movies is all I do, let me assure you that it is not: I suddenly realized this past week that I seem to have acquired a life, or at least borrowed one for the time being. Last week I was pretty much just home for sleeping, and not much else.) The movie is called Primer and, had it been made this year, it would have caused no end of embarassment for the three big "thirds" of the summer blockbuster season because, though produced at .003% of the budget of just one of them, it had me more fascinated and entertained than all three of them put together. It's a sci-fi movie about time travel, but to tell you more about the plot would be unfair (and impossible to explain), so I'll just tell you that I thoroughly recommend it.

Someone once said — actually, I'm sure it's been said far more than once — that 87.2% of all statistics are made up. I have to say, I feel the same way about our so-called rules of polite society. Somebody said to me tonight, "The reason nobody comes by your house unannounced is that most people think it's rude." That struck me as one of the most ridiculous ideas I had ever heard, so I started trying to figure out why.

Moral acts are moral because they are moral (that goes back to the earlier discussion about actions being judged according to the standard God established). Immoral acts are immoral because they are not moral — that is, they do not meet the standard of morality. However, there is no moral standard anywhere that is violated when someone chews with their mouth open. There is no universal standard that defines what politeness is. It's just that someone, somewhere, at some point in time decided it was unpleasant to look at, so people shouldn't do it. (I'm not saying I disagree.) Here's my assertion (and belief): polite acts are polite because someone — or a majority of someones — simply thinks they'll enjoy their life more if it's done that way; impolite acts are impolite only because someone gets annoyed or offended.

Knowing now that that is my assertion, maybe you can see why I think the social convention (which is all politeness is) of not visiting someone unannounced is so ridiculous. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time decides that a friend visiting them without sending an engraved notification first is inconvenient or undesired, and suddenly it's faux pas to knock on a door. I mean, I can understand if you'd rather not have people walking into your house without asking permission first —

...you missed your cue. What you were supposed to do was wave your index finger triumphantly (but politely) in the air and cry out, "Aha!!!" because I was subscribing to a social convention. And you would have been right. I do quite often expect others to adhere to social conventions, and I have to ask myself why. Why do I expect people to knock before entering my apartment? My best guess is that it allows me to think of this space as mine, as being under my authority, that I am self-governing within it, and that I reign supreme over its borders. Given that none of those things are really true, I can't really justify my adherence to even that social convention (though that doesn't make me any more comfortable with the idea of its violation). Where does it stop?

I think it stops when we establish a right perspective on our relationships with each other, and begin living according to those principles instead. Rules like "call before trying to visit me" serve only to give us the illusion of "control" over our own lives while simultaneously isolating us from others. Why do we willingly subscribe to social conventions that require us to trade fellowship for privacy and so-called self-determination? I have more thoughts on this than I can write down at the moment. Even as I participate in it, I think it's utterly ridiculous.

[All that being said, I want to briefly address the idea of respect, and why I mostly ignored it as part of this discourse. Some people will say that we behave politely because it demonstrates respect for ourselves and for the people we are interacting with. Even if I ignore the fact that that is a recursive argument, I still have to ask: how can doing something rude be disrespectful if it's not already considered rude? The fact that the desire to show respect is a motivation for behaving politely has no bearing on why we consider certain behaviors rude. All that being said, I certainly intend to avoid treating people in a manner they perceive as disrespectful, while reminding myself of the true motivations of my expectations of others.]

Total Destruction

2007-07-26T18:45:00.000-05:00

Movies are kind of my thing, in case you hadn't noticed. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine pointed out to me the widely-held notion that nearly all of the world's most devastating problems can be solved by blowing something up, or that blowing something up should at least be on the list of things to try first. We proceeded to list all the movies we can think of that adhere to this doctrine (you shouldn't read anything into the fact that I own most of these movies):

Armageddon (giant asteroid approaching the Earth, blown up by nuclear bombs)
The Core (the Earth's core has stopped spinning, blown up by nuclear bombs)
Deep Impact (giant asteroid approaching the Earth, blown up by nuclear bombs)
Independence Day (aliens invading the Earth, blown up by nuclear bombs)
Paycheck (machine forsees Armageddon, blown up Hindenburg-style)
Reign of Fire (dragons invading the Earth, various sizes of bombs utilized with varying degrees of success)
Stargate (aliens threatening the Earth, blown up by nuclear bombs)
Sunshine (the Sun is burning out, blown up by nuclear bombs)
War of the Worlds (aliens invading the Earth, various sizes of bombs utilized with varying degrees of success)
....

The list goes on and on. (Feel free to suggest additions in the comments.) Reacting to the increasing severity of the various dilemmas the Earth has subjected to — first aliens, then asteroids, then the core stops spinning, then the sun dies — my friend came up with the obvious next step: head on collision with another planet. The irony? It's already been done. (Or very nearly so, anyway.) Upon hearing that When Worlds Collide was made in 1951, he sadly concluded that there are no original ideas left. Need more proof? They're attempting to remake it. As a consolation, I rented it and we watched it this week.

The fact that this movie was nominated for an Oscar for "Best Cinematography, Color" (it also won one for Best Special Effects) speaks volumes and is part of the reason why I can't bring myself to critique anything about it: it's easy to laugh when a scientist proclaims the impossibility of a ship leaving the Earth and landing on another planet until you remember that, at that time, no one had. I expected to enjoy the movie just as much as any other old sci-fi movie, Swiss plot (cheesy, with holes), wooden dialogue and all; however, I was surprised to find that it had some very interesting theological parallels.

At the beginning of the movie, a star and its orbiting planet have been discovered approaching Earth. In less than a year the planet will pass close by Earth causing massive devastation, and then, days later, Earth will be completely consumed by the star. The scientists who discovers this attempts to warn the world. Some of his fellow scientists agree with his findings; however, many, experts in the laws of physics, fail to correctly interpret the signs of the time and attempt to discredit him. Undaunted, a community forms (along with others across the world) to prepare for the coming destruction, with the hope of starting a new life on the new world that is coming. I wish I could remember the exact quotes, but when a detractor scoffs, "You really believe you can reach this new world?" the scientist answers, "We hope to God that we can." The new world does indeed come, and a small group leave Earth (on a rocket) and land on the new world. And then the sun comes and destroys the old world by fire... (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

So, cheesily entertaining (and possibly interesting) sci-fi, or just more proof that there is nothing new under the sun? It's a little of both for me, but you can check it out and decide for yourself.

[On a somewhat related topic, Sunshine, mentioned earlier in this post and also in this previous one, will be released in theaters tomorrow. As I wrote before, I was cautiously interested. Even so, Fox Searchlight threw me a curve this week (most would call what I am about to say spoilers, so consider yourself warned): they have apparently abandoned any and all attempts to advertise the plot, let alone conceal it, because they put out an ad with the tag line, "No one survives." In case that wasn't clear enough, they followed it with a list of all the cast members who die and a link to clips of the death scenes on the movie's official website. All I have to say is, "Hrrmmm..."]

Lessons Learned

2007-07-07T20:30:00.000-05:00

Things I have learned in the past couple of weeks:

If the "Almost Heaven" ranch was appropriately named, then Heaven is just a little better than an old rusted-out barn. (Or, phrased another way: if you are going to make celestial claims, gild your barn.)
Friendship is way beyond Hope; in fact, it's just down the road from Social Hill. (Those crazy Arkansites and their town-naming flair...)
The world doesn't end if I get up before 5 AM twice in one week.
Something about Bluebeard (or Blackbeard?) the pirate that I have already forgotten (I was distracted by high-altitude putt-putt and 100% humidity at the time).
Dispensationalism is, in fact, not a career path involving vending machines.
It is possible for a security keypad to short out and start conducting electricity through all the metal in a door, including the handle.
Persuant to #6: I now know what it feels like to receive a mild-to-moderate electric shock. (My arm is still tingling.)
Persuant to #7: Multiple times.
I am an idiot.

I blame #8 on #3, in the hope of negating #9. Call me an optimist.

CGI vs. CGI (Or, Dueling Directors)

2007-07-06T11:18:00.000-05:00

I confess: I may have a problem. Twice this week I have driven twenty miles to see a movie on one of the only five digital screens in the metroplex area. In my defense, however, these two movies are by their very nature the epitomy of digital cinema. The first, Transformers, the huge special effects action movie directed by Michael Bay; and the second, Ratatouille, the latest Pixar CGI animated movie, directed by Brad Bird.

Of course, it wasn't a fair match from the start. Michael Bay's pedigree includes such great filmic triumphs as Armageddon, The Rock, Bad Boys (I and II), Pearl Harbor, and The Island. On the other hand, Brad Bird is one of my favorite directors (in animation, there is no one better), who has created actual classics, in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

It says a lot that a word has been coined specifically to describe Michael Bay's directiorial style: Bayhem. He creates fantastic, hard-hitting action sequences; as far as pure adrenaline-rushes, there are few better than Bay. One of the things I have actually liked about his style (this may sound like a back-handed compliment; perhaps it is) is his use of sound effects. He very effectively uses sound to convey a convincing sense of mass in his digital creations (for instance, the big steel barbell that goes bouncing down the highway in The Island, or the giant robots in Transformers), something that other filmmakers lack. Unfortunately he almost universally lacks the same convincing realism in his character and story development, and that's where his movies fall apart for me. The CGI in Transformers is among the best I have seen, virtually flawless in both the characters themselves and their integration into the scenes, and the action scenes are intense and exciting. What is strange about the movie though is that his simple drama scenes also feel rapid-fire, fast-paced and intense; it has the odd effect of diminishing the impact of the action sequences. It's a very exciting movie; on the other hand, the story doesn't so much flow as tumble to its unfortunately inevitable conclusion and that, to me, is a flaw. Another flaw of note: for what most will perceive as a movie directed at children, there is a surprising amount of blatant crudeness and intense violence.

Brad Bird, on the other hand: The Iron Giant succeeded where virtually all other children's movies (though granted, I wouldn't recommend the movie for young children) have failed, by creating an honestly and realistically characterized little boy in an equally emotionally resonant story; The Incredibles, likewise, was flashy and exciting without sacrificing engaging characters. To call Ratatouille a visual feast would be to make an egregious pun; unfortunately, there is no other way to describe it: the animation is exquisite. Fortunately, the story and the storytelling hold up their end as well. Bird manages to make the animation serve his story rather than overpower it, and (surprisingly, but rightly) glosses over some plot points that might have distracted, in order to remain focused on the relationships in his story. I am only mildly surprised to say that Ratatouille is the best movie I have seen this year.

Catastrophic Failure

2007-06-17T18:36:00.001-05:00

For the past several weeks, a certain dryer in my building has been unusable (by me) due to the unearthly shrieking noise it made when it was turned on. Well, apparently that is the sound a dryer is supposed to make...when the drum has come unbalanced and is steadily sawing its way through the metal front panel of the dryer by sheer force of friction.

Bonus: According to the sticker, this dryer, with the appropriate installation package, is suitable for installation in a mobile home.