Category: Personal

If you enjoy soul music, especially coming from a pack of slum-raised white Irish teenagers, witha bit of comedy thrown in, then you’ll enjoy The Commitments–it’s been one of my favorites, watched over and over, since the initial release in 1991. The soundtrack, much of it provided by the young Irish kids who play the bandmembers, is terrific; I’m truly surprised that more of them didn’t become known as actors or musicians.

Andrew Strong, for example, is the closest thing this film has to a bad guy, he plays the lead singer and is amazingly arrogant but the others put up with him because he can sing soul like no white boy should. Since this came out, he’s made a string of records but never achieved any real success which is too bad because he really does have the voice.

Robert Arkins plays Jimmy Rabbitte, the focal character in this ensemble as the band manager, but this is his first and only acting part as far as I can find. In the movie Arkins is all ideas and energy but doesn’t sing or play, while in real life he’s primarily a singer with his own band.

The movie sort of plays out like the film of an imaginary rock opera album like Tommy or Quadraphenia, if that makes any sense. First are a bunch of scenes with wheeler-dealer Rabbitte gathering the players together, including some very strange blokes that show up for advertised auditions at his house. Most of the selected musicians aren’t much good with their instruments (except the medical student piano player and Strong) except for Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the one older member who’s toured with a long list of great American soul singers, yet the band comes together as tight and nearly professional in a matter of weeks. Rehearsals, kids, are really important, you see.

They play their first gig, a couple of songs at an anti-drug benefit at the church’s community room, and everyone is at the top of the world. Time to introduce some troubles: Fagan, who is twice the age or more of the others, sleeps with two of the three Commitmentettes. Strong pisses everyone off with his unearned arrogance and the drummer so much that he quits. A couple of more gigs are arranged, though, and the overall momentum is upwards; Rabbitte even arranges a nice review in one of the local newspapers. Then comes the night Wilson Pickett is supposed to jam with the band after his own show. And it all falls apart, so quickly that we’re into the epilogue almost before one realizes just what’s happened. Terrifically paced ending unlike so many other films.

Which isn’t too surprising when you remember that the movie is based on a novel by Roddy Doyle, one of the top novelists of the last 25 years, and he co-wrote the script and that the director is Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and, another personal favorite, Bugsy Malone). These guys drop you into a place you’ve never been and show you some great characters going through a true episode.

Note: Doyle wrote two more novels, The Snapper and The Van, which with The Commitments make up his Doylestown Trilogy (referring to the section of Dublin where the people live). Each of them was made into a very good movie, each very different than this one.

Definitely recommended

• Pam is funny!
• Karl: Learning Music Theory With Java
• Via Simon: My RSS feed should now validate due to the Blogger software update. PS – I met Simon a few years back at a Sun internal XML technical briefing, cool guy, but that was the day I totally threw my back out and was an invalid for weeks afterwards.
• Now that SocialText has raised a funding round, they ought to try and hire me. Blogs, enterprises, developers, and so forth, an excellent convergence of my skills. Who reads this knows one of the principals there?
• Whump must have had an amazing time at the Soiree yesterday, or else been extremely busy at work reading up on all the cool new schizznit.
• Scoble needs to find a new comment system as his provider is apparently out once again.
• John Lim has a very informed take on Tim O’Reilly’s talk at Reboot 2003 on The Open Source Paradigm Shift. Though I do wish John would move his blog to a better host.
• Multi-axis congratulations and best wishes to Zimran on the sheepskin and license; I hope he sees less rain than I did during the honeymoon.
• Toe wrestling! World championship toe wrestling, only in England, of course, would such an event occur. Right?

I’ve enhanced the PHP class that powers the little box over towards the top of the left column of the home page, Countdowns, with a new field, TIPS, to allow for text that pops up in a little yellow box when you position your mouse over the text when the event is linked to another web page. Even updated the PHP Classes package for those interested in using it themselves, woot! (Code is available under the BSD license.)

For all you fans waiting anxiously for another installment:

• Would this wedding location been available if one of the parents wasn’t a Congressman?
• $62.6 million sounds pretty good but are the studio execs really happy? Reviews like Oliver’s are among the reasons I’m not jumping to hand over my movie money.
• Why are some people so comfortable making idiotic assertions yet unwilling to stand behind them?
• While I may agree with the sentiment, the shirts are not in any way a good idea and I don’t want one. This should have been in the form of a question but is such emphatic consistency really necessary?
• Are there legitimate uses for DeCSS and similar software? Of course. Are the folks at the MPAA and its backers a bunch of head in the sand doofii? Of course.

The three young guys responsible for a disgustingly popular Bum Fights video series were sentenced to a $500 fine, 280 hours of community service, and three years’ probation Friday. I couldn’t find more detail than the Mercury News had in a brief mention but I don’t understand how they got off so lightly–they made a deal to plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to stage an illegal fight. The videos they produced sold only 300,000 copies and also featured homeless men and women performing such entertaining acts as ripping out teeth and ramming themselves into doors.

Let’s jut make a conservative guess that these guys (Ryan McPherson, Zachary Bubeck, and Daniel Tanner) made about $7 per video net of production and marketing costs, or about $2.1 million total; not unreasonable conjecture when the tapes and DVDs sold for something like $19.95 each. And in exchange for all the harm they did to the featured players, the DA in San Diego made them cough up a big $1500 without even putting a felony on their records.

I wonder, though, what the police and DA would have done if they came upon two of these poor people fighting over a bottle of alcohol or a nice sleeping bag. Say a knockdown, dragged out affair in a visible location with one of the men really doing damage to the other. Somehow that sounds like the kind of situation where the “winner” would get a real prize: felony assault and one to three years in a state prison.

So Ryan, Zachary, and Daniel ought to thank their lucky stars that business-oriented crimes are seen as much less important, especially when the defendants have some cash to mount a good defense. Fortunately for sanity, these clowns also face civil lawsuits from some of the performers where one can hope they’ll have to disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

I’m watching the USA-Brazil match from the Confederations Cup tournament over in France at the moment, about 10 minutes left in the game, and I want to know where the heck FIFA gets the referees for this tournament. The guy working this match is just sad. He gave our defender Carlos Bocanegro a yellow just now for a perfectly legal slide–both feet went straight into a ball and he didn’t turn his soles up at the Brazilian (Kleberson?) on the other side of it. Five minutes ago he gave Ernie Stewart a yellow for diving when Stewart clearly fell after jumping over the legs of a challenging Brazilian defender. Meanwhile at the end of the first half he walked right past an obvious penalty kick when Landon Donovan (what a great player!) was interefered with in the box.

Not that our players are blameless for the current score, 1-0 in favor of the Yellow and Blue, because the defense has been too loose and the passes not nearly good enough. And other than Donovan and to a lesser degree DaMarcus Beasely, none of the Americans has made an offensive mark. Clint Mathis, expecially, has not contributed nearly enough.

Adriano’s goal, in the 22nd minute, was a combination of what I mentioned. First, he intercepted a weak pass back to goalie Tim Howard, and then Howard had to come way off the line to stop Adriano’s initial shot due to lack of support and was way out of position to stop the rebound. Though I question whether Howard played the initial shot correctly, so that there shouldn’t have been a rebound.

Final: Brazil 1, USA 0. So Brazil makes up for their loss to Cameroon in the first game since Turkey also lost to the African side today. The Americans slip to 0-2 and with their only match left against that same Cameroon team, cannot advance even with a win. After making the Final 8 at last Summer’s World Cup, we get nada, niente, from this tourney; only the top two in each group go on so even if we get a win (for a total of three points) against Cameroon, they’ll still have six points as will the winner of Turkey-Brazil or four points for each in event of a draw.

Admittedly we didn’t bring our top team to give some players a rest after the end of the European club seasons and coach Bruce Arena expects a stronger side for the upcoming CONCACAAF Gold Cup. ESPN also has a good article by Marc Connolly that explains what our coaching staff is looking for from different players during the series.

Well, not really, of course, but our own special GWB today explained the away the failure of American forces in Iraql to find any bio or chem weapons by claiming that looters must have stripped all the sites and all the documents. But gee Prez, if the bad men took the weapons (and why would they give enough of a shit about the documentation to take it too?), and those forces are the ones killing one American soldier a day on the ground there, how come none of the stuff has been used yet? Puh-leeze!

Pick your characters, backgrounds, and props, add some narrative and dialog et voila:

Careful, though, since the FAQ says: “How can I edit or delete my comics? People who have donated to Stripcreator now have access to the comic deleting feature.” And the toy doesn’t offer a simple way to download the results to your PC, I had to do a screen print and paste it into a new image in PaintShop Pro. Still, could be fun.

[via Scobelizer]

Late June is an odd time to be getting new television, but this is the new millenium, baby, and TV has changed. Summer’s not just for snoozing any more as people more and more decide that the beautiful weather is no reason to tear their eyes away from the tube. Personally, Summer has never been an excuse not to watch but rather a time to catch shows missed during the original runs. And catch the occasional cool, mislaid original like Northern Exposure

So this weekend brings us the first new episodes of the year from Monk (tonight at 10 on USA) and Sex and the City (Sunday at 9 on HBO), both of which will split their runs of original shows into two parts in blatant attempts to milk the ratings. The NY Times gives us an elaborate, insightful review of the latter. This is the last season for our four sexual adventurers and the producers know it, so I expect to see Carrie and Crew go out on a high note. Lots of laughs, lots of sex (Samantha targets a hot waiter in the opener), and a few poignant turns on the dance floor of life.

Monk, on the other hand, is just in its second year and after winning surprisingly high ratings last season has been rewarded with a significant uptick in budget. Which means more location shooting in San Francisco and interior work in Los Angeles where last year as much as possible (including all interiors) was done in Canada. If you missed Tony Shalhoub’s excellent performance as the titular detective, don’t skip it now. The show is as much–more?–about exploring his character, in a highly comic way, as it is about solving the week’s mystery.

And what a character Monk is: a top detective with the San Francisco Police Department, he simply cratered after his wife died (four years before this series began) and all the little things that most of us are able to push aside in daily life became magnified a hundred or more times for him. We’re not talking about keeping clean but a fear of germs so deep he won’t shake hands and seals his clothes and toiletries in plastic when packing for a trip. Behavioral quirks: Monk counts all the parking meters he passes walking city streets.

Plus, he has a sidekick, wonderfully played by Bitty Schram, who is paid to be Monk’s, well, caretaker, to help him past all the little hurdles his near-insanity puts in front of him. Of course, Schram also serves as Watson to his Holmes and has a good share of subplots mainly focusing on how the job impacts her personal life.

The other new show I’m watching is Last Comic Standing. The first three episodes have already aired, which were the regional roundups and the Vegas semi-finals, and now the 10 finalists have moved into a house together in the Hollywood Hills. Prize is pretty big for this crowd of aspiring standups: a special on Comedy Central and an “exclusive talent contract” with NBC. Original episodes air Tuesdays on NBC and then repeat on Saturday on Comedy Central.

In general, I’d never found a reality or talent competition show enjoyable until catching an episode of Last Comic Standing, which has enough performers that each one only gets, at most, the best 60 seconds of material on the air, and has very little off-stage, get to know them crap. I mean, it does have a little of that but not for every single contestant and then only brief clips. Also, I think the judges selected a pretty good group for the final 10 though starting this week the show opens up the voting to the public, not a feature I like. The use of well-known comics like Buddy Hackett, Joy Behar, and Colin Quinn to give feedback to the performers but not vote (I guess this is how the American Idol trio of bigmouths works too) adds to the show because the ‘scouts’ are all actually capable of being funny on the spot.

Plus, The Wire, which I think anyone who has HBO has to watch even though the first three episodes have already aired, it’s just that good. And starting Sunday it’s on right after Sex and the City, an odd combination of high quality TV.

While I was composing the previous post, my blog got moved to the new system. Which gave me a scare for a moment because when I tried to store the post into Blogger’s database, I got a database error; fortunately my practice of clicking CTRL+A, CTRL+C before clicking the Post button once again saved my efforts from oblivion. You should see no difference on the published page, which is kind of unfortunate because that means the new system doesn’t include either of the major new features for which I was hoping: trackback and comments. Oh well.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason; today also saw the publication of an excerpt of Ann Coulter’s new book, allegedly also non-fiction, called Treason, in which she asserts that the late Senator Joe McCarthy was a true patriot and not the power-hungry leader of a witchhunt he is remembered as today. While there turned out to be some truth to the claims regarding Julius Rosenberg, there is no truth in the absurd claims of Ms. Coulter.

Coulter probably should have been named Today’s Asshat, by the way. At least the last recipient of the honor had the good sense to resign the next day.

When I first began this time away from employment, I decided that refreshing some tech skills would be a good use of a portion. I learned to be moderately conversant with two free (as in beer and as in speech) systems: a programming language called PHP and a database called MySQL. In fact, I wrote most of the code that powers this website using those two things.

But time keeps moving along the Y axis, so to speak, and I still find myself with free (as in unpaid) time. Scoble was very vocal about learning C# and look where it got him: a tasty job with the company with which he most wanted to work. One benefit for me in him going there is cheap access to software at the company store and so yesterday a nice box with many CDs inside showed up at my door. So many CDs, in fact, that combined with the slow speed on my CD drive, installation took something like two and a half hours.

C# is significantly more complex than PHP or any other language I’ve learned before. I did get somewhat familiar with Java at my last employer, including writing product documentation for a pre-J2EE (at the time) application server, but never to the extent of actually being able to write real applications with it. And I’m not saying I expect to become the next Chris Brumme or Rob Fahrni, just to name two well known C# ‘Softies. Today (so far) I sat down, made sure the VS.NET IDE actually starts up and does the basics, and cracked open a book called C#: A Beginner’s Guide by veteran author Herbert Schildt and read Chapter One. Now that my brain muscles hurt, I need a break. Good thing I have this blog.

Where the hell where these when I was a teenager. Although the rule about not letting lust mix in kind of works against me, I have to admit.

1937 was a difficult year in the United States (and elsewhere as the Nazis and Imperial Japanese began using the power accumulated in the first part of the decade) but offered artists a window to create works with challenging, personal visions. I hardly want to go overboard in praise for Dead End yet this film demonstrates many qualities we are hard pressed to find these days in films featuring teenagers.

For a start, director William Wyler, working with screenwriter Lillian Hellman, crafted a nearly documentary look at life in a changing Manhattan where the poor folks where really poor and the rich folks were completely divorced from that reality, uncomfortable when it came in contact with them, and as always taking whatever they want from their lessers. In one scene, to illustrate, a woman seeking a comfortable life fell in love with a poor but noble guy from the neighborhood and was even thinking she could give up her easy life for him until she saw the huge cockroaches crawling on top of the garbage bin in the hallway of his tenement building; she raced out of there fast as her legs would run down the staircase.

Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea, and Sylvia Sidney are the adult stars and each has a strong performance. McCrea and Bogart grew up as part of an age group in the neighborhood but while Bogart left to become a big time hood and killer, McCrea scraped through college for a useless (due to the Depression) degree in architecture–he’s the noble guy I mentioned–and Sidney, very young and beautiful, is simply trying to earn enough to keep her and her teenage brother fed and under a roof. She loves McCrea but until just before the end, he sees her as the little girl she was growing up and not the adult beauty she’s become.

The key characters in this film, though, are the teenage boys around whom most of the action revolves. In subsequent movies, most of the crew became known as the Dead End Kids, but this was the first to feature them. I’m talking about Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, Billy Hallop (he plays Sidney’s brother), the whole gang, which sometimes was called the Bowery Boys. These kids were kids, spitting at authority because they knew there was nowhere lower to go and reform school was little different from a life where their clothes were always torn and they had nothing better to do than fight each other or the gang two blocks over.

Definitely recommended

Run someone over with your car and speed away from the scene. In a panic, many of us might do that driven by our fight or flight instincts. A high ranking official of the Roman Catholic Church, though, is supposed to fall into the “know better” group. Apparently not. Hey, even someone like a bishop might panic but I’d still expect him to call the police after getting home and having a few minutes to calm down and to think the matter over. Again, not Thomas J. O’Brien. Then again, this killing (I refuse to call these things accidents) took place mere days after the man barely escaped prosecution for his part in covering up child molesting by priests in his charge.

145 comments so far in this thread launched by an article regarding a prosecution under British law of a football fan who chanted a racial epithet at another fan during a match. Some very articulate (including a few from myself) and others not so. Of course you get into the whole cultural differences thing not to mention the difference between US and British laws on speech and the freedom thereof; no constitution or anything quite like our First Amendment there.

What interest me most about this is the concept of how different people try and draw lines between right and wrong. If I intimidate someone by using offensive language, some say, than that is wrong and the law ought to back the offended person up by penalizing my speech. Might push the less, err, thoughtful people who hear such things over the line into violence. Others (like me) reason that without free speech we’ll quickly start circling the drain because such openings are always taken advantage of by someone looking for power or control.

For a number of years, young Americans have been talking more and more about the probability of Social Security just not being there when we hit retirement age. Some people mistakenly believe that the deductions we pay are like making deposits into a bank account, earning interest, and one simply makes withdrawals after age 65. Oops, they raised that to 67, didn’t they? That change was one of the few results of several highly visible blue ribbon political panels over the last 20 years, by the way.

Of course Social Security is not like a bank account: what gets deducted from a paycheck goes out to the people who draw SSA checks today. Whatever’s left goes to buy US Government bonds. The money gotten from those bonds goes out the door today to finance, for example, the War on Terrorism and paying Halliburton to rebuild Iraq. Demographics show that in the future, we just won’t have enough working people to pay the benefits today’s workers are accruing.

Now Europe, especially the Western nations that weren’t part of the Soviet Bloc, is facing the same mess and a lot of people there don’t like it. There are strikes and political rebellions. And for all the trucks they block and the signs they carry and the governments they vote down, the demographics aren’t going to change. (Okay, they could start having a lot more babies ASAP but since the unemployment problem is way worse in Europe than in the US–bad as it is here–I don’t see that as being much help.)

Bottom line, best as I see it: There will be a lot of angry people looking for money to live on when they get older, unless the governments really spin up the printing presses to push the problem to the next generation. Chirac, Bush, Cheney, Blair et al and whoever, they better think about how to deal with this dilemma and I have one hint for them: privatization is not the answer.

Last Summer we saw the Al Pacino/Robin Williams version of this movie, so it was a no-brainer to watch the subtitled Norwegian original when it came across a movie channel. I thought it would be interesting to see the difference between European and American perspectives on a twisted detective flick and I was right.

Insomnia stars Stellan Skarsgaard in the role Pacino played, as the big rep city detective flown into a small Arctic community to solve a teenage girl’s murder; none of the other actors have a name in America, though they are reasonably good nonetheless. Skarsgaard, though, has appeared in a number of US films including the recent cable miniseries Helen of Troy and the cool Frankenheimer/DeNiro hit Ronin. His detective is even more out of place than the American version: called up from Oslo, he’s only come over from the Swedish police a year before after embarrassing his chief while Pacino only had to deal with the flight to Alaska from LA. No one, of course, plays tired as well as Pacino and so I’m not surprised Skarsgaard didn’t match him on that score.

Director/writer Erik Skjoldbjerg has crafted a more complex, subtle version than Christopher Nolan could squeeze through the American studio filter. I’m not quite sure why this is so, but American films always need to have circumstances and dialog more explicit than films I see made in other parts of the world and the difference shows up in this film as not wasting 10 minutes of screen time. Characters don’t need to be so decidedly good or bad, which means our detective can collaborate with the real baddie (Williams’ character in the American version) even though the novelist meets the same end.

Recommended

Harlan Coben wrote a superbly touching tribute to his dad for Father’s Day in the New York Times. I’m sad for Harlan, that he lost his so long ago, but I’m very glad that my father is still around, still able to gift me with his understanding of the world and his generosity of spirit. I remember some of those Little League days, though Harlan was a year behind me and I never had his dad as a coach; I’m sure he remembers the one coach I do, Mr. Speigel, who was, um, very eager to win and therefore left me on the bench as much as possible.