Category: Personal

Oh behave! – those wacky Brits and the things they deep fry

The news is out, more on this breaking story later.

They expect me to wait 57 freaking days for the new Springsteen album? Someone up there either wants to drive me crazy or into serious agony! Shore Fire Media put out a press release today stating that a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band recording, The Rising, will be in stores on July 30. Backstreets.com has the track listing and some other tidbits; My City in Ruins will be on the disc but not 41 Shots. “The sound is very recognizable and very different,” Springsteen said. “If you have all of our other records, you don’t have this one. We picked up the level of intensity. I can’t wait for people to hear this record.” Gawd, this is going to be a long two months!

[thanks to garret for the initial notice]

At 9:24 a.m. Well, since I’m waiting here from 9-12 for the plumber anyway… The problem I’m having is that, only on premium movie channels (HBO< Showtime, Starz), I frequently (but not always and not predictably) have signal problems where the picture pixilates, fades to black, freezes, displays various green splotches and loses the sound as well. Previously the support rep said to power cycle the Tivo box while this is happening. Tried that Friday night when Jeremiah was on and it did not help.

Update 9:46 a.m.: Finally off the generic jazz muzak and alking to a real person but he puts me back on hold to read up on the previous case entries. Still no sign of the plumber. Turned on the TV and the problem was not happening, checked several of the channels. But it did happen last night as soon as I tuned into The Sopranos.

Update 9:54 a.m.: Well, off the phone with a couple of suggestions but no solution. “Maybe it’s the cable box.” is the current position. We’ll see. I was told to power cycle the cable box and if that does not help, try switching the two cable boxes. Swell. I suppose I am the first person to EVER call in with this problem. Right?

Denmark-Uruguay yesterday, Argentina-Nigeria this morning, England-Sweden this afternoon. Some terrific soccer. England have to be disappointed with their result; the team did not live up to expectations, fell down after a strong start, and continued their 34 year streak of not defeating the Swedes. Argentina are just the opposite, squeezing passed the very young Super Eagles 1-0 on a super header by Batistuta off a Veron corner kick. Today’s two games showed off the fearsome nature of corners, as England’s score also came off of Sol Campbell’s head. Nigeria gave up corner after corner and you knew sooner or later the South Americans would take advantage. Still, the draw has to have the Nigerians thinking they may have a chance to advance even after the loss if they can manage a draw and a victory in the next two games.

Every commentator says the reason soccer isn’t more popular here in the States is because of the predominantly low scores. May I beg to differ? I think the real reason is that soccer is simply too casual, too loose. Watch the play after a foul, when a player gets in the general vicinity of the spot where it occured he just spins the ball in front of him and kicks it. Watch after a ball goes out of bounds, when a player takes several steps passed where the ball went out and tosses it into play. Consider that the clock doesn’t stop for goals and injuries and instead the referee keeps track in his handwatch.

All those go against the American grain. NBA shot clocks go into tenths of a second. NFL fields are marked with every yard and use chains to measure for first downs. Even the NHL uses instant replay on disputed goals.

Then there is the issue of control. In American sports, the head coach/manager retains very close rein on the action, in many situations running onto the field/court to argue individual calls. In soccer, once play starts the coach has very little to do when the ball is in play except to send his (at most) three substitutes.

Sure, Americans would probably find the game more exciting with more scoring. One could make a similar comment about hockey although that sport continues to make headway; I expect that seeing the Carolina Hurricanes make their franchise first-ever Stanley Cup Finals appearance this week will light up the South, especially if the series goes six or seven games.

But Americans are a pretty uptight bunch and I think that’s the real reason soccer, the ultimate in sport everywhere else, goes nowhere in the U.S.

Aren’t we all? – If you’re having a hard time believing the Nets are in the Finals, well, you’re not alone.

I know, I’m just as surprised as you that I waited 16 days to see Attack of the Clones too. What the hell. We did make the extra effort to drive to San Jose and see it at a digital projection theater. Not incredible but nice to have, worth driving a few extra minutes if you live near one of the 20 theaters across the country which have it.

Don’t bother to see it if you expect logic and amazing acting. This isn’t that kind of movie. The special effects are state of the art and the integration of digital creations with real people is undetectable. Yoda, as many others have said before, rocks. The aliens of planet Kamino, scientists who create the clone army, are amazingly beautiful and you will believe the characters are people in suits even though they’re not. Hayden Christensen, the 20 year old Anakin, did not meet my expectations for the role and Ewen McGregor is usually a much better actor. Christopher Lee just rocks and at 80 years of age shows no signs of slowing up (remember his Sarumen in Fellowship of the Rings?).

Will George Lucas direct Episode Three as he has One and Two? I kind of hope he doesn’t. As good as the technology is here, he seems too enamored of it and we end up with weaker acting and plotting than ought to be the case. Still…

Recommended

People have amazing ability to hide reality when it’s right under their noses: Graying Now, McCarthyites Keep the Faith

Karl tried to change the world and failed but props for trying, buddy! And more props for getting rid of the Star Wars background image that was making your page so hard to read<LOL>

What the heck – why not jump on the rolling boulder matt.griffith started…

I would never come up with a phrase like:

“Once Jack springs into action, Mr. Affleck, whose slack features convey the clueless petulance of a superannuated frat boy bluffing his way into the big leagues, loses his grip.”

From today’s NY Times review of The Sum of All Fears, Terrorism That’s All Too Real.

Tivo can be a great and wonderful toy, no doubt. But it can also be a pain in the ass. I set the machine to record this morning’s opening World Cup match and instead of changing the channel to 38 for ESPN2, the piece of crap changed it to 3. Sometimes it drops off the last number for some unknown reason. And yes, I already made the aluminum foil fort over the IR receivers. So I miss a huge match, with Senegal upsetting France 1-0. I set up a Season Pass for the World Cup matches and let’s just say this better not happen again because I can’t be staying up all night to watch. Damn!

Agent Smith, General Zod, and Leonard Shelby turn the conventions of the road movie upside down all across the Australian desert on a lavender bus in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla, of course, is the bus. The stars are Hugo Weaving (Smith), Terence Stamp (Zod),and Guy Pearce (Shelby) and they play a trio of drag queens who fix up an old bus in order to drive from Sydney to Alice Springs to perform their act at a casino theater run by Weaving’s lesbian wife.

Amazingly, the movie is even funnier than it sounds. For example, at one point they get lost on a shortcut out in the middle of nowhere–after all way back in 1993, when this movie was made, civilian GPS wasn’t available, was it?–and are rescued by a roving band of Aboriginals. To say thanks, they get out their full kit and perform. Then there is the late in life romance between Stamp and their auto mechanic, Bob. And I knew I’d seen the actor playing Bob before, Bill Hunter. Turns out he played Muriel’s sleazy politician father in that other 1994 Australian hit comedy, Muriel’s Wedding.

Acting is all about submerging the actor in the role and bringing the character to life, right? Well after seeing The Adventures of Priscilla, I have to say that Hugo Weaving is a terrific actor, just on the range of roles he’s pulled off. The drag queen here, Agent Smith in The Matrix, and Elrond (the Elven King) in Fellowship of the Ring. Someone needs to explain to me why he isn’t getting more big roles. Maybe after the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions films come out next year he’ll get busy.

Heartily Recommended

Sad but in a funny way – one of the reasons behind Blogger communication woes.

The Blogger API server continues to be offline, causing this site’s Book Review and Springsteen pages to be non-functional at this time. Pyra is not responding to email or newsgroup postings on this topic. User frustration is mounting. Myself, I set up MovableType 2.11 yesterday and unless there is some serious improvement from Blogger services quickly, you may see me finally give up and leave. Which would be a shame after all this time, well over a year now, that I have been an enthhusiastic user and supporter. Ev, are you listening? Why can’t we get so much as a simple status message/response?

Update, 5:30 PST: Ev posted a message to the newsgroup explaining many of the difficulties, including why he hasn’t posted answers to the numerous problems. We need to have a chat with some folks at Yahoo! Groups, it seems, when a group owner can’t even post to his own group.

Update, 6:30 PST: The API server is back online and so all pages should be working.

Ethan and Joel Coen have made 10 movies together over the last 18 years, sharing writing, directing, and producing chores, even editing most of them under the screen name Roderick Jaynes. All of them, without exception, have been odd, outside the mainstream. Lots of visual quirks and extremely stylish cinematography. Most recently, The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the award-winning Fargo, the comic Raising Arizona. 1984’s Blood Simple was their first effort, written while Joel worked as an editor on Sam (Spider-Man) Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead.

The story in Blood Simple is basic, mostly a framework on which to hang dialog and visuals, a cheating wife, a suspicious husband, a sleazy private eye, and the boyfriend. The story isn’t important and it mainly develops that people all too easily misunderstand based on assumptions they ought not have made. Frances McDormand, who married Joel Coen shortly after this film was made, is the cheating wife, very young, blonde and pretty, but with that unique combination of mouth and eyes that always seem older than she is. This was her first (credited) movie role though she has starred in many of the Coen films and won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Fargo.

John Getz (yeah, I asked who he was too) gets his biggest part here as the boyfriend. Maybe its his gritty voice but in this film he shows a massive lack of emotional range, which works fine here but is probably less than advantageous in getting other parts. M. Emmet Walsh is the conniving, backstabbing private eye, a terrific character actor who’s made over 75 films in the last 30+ years. Dan Hedaya is the husband, another career character actor who mostly plays a sleaze; typical of his roles, on the comic side, was as Bette Midler’s ex-husband Morty in The First Wives Club. There are very few other roles in this movie, only a couple of which have lines, none of which matter.

Blood Simple can be viewed as the blueprint for almost all of the Coen brother films: tight, confusing plot with strong but (until lately) not big name actors playing odd, offbeat characters, lots of strong but often misdirecting visuals, and, whether comedy or drama, a nearly hallucinatory atmosphere.

Recommended

What to do? What to do! The TV season may be over but you wouldn’t know it to look at the schedule for this coming Sunday night at 9:00. For starters, the season finale of Six Feet Under. After being turned off by the first few episodes of the first season, I started watching and now it’s good, really good. TNT has an original movie starring Patrick Stewart, King of Texas, which fortunately will be repeating numerous times; don’t you want to see Captain Picard play Shakespeare as a Texas rancher?. The Tonys are on too but I don’t really care, do you?

Here’s the dilemma: ABC is premiering The Hamptons and Fox Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska. How can I miss out on such intense, dramatic reality programming? Just because I think Survivor sucks, Fear Factor farts, and Temptation Island blows.

With Tivo I can record only one show at a time and I can watch another on the other set. What’s a poor boy to do? Actually, I think I’ll just be watching Six Feet Under. Reality shows can bite my shorts, to paraphrase another Sunday night TV hero.

Serious programming note: At 10 make sure to watch the new HBO series The Wire which Matt Roush says is even better than Six Feet Under. Another David Simon (Homicide, The Corner) Baltimore cops and criminals show.

One tries to be tolerant of different points of view, certainly.One understands that not everyone see the world as one does. You say tomato, I say evolution. But one does expect certain standards to be consistent across Western democracies. But then one finds out he can be wrong, very wrong, in holding such a belief. Wrong and very sad.

Because Michel Houellebecq said Islam is “the most stupid of all religions” in an interview, the French writer faces a blasphemy trial out of the 17th century. Four French Muslim organizations have brought criminal charges of racism against Houellebecq. I have no understanding of French law, to be sure, but how do you get a statement about a religion to squeeze into a charge of racism? And–again, I know this is France, not America–but don’t they have freedom of speech there? Houellebecq has gotten so many threats against his person and his family for his statements and writings that he has said he will never write again.

In the discussion of this article at MetaFilter, one poster suggests that if a similar comment had been made substituting Judaism for Islam the reaction would be quite different. I suggest to him that such comments are made quite frequently in, for example, the Arab news media, where recent articles claim that Israeli Jews kidnap and kill Palestinean babies to get blood for use in baking bread. And that the Mossad is responsible for the 9/11 atrocities.

I have previously posted about Houellebecq and his notoriety. I still look forward to reading his coming novel. And remain convinced that France has fallen into a rut, no, make that a hole, from which it will be very difficult to climb out. Expect to see increasing levels of violence from Islamic residents/citizens, not only against Jews and writers, but against the general population. Sad, very sad.