My new friends

Star Pie Movie Forum has added me to the list of friends on the front page of their forum for my reviews. Very nice of them and good luck in their plan to build a site with reviews for all movies and TV shows. An ambitious goal but possible though I think a more realistic plan would be to make a RawSugar collection of all the other movie review sites.

On a similar note I belatedly added Danny Broomeman to the blogroll. He's sent me as much traffic as any personal site except dangerousmeta over the years and I'm remiss for not returning the favor.

28 Baby!

Notes written in the last seconds of the game: 64 freaking yards to his roommate on fourth and 12! Then pretend you're gonna down it and Leinart sneaks over the top!!!!! WOWOWOWOWWOW!!!! Unbelievable. Why did USC get a celebration penalty but ND didn't after Leinart's fumble? What a win!

Attention Downtown Athletic Club: Three TDs for Reggie Bush but Matt took over in the end--my Heisman vote is still undecided.

(Checking the post-game reports, emotion got the better of me. Leinart threw for 61 yards and it was fourth and 9.)

The victory today has to be one of the most exciting football games I remember watching. Like the Notre Dame players and fans. All the hype about ND ending big win streaks, the special kelly green uniforms, the celebrity alumni pumping up the Friday night pep rally, maybe was going to come true.

The game looked to be over when Leinart was stopped short of the goal with USC having no timeouts. I watched the clock count down to zero and was totally dejected that after the brilliant catch and run by Jarrett we couldn't get the last twelve yards. The ND crowd were racing all over the field, the Trojans were looking downcast.

But I saw Pete Carroll plus a couple of assistant coaches and players trying to get to the referees, then the TV guys must have gotten the message in their headsets, ABC shows the replay and sure enough Leinart fumbled the ball out of bounds with seven seconds left on the clock.

Since the Fighting Irish are our biggest football rivals this was starting to smell much sweeter. The refs got all the celebrants off the field, reset the clock to seven seconds and gave us the ball first and goal at the one. Leinart pretends he's going to down it, to stop the clock so we can organize the real try but instead takes the snap and makes like a power fullback, ploughing into the line and rolling off a tackle to spin in. Six points baby, 34-31 USC.

Now it's really over, the streak still runs, and Irish eyes are not smiling tonight.

What were you thinking when you were 14?

[Want to join in the fun? Post your memories to your blog and tag it with were14 at RawSugar or delicious.]

I just drove TS1 to a daylong art class at Deanza College through grey dreary skies, puddles from an overnight shower up and down the roads and when Earth, Wind and Fire's September came on the radio for the last few minutes of the ride home I found myself thinking back to the '70s and specifically to the fall of 1975.

The most memorable event for me was the release of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. Never before had a record consumed and connected with me in such a deep way. In the months before hitting the stores, the title tune was constantly on the radio and for the first time I was at Sam Goody's the day it came in. I think it was 1976 before another record got on my turntable. Through all the years since only U2 has come close to Bruce in my affections. Not that I don't love the music of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles almost as much but--perhaps because I was too young for the most part when their big releases arrived--with them it's just the music.

The question I'd like to see you answer isn't (necessarily) about the music of the year you were 14 but this: What did you want to be then? What future did you wish for yourself? Was it about a job, or to be a music or movie star? 14 is too old for cowboy, astronaut or fireman boy fantasies, though not more earnest desires for those jobs, of course. Despite reading deeply in the science fiction backlists, my desire at the time was split in two opposing directions: rock star or accountant.

Strangely, or possibly not in the post-'60s hangover yet not quite punk/disco sunshine, I didn't think much about having a wife or family. I spent a completely expectable amount time fantasizing about girls and sex, mind you, just not about what might be happening with one of them ten or twenty years down the line. Even when I gave a few cycles to what being an accountant might be like I never completed the suburban image with a pretty Jewish wife and a son and daughter.

What aspect of being an accountant attracted me isn't clear any more, if it ever was, but I know the person who put the thought in my head. Our family's accountant was a man named Jack Kaye and if I wasn't reading science fiction or about rock and roll I was reading about the stock market. Like the recent scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, 1975 had front page headlines about companies (Boeing, for instance) bribing foreign government officials to win deals. Interesting, meaty stuff. Oddly I didn't think of working on Wall Street, that didn't happen for another none years. There was just something about Mr. Kaye that put the thought in my head.

Rock star, well I suppose 82.7% of 14 year old American boys wanted that future and the same number's probably still true today. I never came close to making it happen--people who know me now might easily laugh at the thought--but I did give it a try. A couple of years earlier I'd taken drum and then piano lessons. Drums were too loud for my mom and the piano I guess took up too much space in the living room so it got traded in for one of those family fun organs after a year.

The next year I talked my way into an electric bass and lessons from Rick Kerner, at whose mother's school I'd taken dance lessons in the pre-Bar Mitzvah season of 1973. A few months in my mom learned a lesson of her own: she would've been better off keeping me on drums or piano. I had always set the volume on high and, for accompaniment, had a record playing even louder.

Rick also had a business providing bands for Sweet 16s, Bar Mitzvahs and other occasions, which he hired me into after maybe six months of lessons. Sadly, being too young to drive (this was spring of '77) and not talented enough to outweigh the hassle of arranging transportation, my first gig was my last gig. I did have fun since the party was some girl's Sweet 16, fresh territory because it was a town or two over from where I lived so none of the girls knew me.

But back to '75. This was also the after-party for Watergate and the Washington Post and the New York Times were still mining the rich fields of both parties' backlog. I suppose it was about this time of year I began to read about Jimmy Carter. Not that I realized he'd be the next president though I did know that the Republicans were roadkill. Gerald Ford was such a non-entity that the idea he might win election on his own name was simply laughable and the open question for me was whether the Democrats would take every seat in both houses as well. Yes, that was a naive thought but 14 year olds are generally not political cynics.

I believe I was peripherally aware of the first baby steps a few companies were taking towards personal computers. Mainly, though, my expectations were simply that computers would continue to advance and become ubiquitous. I wondered, and to a large degree still wonder, why science fiction authors haven't accounted for this in stories. Star Trek, the original TV series that is, did one of the best jobs even if they were completely ridiculous in the number of blinking lights and variety of sliders, knobs and buttons.

1975's conception of 2005 was unsurprisingly far too optimistic than our reality; if we avoided Trek's World War III and genetically engineered supermen, well, the margin was narrow and the light at the tunnel's other side is still faint in the distance. Despite ending the Cold War without launching a single ICBM in anger, an outcome which many Americans thought nearly as probable as not, the path to it, work done in its name, nonetheless scattered seeds that have recently grown into a crop perhaps more dangerous from the likelihood that we'll be unable to disarm the combatants in any meaningful way.

At 14 I was far more excited to meet the next 30 years. Girls were turning lovely and on rare occasions felt the same about me. Music could take me to some distant place for minutes or hours at a time. Nixon's campaign at empire had left marks on me but Woodward and Bernstein's triumph had erased most of them. I wanted to be an accountant or a rock star and both were attainable.

Tell me about you at fourteen, your aspirations and expectations in life.

16 episodes

Great bit of dialog from Jayne in The Message, the episode of Firefly shown on SciFi today: "What'd y'all order a dead guy for?" Said in his typical deadpan, this is a perfect example of why the show was so good. I'd like to hear one line as good as that from shows that ran for much longer like Walker, Texas Ranger, According to Jim or Diagnosis: Murder. Seriously, there are times when I just hate Fox plain and simple.

Everybody must get stoned

Bob Dylan is a visionary indeed: Marijuana May Grow Neurons in the Brain.

Bloglines: News?

Robyn DeuPree, the Bloglines Product Manager, announced new features for the service today and asked for feedback. The additions are keystroke navigation, unread vs. keep as new, mobile and universal inbox. Since I don't use the mobile interface, my response doesn't apply to it. Short answer: wow, totally unimpressive.

Actually, since none of these features are useful to me I shouldn't have excluded mobile. Seriously, there've been about zero new features for about 12 months, even though Bloglines was bought out by deep pocketed InterActiveCorp, and this is the best that could be done for the first release of the new regime? I'm still waiting for news on the bug I reported a couple of months ago, that read items come up again as unread despite no visible changes. At the least they could have added a read but changed indicator (which, for example SharpReader has) to make that possibility visible.

The most laughable of the new features, and I mean I actually laughed when I read it, is the so-called "ginsu knives of Bloglines..." the Universal Inbox. What warrants such a lofty name? "We've partnered with Astrology.com to deliver daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, and Lottery.com to bring you lottery winning numbers and jackpot values for any state in the USA." I realize that RSS use is spreading beyond the techie community, which is great, but the idea that Bloglines thinks lottery results and horoscopes are the highest value adds at this time is hilarious.

Last night's movie: Garden State

File this one under nice, literate and honest. Not great, not a revelation. Zack Braff, more widely known as the star of NBC's Scrubs sitcom, wrote and directed Garden State and got some festival awards and critical plaudits. To some degree this seems to have been a reaction to the idea of a network sitcom star writing and directing a low budget indie film since the movie is, like I said, nice but not great.

Braff plays Andrew Largeman, an actor successful enough to be semi-recognizable enough in his hometown but not to avoid waiting tables while between roles. His medicine cabinet is filled with vials of prescription pills and his bedroom is completely white, down to the pillowcases. At the open, Largeman gets a call, which he screens, that turns out to be his father (Ian Holm looking distinctly un-Bilboish) notifying him that his paraplegic mother drowned in the bathtub and died. He gets on a plane to New Jersey, giving us the title.

In the course of four days he meets up with high school pals and acquaintances--they're all 26 years old now--who give him comps for how life is working out. A reasonably typical assortment and everyone calls him Large; from watching I didn't realize this was his name, I figured since his character is Jewish it was something more like Larchman or Lachman. Large complains of odd headaches and so his father, also his psychiatrist and the prescriber of all those pills, sends him to a neurologist (Ron Rifkin) where he meets Natalie Portman. Portman is not coiffed with strange braid patterns.

The remainder/bulk of the film covers the next few days during which Large bonds with Portman, comes to terms with Holm and realizes, and this is why I made the comment about not being a great revelation, that life is to be lived. Not wasted on pot (his best friend from back in the day), pills (as his dad would have it) or fighting a constant battle to understand "Why?" (his mom). Interesting, decent acting from the key players, but all in all more of a promise of Braff's potential.

Braff did a blog though after he finished all the post-premiere and DVD publicity chores he stopped posting; which is okay, the film's essentially done and the blog is still out on the web for reading. The posts attracted fairly heavy quantity of comments, I must say.

recommended

Sluts of all kinds on display

My friend Beau recently relocated to San Francisco (from Perth via Maui, ouch!) and based on a co-worker's remark is now eagerly awaiting his first Halloween in the city. All I can tell you dude is remember what city you're, the movie Crying Game, and watch out for just who you approach ;)

I go BSD

Beau Lebens repackaged the PHP Blogger API project he, Kathryn Aaker and I originally published a while back so that it's now under a BSD license. Somebody from MIT wants to use it and needed this and who am I to say no to MIT?