Category: Personal

Turns out that Matthew Broderick has one of the leads in You Can Count on Me because he was high school buddies with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, how’s that for a juicy tidbit! Okay, this is Lonergan’s first major film and getting someone of Broderick’s history probably helped more with getting the financing. This is an odd little film that had a lot of critical acclaim and got nominated for a lot of awards so I figured to give it a shot. Can’t really recommend it to others unless you like really small scale character studies where the characters undergo almost no growth at all. None of the actors give all that exciting performances although Laura Linney comes closest in what I suppose is the lead role.

While taking my Weekday Morning Coffee Stroll with Evan today, I had an idea for a novel called Greasy Lake after the Springsteen song. Our protagonist would be a simple Everyman, not too smart, not too well-read, had his share of issues earlier in life like, say, drugs, alcohol, women, but has lots of family connections which see him through these troubled times. A smart as a whip oil industry executive figures out that between changes in laws, voting trends, media coverage, and post-modern advertising techniques, he and a few cronies can use Our Boy as a frontman to take over the US government. His thinking says this will be so low key that no one will notice, or even if anyone does they won’t be able to get any attention paid to “such a ridiculous idea.” At least not until it’s too late. Think Christopher Buckley for tone.

Oh wait, they’d shelve this one in the non-fiction section, wouldn’t they?

They’re running bits of it in the NY Times already: The Angry People

Spent a bunch of time last night and today writing a new function in PHP for this site and you can see the result over on the right side where a link says “bst Year Ago”. That phrase sounds awkward and might get changed but the functionality will stay the same, which is to provide a hyperlink to the weblog from one year in the past of the day someone views the page. For now I think this is only useful on the main page so that’s the only place it appears. This is a standard feature in some other weblogging systems (Radio, MovableType) but I have not seen it before for Blogger, especially not a version written in PHP. Then again I haven’t looked that hard either.

I need a refinement in the Blogger template to finish/polish this feature, to set an anchor link in the weblogs on a per day basis in addition to the current per entry basis, but I’m not sure that’s possible at this moment given the Blogger functionality. So for now clicking the link takes you to the top of the appropriate blog archive file. Once I have a year’s worth of LinksBlog! I will add it in there as well.

Code is fairly nicely set up to allow others to use this, I think, and even has a few comments to explain what’s going on. Source is available on request.

In today’s NY Times, Jimmy Carter wrote an essay titled America Can Persuade Israel to Make a Just Peace and he falls into the same trap as so many other supposedly learned, informed people: he thinks that giving the Palestinians a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza will be the end of the matter. Carter goes farther and suggests a “limited right of return” although he takes the weak road and doesn’t suggest any detail on how this will be limited. Everybody will then live happily ever after, right? Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will just lay down their arms and rejoice. They won’t try and drive Israel into the sea.

Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair prove that girls rule in The Sweetest Thing, which was a funny cross of Scary Movie and My Best Friend’s Wedding. Just like in Scary Movie Blair is the butt of an oral sex joke although this time a piercing causes the trouble. The film makes a big deal of how gorgeous Diaz is but if I had to choose I’d take Applegate in a heartbeat, no hesitation; one of the movie’s jokes is how Diaz breasts have slipped a little since she was 22, her character is 28, but in real life she’s 30 and I think her thin, angular face may not age all that well. The director was smart enough not to have Applegate do the same, he even denigrated her breasts as fake in another scene, or she would have stolen the movie.

Screenwriter Nancy Pimental is previously credited as a writer on South Park and I can see some of that influence here, such as the exchange between Applegate and a little boy in the church scene. Thomas Jane doesn’t have nearly enough to do as the object of Diaz’s affection but that’s probably due to the fact that the film’s too short at around 83 minutes. Georgina Engels (yes, the blonde from the Mary Tyler Moore Show) has a cute cameo as a campy clothing store owner and Parker Posey, obviously taking the money, is cute but has no decent lines as Jane’s fiancee. Recommended

Ordinary pet peeves are like:

Someone cutting you off or tailgating on the roads

Homicide bombers

Jerry Springer

But I have a serious one: putting a new roll of toilet paper out the wrong way. The hanging paper needs to be on the side away from the toilet seat but many people get this wrong. Why? Is it that hard to figure out? Come on people, let’s get it right!

Not to say anything about personal interest but I did have some interesting conversations in the last couple of days with senior staff at i3Connect (“Connecting People, Communities and Applications”). This company has a couple of products just coming out, one is actually still in beta, but a very strong vision. Free for personal use, Vista is an instant messaging client with lots of zoomy features of which the most important are the ability to communicate over many of the major IM networks including MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and Yahoo!, support for custom realtime information channels, and use of the Blogger API (means that Vista can be an authoring surface). i3Connect is also in beta with Merlin, a sophisticated server that integrates IM and Web Services support. If you IM, check them out.

Well, the mystery of baseball suckage has been handled (I’m joking, don’t send me any bombs disguised as baseballs) and now I am thrilled to report that the IRS mess is over with as well. The check actually was in the mail and received today. I would include a scanned image but I was so anxious to get money in the bank that I ran right over and deposited it.

Mmmm, closure feels so nice. What other situations can I get to it on? Well, there is this person, who used to be a really close friend, who apparently only has one use for me any more, as a technical resource as he builds his website. He calls once or twice a week and other than a perfunctory “How are you?” has no interest in any conversation other than his question. I really ought to write him an email explaining that this really hurts my feelings. Or perhaps I should just fall back, briefly, into my old passive/aggressive behavior and let him figure it out from this post. Of course, he doesn’t really read my weblog even though he is quite well aware of it and has asked me to ue it in the past to promote his causes. I probably wouldn’t feel so used if he had actually done the favor I asked of him last Fall, which he agreed to do but never delivered.

Well, I had another couple of email back and forths with Caroline Chang. For someone who has to deal every day with cranks like me, and even worse, I suppose, she sure does a good job of keeping a positive attitude. Thanks, Caroline! The bottom line, though, is that viewers should not expect any change in this situation; baseball and other sporting events run long and stations will accomodate viewers of other shows as best they can but no better. As I mentioned in the previous post, there was a mixup in communication: while station management intended the delayed network shows to begin on time, the techs responsible for running the equipment didn’t do as instructed. Ms. Chang suggests padding the recording time by an hour or more to allow for this situation, which is not unreasonable. Well, enough on this topic. The moral of the story has two parts: first, baseball sucks but some people like to watch it anyway so TV stations are going to continue showing it, and two, I need to pad the recording time when this happens.

Update 6:30 p.m.: Ms. Chang sent me what is likely the final answer in this dialog, and explanation of station policy on how to handle live events that run long: “If the game ran til Midnight, News would be canceled. It would air for an hour before Midnight however. Each night is different, so how we would handle would depend on the night and the programming that is scheduled on Fox that night. No matter what we do, and how we handle it, we upset somebody. Our contract with Fox requires the preempted shows to air prior to 2a, so we would back time between the News, and the shows scheduled at 11p & 11:30p. For each Giants game we plan a contingency plan that allows for a 5 hour game, and specifies what should happen for each 15 minute increment.”

I am impressed. I got a pleasant, positive response from Caroline Chang, KTVU Program Manager, to my complaint about the delay of 24 and Andy Richter Saves the Universe. She said it was pilot error, a mixup between herself and the Master Control staff, and she offered to send a videotape of the show. A good first step, for which I thanked her.

But it isn’t really enough. I need KTVU to commit to airing a show like 24 when they say it will start, or there’s no point in watching. Unlike almost any other show, 24 demands that you see every episode to understand what’s going on. Perhaps this is an extreme attitude but I’ll wait and see what Ms. Chang’s next response says.

Continuing our entertainment theme, I pulled together a page of the more than two dozen movies coming out between now and early September that I hope/expect to see:

Summer 2002 Movies for BillSaysThis

Thanks to IMDB for the dates and links.

12 days ago, I wrote about my inability to get any love from the IRS. The agent I spoke with that day assured me a check would be cut in a week and mailed that same day (April 12). USPS is not that great but usually first class mail will be delivered to me from anywhere in the country within two business days. It’s been four but no check for Bill. Instead, I get a letter from the Dread Crew, dated and mailed April 15, explaining that my bank had refused the direct deposit and I should expect a check within three weeks.

I call up and sit on hold for nearly a half hour, thankfully I have a phone headset, and am finally connected to a live agent. Who insists that my bank must have refused the direct deposit because why would the IRS lie to me? Um, yeah, okay. He does say that the computer shows a check was cut and mailed to me for the refund on April 12 as promised. But it comes from a different processing center, so it could take up the THREE WEEKS to make its way to my mailbox.

If I don’t like his answers or explanations? The agent suggests I consult an attorney and file a lawsuit. Would I get my money any faster? No. Would I get any more money? No. I might get the truth, though, he says. So I should spend my own money (and yours too) getting my own government to tell me the truth? I think this guy must get driven insane answering these beyond his control questions but there has to be a better way. IAC, I still want my Benjamins!

Okay, maybe there are some people out there who like this slow and boring game. I don’t but okay. However, having favorite shows pushed off by local games definitely sucks when the national network is going ahead with new episodes. I have a Tivo so recording the delayed until midnight showings ought not to be such a problem. But, uh oh, I turn out to be fucked when the game runs six minutes long as happened last night with the Giants and then the moron station execs don’t cut short the following shows, like their stoopid local news, to account for this. I wonder if letters to the station really ever do any good:

Bad enough that you would show baseball instead of these shows and then show them late at night. But okay, I can set my recorder (a Tivo in my case) and watch the next day.

But you don’t even stick to the damn schedule you list and run the shows late. Oh well, I didn’t want to see the end of the shows anyway. Sure I can try and catch 24 later in the week on F/X but that doesn’t help my girlfriend, who can’t be here then to watch. And it doesn’t help with Richter because that show isn’t repeated.

Baseball sucks. I realize that’s my opinion and someone must watch the games or you wouldn’t bother. But if you’re going to delay these shows from the rescheduled time, the least you could do is honor the contract you have with viewers (most whom I’m sure are not going to stay up into the middle of the night) and make sure they can be recorded!

I suppose it’s too much to ask that you shorten something else, like say your news program, to make up for this so we don’t get screwed over next time.

The NY Times previews the Summer of the Spinoff, a look at the movies coming this summer and beyond, and asks if the corporate finance managers have taken control of Hollywood. The article points out that there will be no less than 16 movies released between now and the end of this summer that are part of a series, a spinoff from a cartoon or TV show, or a remake of an older hit. Not to mention the tie-ins from the movies to books, TV shows, and other entertainments.

Friday starts us off with The Scorpion King, a prequel to the Mummy movies, which stars the WWF’s The Rock and will be accompanied by a History Channel documentary. May gets us the next Star Wars movie, which will have several TV shows built around it, and already has a group of fanatics sleeping out on the sidewalk waiting to see the first showing (of course they have a web page, though I can’t find it just now) plus Spider-Man. In June that loony Crocodile Hunter moves to the big screen and Adam Sandler remakes the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart classic Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, Austin Powers in Goldmember bows in July–yes, they made a deal with the Bond people and will show a trailer for December’s Die Another Day–along with Men in Black II, and Spy Kids 2 follows in early August.

For years some people have argued that all these sequels, prequels, remakes, and TV shows and cartoons come to big screen lay bare the inability of the Hollywood studios to bring real, meaningful creativity to us. Bull doodoo, okay? For starters, independent and foreign art house films have never been as strong as they are today. Century Theaters, one of the bigger and smarter movie theater chains at least in the Bay Area, has created a new brand (CineArts) of theaters to show these films. Not to mention upcoming studio films like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Salton Sea, both strong dramas with big name casts and backing.

I think with a couple of exceptions (*cough, Scorpion King, Spy Kids, cough*) I’ll probably see most of the movies I listed above. Sure these are commercial films, no question about it! And some will probably fall through the cracks, what with more films than ever coming out. But I laughed my ass off through the first two Austin Power movies, loved most of Will Smith’s films (even Enemy of the State), same goes for Sandler, and think Spider-Man will be terrific based n the trailers. Don’t even go there for Star Wars and the big four coming in November and December: Harry Potter, James Bond, Star Trek: Nemesis, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. For the $9.00 and up per ticket I have to pay today, Hollywood will need to earn my business. They seem to keep on doing just that.

Usually when a price is not revealed, the amount is higher than one expects. Not so surprising with jewelry or other fancies but when the cost of joining the Y is teased and teased on the website, when plenty of other costs are posted, when all the types of memberships are posted, you have to wonder what is going on. I got a postcard in the mail today (yes a snail mail paper postcard) with the tagline “Added Up, No One Beats Our Value!” and thought, well maybe I ought to look into this. The I searched the website, read the FAQ, and all I could find was “Contact the El Camino YMCA’s director of member services for information about joining the Y today!” Yeah I’m lazy enough to need to join a Y, or some gym, but that just makes me jump up and run over.

A few months back I re-read Exodus by Leon Uris and I had bought at the same time his novel QB VII but I’ve been so slow with reading books lately that I just now got to it. Still it was worth the wait even though Uris is not the best story plotter in the world; Exodus sort of made it easy for him since he was just fictionalizing a true story. That’s true here as well but the real life tale doesn’t lend itself to a traditional plot line. This book came about after Uris was sued for libel by a Polish doctor who was named in Exodus as a Nazi collaborator in their hideous WWII concentration camp medical experiments and the author made the interesting choice of inventing two people much like himself and the plaintiff involved in a very similar libel battle.

QB VII is told in the third person and divided into four parts: a biography of the doctor, a biography of the writer, trial preparations, and the trial itself. The doctor’s biography begins when he turns up at an Allied airforce base in Italy a few months after WWII ended, while the writer’s bio covers his entire life. Both are treated sympathetically, more or less, even though it is impossible for the reader to not know what is coming. The trial itself, as with most of the preparations, takes place in Englad and Uris gives over quite a few pages to describing the Royal Courts in the City of London, their history, and people and he uses language that would have the uncritical reader amazed at their perfection and ability to rise above the human condition. The setting is England because the doctor, a Polish Nationalist, settled there with several thousand of his compratriots after the Communists seized power.

QB VII was also made into what I thought was a great television miniseries in the 1970s, with Ben Gazzara playing the writer and Anthony Hopkins (in his first major american role) playing the doctor, although I haven’t seen it repeated in some time. Amusingly for some reason (probably money and production simplicity), the miniseries moves the doctor’s long sojourn in obscurity, fearing for his life after Poland made an unsuccessful attempt to extradite him in the late ’40s for war crimes, from a tiny British outpost called Sarawak in southeast Asia to the desert sands of Kuwait.

Still, Uris does cover interesting, important ground. Even though people like the doctor did not set out to do horrible things, they must realize that to participate is to forfeit their own humanity. In the end the author perhaps pushes a little too far in the eagerness to prove that evil must be rooted out to forestall future repetition by implying the collaborators were not as unwilling as their words would have us believe. In these months when some of us believe that certain Arabs are out to finish what the Nazis started, this book might be seen as a chilling warning to the European apologists.

On this day in <deleted by order of the celebrant> my sister Joanne was born in Newark, NJ. Now she lives a happy life in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas, oh my god!) and is the publisher of Security Dealer Magazine. Joanne is wonderful, smart, funny, pretty, and single (does that make a good personals ad?), she’s tall, blonde, well-traveled, and doesn’t smoke. If you are the right man for her, you will be smart enough to figure out how to get in contact with her without asking me. She is the best sister a guy could ask for except back in high school and college she refused to fix me up with her hottie girlfriends but I forgive her for that now.

If you’re in the area, and by that I mean 90 minutes driving time or less, you really should visit the San Jose Museum of Art. I went today with a couple of friends and had a nice 90 minute visit. The major exhibit, occupying most of the ground floor, is a major retrospective of Nathan Oliveira which runs for another four weeks (May 12). The two other main exhibits are Is the Medium the Message? out of the museum’s permanent collection (ends April 28) and First Impressions: Paulson Press (ends June 2).

Oliveira is a Bay Area native and retired Stanford professor of art who has been an active artist since the 1950s; this exhibition of about 70 pieces covers essentially his entire career. Although there are a few sculptures, most of the pieces are paintings or prints and I saw a clear progression in his work. Early on Oliveira was considered part of the post-War California school along with Richard Diebenkorn because of their common use of gestural painting but I find Oliveira’s works much more appealing than Diebenkorn’s. To my taste, to the extent I’ve seen his work, Diebenkorn is too raw and rough in his painting. Not that Oliveira has all of a sudden found a place in my top ten artist list either, a lot of his pieces were to dull and earth-toned, but I did enjoy seeing the increasing refinement and sophisticiation in his efforts over time, particular the the paintings displayed which are part of his recent Stelae series. None of those images are online but here is one I liked:

In addition to the exhibits, another reason to visit is that the museum charges no admission fee. The building itself is very nice with tall ceilings and lots of light and is located right in downtown San Jose. There is plenty of parking and some good places to eat nearby and a little park across the street where we listened for a few minutes to a drum circle.

Sorting out the seeds – Going into the last day of regular season NHL play, Devils are finished but the Islanders have one more game to play, against the Flyers. If the Islanders win, they end up fifth in the Eastern Conference and play Toronto (100 points); if they lose or tie, they end up sixth and play Carolina (probably 92 points with a win tomorrow over Atlanta). Whichever team the Islanders don’t play, the Devils do. Carolina is the higher seed, even though they have fewer points than Toronto, because they won their division and Toronto came in behind the hugely surprising Conference champion Boston Bruins. Whichever team ends up playing Carolina in the first round has to be the favorite even though they give up home ice. So, the question is, will the Islanders show up for the game tomorrow and play for pride or leave it in the dressing room and play for the matchup?

Update, 4/14: The Islanders played for pride and beat the Flyers 3-1 this afternoon. They end up with their best record in years and will meet Toronto in the first round of the playoffs, leaving Carolina to the Devils.

Spent a chunk of time last night and this morning enhancing the metapie weblog. Main changes were to make the post author more clear by having it shown ahead of the post, making the site more readable by increasing the font size (-1 is not legible to these old eyes any more!), and adding links for the team members to their home sites. I also added in a connection to a new tool called BlogChat, which is in beta but appears to have the basic functionality working, on the page. No idea what plans M. Pie, the mysterious and anonymous trader who hosts metapie, has in mind for it but it works. To test BlogChat I had a long, pleasant conversation with another one of the beta testers, a self-proclaimed web weenie named Jessyca Wallace, and the results were as expected. Go read metapie and if you have something to say about investing think about joining!