Category: Personal

Doesn’t my Sweet One look lovely?

[Remember, I switch the gender of my antagonist in each post so as to not give clues to the person’s real identity, s/he is far too likely to sue me.]

Those more serious measures I mentioned? We voted to issue a work order to our landscaping contractor to remove the illegally planted flowers as well as some supporting materials he installed. Gave a two week deadline to allow X to comply, and even let that slip (thanks to our management company, the board certainly didn’t vote for it), but he chose to ignore us. Exactly as expected. Meanwhile X had a mediation service contact us to iron the issues from his perspective (“the Board is and has been harassing him”) but since he is so far behind on dues we declined to participate until that is rectified. He offered a payment plan but no reason why we should accept, and so we didn’t, voting to continue the collections process.

The mediator called me originally, instead of the person at our management company, since one of Mr. X’s ‘conditions’ is that the management company not participate in the discussions. Very funny, isn’t it? As if the Board would leave itself open to liability from other members by allowing that. I could tell from our three ot so conversations that the mediator is exactly the personality type one would expect in that job. Semi-amusing to talk to but I put him onto the management company and left it at that.

This week the landscaping contractor tried to remove the plantings and Mr. X saw them. He walked out and said if the workers continued he would call the police. Of course they stopped, it’s not their place to have to deal with cops. But I’ve volunteered to be out with them next week, and to talk with the police in advance, so this will get done. Trust me.

I came home this afternoon from running some errands and though I wasn’t in a bad mood, something was weighing on my stomach. I thought the problem was that I tried the new Mocha Malt Frappuccino at Starbucks, not very Atkins but couldn’t resist. That wasn’t it though, and when I was perusing the afternoon linkage from garret, I realized the problem. We’ve been chatting a bit about recent actions by the Bush Administration (sorry, g doesn’t provide easy permalinks to his discussion page) and that had me off a bit to start.

Then I read today’s SCOTUS Miranda ruling. My first thought after reading the linked article was, “This isn’t my America any more.” Hit me like a punch in the stomach. Of course, as my morning coffee partner would tell us, this never really was our America; the ones who do own it are simply no longer bothering to keep their machinations behind the curtain.

Conflicting actions and statements have confused me to the point where I just can’t understand any more. We invaded Iraq to clear Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, or something like that, the story keeps changing, but none of it was there. Now the more vocal Iraqis want us to leave–today!–except for those that want us to rebuild their power and water plants and then leave. Over in Africa, there’s so much war and misery but very little American attention and what there is of it mostly asks, validly I think, what can we do there to make a difference. And we can all wake up tomorrow sick and dying with SARS anyway, if a few superspreaders get past the thermal monitors at the airports in Asia.

All this is not even on the personal level, where I can’t help wondering what’s keeping me from getting a job. My honeymoon’s literally over, it was great, but now the fiscal reality is hitting me in the face. Networking, that’s the answer everyone says, but I guess I belong to the wrong network because the people I know who are getting jobs are changing industries or moving away from their families just to get a paycheck. But when I think outside the box, I get slapped down. Sure, for example, the biotech industry is growing, but even those companies want some relevant experience.

Enough! I wish I could just stop reading the front section of the newspaper but it seeps in around the edges anyway. Makes me unbelievably happy that I have Vivian for comfort and succor.

No doubt, X2 is your straightforward, simple fun, action-packed Summer blockbuster. Unlike another recent box office big deal, which aspires yet fails to be so much more. As the current email joking goes, the cross-dressing Larry Wachowski needs the money more for his soon-to-be due divorce settlement and half of $16 million doesn’t go as far as it used to, while X2 director Bryan Singer only has to deal with homophobia.

Simply put, I enjoyed X2 a lot more than Matrix Reloaded and I expect that’s true for many people who’ve seen both. Singer, his writers, and producers understood their mission–create something fun that’s true to, but not limited by, the comic book legacy–and they did it. Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Franke Famke, Anna Paquin, Ian McKellen, and even Patrick Stewart look and act bigger than life, punching and psychokinetically moving anything in their way, and the main new mutant, Alan Cummings as the blueskinned Nightcrawler is terrific. Cummings seems to have taken Joel Grey’s Master of Ceremonies character from Cabaret as his template, if Grey had been playing an exceedingly religious German with a tail.

The visuals, including the SFX, are also great. We loved the detail shown for the X-Men’s jet and the destruction of the dam was just…serious. Props to cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, production designer Guy Dyas, and, hell, the entire makeup, special effects, and set dressing crews, I don’t know who to single out; for example, the attention to detail shown in Bobby Drake’s bedroom had an attention to detail I just didn’t expect.

Definitely recommended

• Amusing visual comparison: old, current, and future versions of the $20 bill on display at the NY Times.
• Laughably deceitful: AOL wants out of the promise it made (instant messaing interoperability with other IM services) to gain FCC approval for the Time Warner merger. Helps that the current chairman, the laughably useless Michael Powell, was the main dissenter to placing the condition in the first place. Clearly AOL is taking its lead from the Bush Administration’s playbook and claiming a full of crap, extremist position is reasonable, moderate, and patriotic.
• Laughably slutty: RomaKimmy, a fellow SpoFite, had an extremely honest (and eye-opening, for this male) blog post on a recent Friday night bar outing. I always wanted to be a male underwear model when just a tike but never attained the slender, muscular body, large package, or sufficiently vacant stare for the job.
• Laughable (old) interview: Nothing on this afternoon, TS1 and I turn on the tube while munching leftovers for lunch and The Caroline Rhea Show happens to be on with Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn as the guests. The episode is a repeat from the days when their Old School was just released. I had no doubt that Vince and Luke were onstage only because they were required, probably on pain of amputation or similar, and you would agree from their body language, but the interview was beyond hilarious because the men just turned the situation around, constantly interrupting and making Rhea answer or giving nonsense but on target answers. The demographics for the talk show must be barely 17 year old females or women who think like them, which was confirmed by the next guest, a champion baton twirler who gave a lesson as part of her five minutes.
• Laughable sex product concept: Women (and I suppose men) can wear edible panties to excite a partner, but how about something like an edible condom for men to wear? With the appropriate “Does not prevent pregnancy warnings” of course. (note: this was my own laughable idea, hence no linkage, but if you own a company that can produce these, just call and we’ll talk royalties or licensing.)
• Not at all laughable, just cool: Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan’s company, took us one step closer to a real space travel system a week ago.

• Lebron James, the likely first pick in the NBA draft, was interviewed at halftime of tonight’s Spurs-Mavs game and showed up dressed head to toe in Nike gear. Even a logo’ed headband to make sure his sponsor is onscreen every second he is. Guess giving an 18 year old a $90 million, seven year contract means getting value from Day One.
• Russell Beattie makes an excellent speculation on a future hotspot for corporate developers.
• Pam, playing with her guitar-playing partner Tim as The Secrets, rocked the Palo Alto Farmers Market yesterday, with both Dar and Lucinda Williams covers plus Fleetwood Mac and more. The little girls were dancing to her tunes.
• Were you as surprised as me by Bruce Almighty rocking the box office this weekend? To the tune of $70M!
• Slightly Bent, otherwise known as Ron Green, poses an interesting question: Where are the leaks and rumors about the next version of IE?
• Market researchers Gartner, probably figuring that few clients will pay their ridiculous fees when Linux truly dominates the landscape, tries to power up their pro-SCO stance.

Sorry about the ungainly appearance of these bullet list postings but I refuse to fuss/workaround Blogger’s longtime weakness any more.

Trying compete with the production might of HBO has not been easy for the executives at Showtime. Since they seem to have fairly similar subscriber counts (AFAIK, of course), they ought to have similar monies available, but then again HBO is part of AOL Time Warner and Showtime is owned by Viacom, so the difference may be corporate philosophies. Showtime is trying to pick up the pace lately, while also differentiating itself from HBO with more adult-oriented material, so perhaps in a few years they difference will be minimal.

Last night we watched two original films on the #2 cabler, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Our Town, both filmed versions of classic stage plays. Each is produced quite often on stage and have been filmed numerous times before, of course, so I’m always curious to understand why someone chooses to do so again. The reason for shooting Our Town was quite obvious: any chance to get some proprietary Paul Newman is worth doing. How much could it have cost to just set some cameras up in front of a stage play where the drama was being staged anyway?

The rationale for Roman Spring is not so easy to uncover but I chalk it up to HBO envy–just look at the movie they’re premiering tonight! A movie with an older star set in Italy, just to make the connection explicit. But I’m surely making too much of this, given the long cycles of decision making and production.

Our Town is primordial drama, written by Thornton Wilder and first produced back in 1938, where small events, a few days in the lives of small people in a small town, are used to scrutinize the largest meanings of life. The late ’30s were a time when, as a friend pointed out today, so many intellectuals were attempting to absorb the messages of Nietzsche and Wilder certainly was trying to do so in an American context. In other words, lump this play in with current megahit Matrix Reloaded as fiction attempting to pull the covers off the bed of existance. without all the cool technology and special effects, of course.

Newman plays the Stage Manager, the central role which narrates the play, providing glue material and enough interpretation to ensure that no viewer misses the core message: savor life’s little pleasures before it’s too late. The production, not surprisingly, is filled with name actors: Lorraine Newman, Jeffrey DeMunn, Frank Converse, and Jake Converse; actor James Naughton directed.

Viewing note: Don’t worry if you don’t have Showtime, since this is a Masterpiece Theater co-production and will be seen on that PBS series in August.

Recommended: I watched it because it’s been years since I saw a serious production of the play and, well, Newman is a great actor and I’ll almost always watch anything he’s in.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was originally written as a novel in 1950 by Tenessee Williams, after Greta Garbo declined his entreaty to use it as a starring vehicle, then later transformed into a play; the original Broadway production starred Vivian Leigh as Stone, an actress who’s passed that certain age, and Warren Beatty as Paolo, the proud but poor Italian count who services rich American widows in post-WWII Rome.

In this version, shot as a film unlike Our Town, Helen Mirren plays the woman past her prime but not past her pride and Olivier Martinez (the hottie who disrupted Diane Lane’s marriage to Richard Gere in last year’s Unfaithful) as the marcetta (Italian for gigolo). Mirren is a good match for the role, as the wrinkles and changes wrought in her face by Time make the contrast with oh so pretty Martinez as well as her own misgivings absolutely explicit. She struggles with the turn in her fortune–her rich, adoring husband dies early on–and is stalked (or so we would call it today) by a character known only as The Young Man throughout. Finally, Stone’s pitiful existence cannot sustain whatever attraction she once had, Martinez moves on to a more tempting target, and Stone surrenders to The Young Man. I didn’t draw the connection, but another reviewer says that The Young Man is William’s symbol of Death; the movie ends semi-ambiguously with Stone embracing him.

Can’t really recommend this as the best use of two hours of lifespan

• NY Times editorializes in favor of the Atkins Approach. The whole thing is definitely going mainstream, though it’s sad that Dr. Atkins himself is missing the parade, and TS1 and I are still losing weight by applying it.
• Also in the Times zone, Jayson Blair wants to write a book about how he made up most of his reporting while working there; by itself this would be a laughable attempt to profit from his own misdeeds but then he expects us to believe there were secret cocaine parties in the paper’s offices. This scribbler thinks Jayson ought to stick to what he knows best: fiction.
• Anonymous Coward posts a hilarious geek re-interpretation of history on /., though this is not the first posting of it. And even last year it was probably old. But still funny.
• How does someone get forced out of politics due to ethical transgressions only to end up in a court-appointed job six months later? Because it’s New Jersey, of course! Drudge mistakenly headlines this as a government-paid job but I wonder what qualifications Torricelli, a career politico, has to oversee an enironmental cleanup dispute.
• This story comes from a French newspaper, so take it for what it’s worth, but apparently our troops had such an easy time taking Baghdad last month because we paid off the Iraqi Reublican Guard commander. A few hundred thousand dollars and sanctuary for him (plus family) seems like a trivial price when you consider that just one of the big missiles we used in the campaign costs over $1 million and many lives weren’t lost in the battle that never happened.
• And finally, can we get a shout out for the Nets and Devils, who’re both in their respective Finals in the same year for the first time? Realistically I’ll take the Devils, who ought to find a way past the red hot Giguerre, but not the Nets, who probably can’t match up well enough against Duncan.

Laugh: from BBSpot, Bush proposes Universal Time Zone, one of those so plausible it must be real jokes [via jennet.radio]

Cry: Republicans use their far deeper pockets to transform politics across the country, as described in this NY Times OpEd essay from texas, coming soon to a statehouse near you. [via garret]

Wonder: Israel broaches the idea of joining the European Union, though this would be years away and only after a resolution of the Arabs’ war against them.

the geeks stupidity ensues, or at least that’s what the trolls at /. will tell you. Of course, it’s always better when the lawyers put their hands in the mix.

Just to show how our federal government really works, check out this Reuters article on an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity which shows that “Federal Communications Commission officials have taken more than 2,500 trips since 1995 that were mostly paid for by the industries the agency regulates.” The agency’s spokesperson claims that they don’t have the budget for the trips but getting out to the people is necessary to properly regulate the industry.

Put that up with William Safire’s most recent column, The Great Media Gulp, in which he explains that the future of our media regulation rests on the shoulders of an unknown 36 year old lawyer who holds the swing vote on the FCC. Lovely. Of course none of the major media outlets are covering the story anyway: The Big Blackout.

1. New academic studies show: Atkins Similar to Low-Fat Diets
2. Annika Sorenstam stood up to the first day pressure
3. Season finale of Enterprise was…interesting.
4. Buffy finale was off the hook

Over in Kauai I found a few minutes for reading and polished off an early ’90s Carl Hiaasen novel called Native Tongue. Quite the absurd little page turner with a reasonable if not totally shocking outcome. Not terribly dissimilar to Double Whammy, his other novel I recently read in that the protagonist is likeable but no hero, has relationship issues, and used to work for a newspaper. Instead of bass fishing, the evil resides at a Disneyworld knock-off run by a former New York Mafioso turned federally-protected witness.

Moderately recommended

No Second Chance is the latest mystery from Harlan Coben, his third very serious one in a row. I enjoyed it, Harlan’s an excellent writer, but I’m really looking forward to a new Myron Bolitar story. In this thriller, Dr. Marc Seidman wakes up in a hospital 12 days after being shot, to learn that his wife is dead and six month old daughter missing; shortly after he goes home to convalesce his old money father-in-law receives a ransom note but even though they pay, the kidnappers know that the police have been involved and his baby isn’t returned.

She doesn’t turn up dead either, which pretty much drives Seidman over the edge. Time passes but no real suspects ever come to light though the police and FBI have the surviving family member as a strong possibility. After 18 months, out of the blue, another ransom note arrives demanding another $2 million payoff and this is when the race really begins. Coben is good at creating characters suited to their roles and pacing, which are really important to me. In the end, Seidman learns some life lessons and overcomes the shocks and surprises put in his path.

Recommended

1. Tonight is the last Buffy; I’m sad to see her go but Whedon has done a pretty interesting job so I’ll be expecting a huge ending. Not. Reading. Any. Reviews!
2. Noted SF author Greg Benford posted Theological Science Fiction: Why The Matrix Matters, an insightful essay. [via Sam Gentile]
3. There’s just something different about Mississippi, especially the politicians.
4. Buick Turns 100, Smoothly: we had a few Buicks when I was growing up but I can’t imagine buying one myself, not when their styling is either five years late or just plain weird.
5. Speaking of cars, fart-powered fuel cells! If only they could capture my output, as TS1 can testify, there would never be another energy crisis.

The fucktards at Fox cancelled John Doe while I was away and confirmed that Firefly is dead and buried. I hope the Fox execs don’t ever bring out another science fiction-ish series that is serial rather than episodic because I sure as hell won’t be watching and will be suggesting to others they avoid it as well because I’m sick and tired of getting caught up in a cool mythologies, stories and characters only to have them disappear far too soon. The way studios are handling series these days, I can just wait for the third or fourth season and some cable network will let me catch up once I know there’ll be enough to make it worth my while.

The new show Jake 2.0 coming on UPN in the Fall is a good example. Certainly sounds like the kind of series that I’d enjoy but also seems aas likely to succeed as, say, Seven Days and so I’ll just wait. Maybe Jake will get renewed and I’ll catch up over the Summer repeats, maybe I’ll wait and see. But I don’t expect to be watching when it first comes on.

I have to say I was disappointed by Matrix Reloaded, not that I was the only one, in what turned out to be the second highest opening weekend grosser and all-around geek Xmas in May. True that the special effects software gave the Wachowski Brothers amazing capabilities but they wasted them on cold, mechanical fight scenes that served no purpose in advancing the story. Neo versus a horde of Smiths, very impressive technically but no heart.

Then there’s the problem of too much talking, loads of five dollar words with five cent meanings. Morpheus’ speech to the orgiastic partiers in Zion stands in stark emotional contrast to Neo’s one on one with The Architect (and to a lesser degree with The Oracle) but neither gives us meaning to match the emotion with which the actors imbue their speeches. The explanation Neo gets, in both cases, make the fights seem entirely irrelevant whereas in the first movie they meant so much more because of the difference in our understanding.

Even with the amazing capabilities, such as in the Neo/Smith brawl, the fights don’t impress me as fights because I never doubt that Neo will win and Reeves never appears to work up a sweat while fending off whoever. And where is what ought to be a highlight of the FX work, the battle between the human fleet and the drilling machines? Why did Andy and Larry leave it offscreen even though they had a chance to show us an entirely different kind of fight? Last complaint: I didn’t buy the intensity of Reeves’ affection for Carrie-Ann Moss, probably because the film spent zero time giving us a reason.

Patrick Lee, writing in SciFi Weekly, suggests the film really requires, and deserves, two viewings to really get. Plus make allowances for this being the middle of three films. Maybe. We’ll see.

Mildly recommended, probably ought to see it once on the big screen.

Ts1 and I returned to the casa last night, a little later than expected but otherwise well. We had a terrific honeymoon, photos of some of the activies and sites will be posted in the near future for the obsessive fanbase, and are still happy about the whole marriage thing. Lot of errands and catching up stuff to do but more blogging to follow.

I am married, I am married, I am married! When does the magic spell wear off? Never, I hope!

More photos to come when we return!

When a mother holds a gun to her son’s head, that’s when we should understand to the point of certainty that people don’t need to have guns. Frankly, the only logical reason I’ve ever heard given for having one is hunting for those who enjoy it and for them rifles are sufficient, with the rifles stored in a club facility near or at the hunting grounds. The current push in Congress to give gun manufacturers immunity from lawsuits is beyond absurd. The NRA can kiss my First Amendment-protected ass if they think different but I sure wish they’d cut out the idiotic arguments proclaiming that every gun is a good gun.