Month: July 2002

Watch out for them darn aliens!

I really can’t tell, either by reading the essay or by perusing the remainder of the website, whether Global Mind Control Slated For Humanity By 2004 is serious or a parody. Rev. Terry-ana Robinson, MC (where MC apparently means Melchizedek Cloister) writes of a terrible plot against humanity by a group of humans conspiring, and interbreeding, with aliens. Her methods for developing immunity to this bioweapon, though, is simply to become closer to the God or Higher Power in which you believe, eat a healthy diet, exercise, open your mind/rid yourself of dogmatic, unthinking beliefs, and learn new things. Doesn’t this sound like a pretty basic way in which you mainly live already? [Weirdness via garret]

Last night’s movie: K*19

Sadly, this movie came highly recommended (although it did not receive good reviews); I cannot recommend it to you, my reader, unless I was recommending it as a sedative. K*19 is the true story (co-produced by National Geographic Films, no less) of a Soviet submarine pressed into duty early in 1961 before the boat is remotely close to ready, to meet a political need, and how the maiden voyage could have triggered World War III.

Or at least that’s what the makers would have us believe, since there is little else in the way of dramatic tension to keep us awake. Harrison Ford is brought in at the last minute to be K*19’s captain, pushing Liam Neeson down to executive officer even though he is beloved by the crew and Ford is seen by them as a careerist who married a politician’s daughter to advance his career. I had no trouble seeing where director Katherine Bigelow (Strange Days) and writer Christopher Kyle (TV’s Homicide: Life on the Street) thought the tension would be.

“There are great human dynamics in this story,” Neeson said in a publicity piece, and this is the crux of the problem–the dynamics just aren’t that great. Sorry. Running drills on a submarine don’t make for tension as they are only drills. Towards the end, when the boat is stranded and an American helicopter flies over to reconoiter, the Soviet crews’ response to the enemy is a mass mooning. Wow, that was just how I would have answered my mortal enemy during the depths of the Cold War. The one bit that I found interesting, when the young officer in charge of the reactor crew refuses to sacrifice himself, is Hollywooded away without his ever being confronted by any other character onboard for his cowardice.

Not recommended

Sistah loves the beach

My sister Joanne loves the beach even more than I do. For the last few summers, she’s gotten out of the New York City heat by taking a share in a beach house with friends. They’ve experimented with the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore but seem to have settled on Fire Island as the favorite. I’ve never been there myself but maybe one of these days…

Joanne and a Fire Island housemate on the beach, enjoying the wonderful sun, Summer, 2002

Today’s book: The Summons

John Grisham had spent some time away from his legal thrillers with a couple of homespun coming of age tales but returns to form in The Summons. Ray Atlee is the son of an old, dying retired Mississippi county judge, brother to an addict who can’t seem to chose a favorite substance to abuse, and a legal professor who can’t connect with women. Ray and the brother have been summoned home by their father but when Ray shows up the father is dead, having finally given in to the cancer. He finds $3 million in a cabinet in the house, which gives us the basis for our tale, and nearly has a nervous breakdown.

This is nowhere close to the level of suspense and complexity Grisham is capable of, or used to be, in novels like The Firm and The Rainmaker. We never get a reason why we ought to be cheering for Ray, other than the fact that he’s the main character and we meet him first. The explanation for the money’s source turns out to be reasonable, not mysterious, though not truly aboveboard. The source of danger is only mildly intense. Grisham has a way with words, no doubt, and I kept reading to the end, though I just turned out dissapointed.

Not recommended

More Bruce

Time Magazine has him on the cover again, 27 years after his first appearance: Reborn in the USA:

Time's new Bruce cover

He’ll be the featured story on Nightline tonight, including a solo acoustic performance of new Song Empty Sky and be feaured on the Nightline follow-up show UpClose tonight and tomorrow night, then on David Letterman Thursday night.

Robert Hillburn reviews The Rising in the LA Times: Hope Won Out.

Finally, after you pick up your copy, don’t forget to head over to Backstreets.com and give your verdict in their Readers Poll.

Bruce on the Today Show: Bruuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccceeee!!!

Nils is playing the slide guitar parts. Bruce is playing the leads. Soozy Tyrell is now an official member of the E Street Band, bringing the total to 10, and I wonder if by the next tour he’ll be bringing back the Monopoly players from the days of the Bruce Springsteen Band. Amazing how much the crowd is into this, they already know the words to sing along to The Rising. Glory Days is the surprise older tune he threw into the set; he brought out the battered Telecaster for it and Steve has the mandolin.

Listening to the Big Man’s sax layering on top of the guitars, reaching higher, higher, higer, it just sends chills down my spine. In the interview before he started playing, Bruce said that he saw his role as testifying anf getting people up to dance. He means testifying in a religious sense and I get it, all the way, especially when he’s throwing his hand up during the “It’s all right” choruses on Lonesome Day.

The fourth song is Into the Fire and Bruce really has his mountain voice on. Hard to listen to this song, seeing the crowd, and the band, and not feel the tears slipping down from my eyes. This song is the power of rock and roll, the depth of the lyrics, the connection to who we are, who we can be, and still get up and dance.

“No Better Colors: Red, White, and Bruce” read one of the signs held up and surely that can’t be argued with.

Today’s movie: Gangster No. 1

Continuing the recent theme of quirky British gangster movies and even plain old gangster movies, we saw the new Malcom McDowell/Paul Bettany flick Gangster No. 1 (the official site pissed me off some with a Flash intro that can’t be skipped passed and other than some clips from the cutting room floor is a surprisingly useless website). One of the real positives for this film is that all the dialog, for a change, is understandable to American ears.

The action is split between 1968/9 and 1999. The film opens in the latter period with Malcom McDowell surrounded by a table of associates in a very fancy ballroom with a boxing match going on in the center. The men are chatting and laughing, reminiscing, when one of them mentions that another “golden oldie, Freddy Mays” is getting out of the joint after 30 years. McDowell gets up from the table, leaving his pals wondering why, and leaves. We flash back to the ’60s and hear McDowell’s voiceover tells us that we’re seeing the younger him (Paul Bethany) in a pool hall and he has been summoned to meet Mays for the first time.

Through the rest of the movie, even though the character (who is never given a name) is played by mostly Bettany, we have McDowell providing the voiceover. No doubt that Bethany does look like a young McDowell; he will be familiar to you as Crowe’s imaginary friend in A Beautiful Mind and Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale. Given that there are three other characters we see in both times, all played by the same actors using makeup, I don’t really understand why Paul Bettany doesn’t play our protagonist throughout. Nothing against McDowell but I don’t see that he does much that Bettany couldn’t.

Frankie Mays (David Thewlis) has established himself as an English crime lord (nicknamed The Butcher of Mayfair) and is quite good in the 1968/69 sequences but not much in the later scenes. Saffron Burrows is quite lovely, all legs, and big eyes, as the nightclub dancer who’s pushed into love at first site with Mays, much to the dismay of our protagonist.

Director Paul McGuigan is responsible for keeping us engaged. There are no real subplots here, just the two main lines of action and while he does go in for a little more of the red stuff than one might deem necessary (and why do we need to see the older gangster Tommy’s puke?), it’s all believable, all straightahead. The script is credited to a Johnny Ferguson but he has no other credits in IMDB and this makes me wonder if this is a pseudonym.

The climax actually comes in the next to last scene, a confrontation between McDowell and Thewlis, and, in this reviewer’s opinion, should have been the end; the last scene is unnecessary and really detracts from what’s come before. Overall this is a very bloody, violent film so don’t go if this makes you ralph.

Also, the film was released in the UK and elsewhere in 2000, one must wonder why we’re seeing it here only now.

Recommended but not for the quesy

Rich get richer dept.

Amazing tax avoidance scheme allowed by the IRS which, surprise, only benefits estates larger than $10 million: I.R.S. Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid Taxes. Buy expensive life insurance, claim you paid the lowest fee charged despite having paid much more (the premium would be considered a gift to the heirs), then avoid even the gift tax by using a trust. Brilliant move by a creative insurance agent and lawyer and ridiculous that the IRS would approve it–but they did, in 1996!

BlogWords

Some people have been making up special blog words lately, so I thought I’d share a few of my own:

  • bloggie chan – detective who uses his blog to solve mysteries

  • blogfinger – blogger plotting to take over the world

  • bloginator – special AI weblog using Blogger’s post to the past feature to save Mankind.

  • blogdiculous – a blogger getting out of control

Good things happen too

Just to be sure you readers understand this, I am a pretty happy guy and have been most of my life. This site may come across differently at times but that’s for the same reason that news shows feature stories about death, destruction, and criminals–happy stuff doesn’t give one much to write about. But I’m proud to say that I won Rob’s movieline of the week contest this week, and happy that I did. Of course I used Google to find the answer, I didn’t actually remember the Ah-nuld line. Still, a win is a win. And happiness is a good thing wherever you find it.

Bushinations

Krugman: The Private Interest. More on Bush’s refusal to admit mistake, in this case the plan to privatize Social Security even though we’ve learned since this came out in 1999 that the stock market can (*cough*) come down (*cough*). He quotes Houston Chronicle reporter R. G. Ratcliffe who wrote in 1998: “A pattern emerges: When a Bush is in power, Bush’s business associates benefit.”

Going wireless

With the Sweet One moving in here soon and me jonesing for some new tech toy, I splurged on some sort-of necessary equipment to set this house up for WiFi Compliant networking. Hello, 802.11b, goodbye Cat 5 cable! Linksys makes some extremely easy to set up and install equipment: BEFW11S4 – EtherFast® Wireless AP + Cable/DSL Router w/4-Port Switch and WPC11 – Instant Wireless Network Adapter. Her desktop PC will get a wired connection to the access point when it arrives.

Linksys makes the good stuff

No more need for the perfectly good Linksys PCMCIA Ethernet adapter and annoying dongle, so it gets X’ed out.

Update, 30 minutes later: The web is an amazing thing, as I am constantly reminded. Minutes after I published this entry in it’s original form an email from E. J. Fischer arrived; he’d seen my blog passing through Blogger.com’s Fresh Blogs listing. To get in that list, a blog needs to be one of the first 10 blogs published in any given minute (as determined by the clock on a particular Blogger server). Clicking through to my blog, what does EJ see but my entry about getting 802.11b set up here. EJ’s dad invented 802.11. EJ writes the Maelstrom Cognizance weblog.

Free Bruce?

If you thought Free Dimitry was a big cause celeb in the online world last year, wait for what might become an even bigger anti-DMCA campaign. Open source veteran and HP executive Bruce Perens plans a public demonstration of a modified DVD player that will make him a DMCA outlaw?

Replace me

Ev is advertising the position I previously filled for them: Pyra Labs – Jobs: Customer Support. You’ll be working with a great group of customers and good people at Pyra. Just remember, when things get tough, to repeat to yourself, with eyes closed and face turned towards the sky, this little mantra: “The customer support rep did not write Blogger. The customer support rep did not select, install, or configure the servers. The customer support rep did not make malicious changes to the customer’s template.”

Some old rockers…keep rocking

For example, Canadian power trio Rush. Their latest release, Vapors, is consistent with the body of work they’ve made over the last 28 years (Rush, 1974, and Fly By Night, 1975), rocks as hard as ever but doesn’t stagnate. Neil, Alex, and Geddy have always been techies and so it’s no surprise they have a pretty sophisticated website all done in Flash. Given that their days of huge album sales are over, the group is using the site to collaborate with fans–homemade videos, fan record reviews, and more–and not just minimal material related to a new release. When I clicked on the ’70s Photo Gallery, Closer to the Heart just started playing (and no annoying RealPlayer or WMP popping up either). One quible: Shoreline Amphitheater is in Mountain View, not San Francisco! [via Phil’s Own

Passages: Chaim Potok, 73

One of the great Jewish American writers of the pos-WWII era, Chaim Potok died today of brain cancer. Often compared to Herman Wouk, Potok focused more on the challenges of living as a religious Jew in American society while Wouk focused his stories more on Israel. Potok was perhaps best known as the author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. He was also an ordained rabbi, a university professor, and editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society of America