BillSaysThis

Ram: a haiku

YAWNS1: Introducing 802.11s – Wireless Mesh Networking

1) Yet Another Wireless Networking Standard

This is a republic, with an emphasis on an informed polity, so why do Bush’s executive orders allowing rendition need to be classified? Not the details of any specific individual tranferred to another nation under it, which is a different discussion, but the order itself. My guess is that the verbiage would be embarassing, at the least, to the Administration and in any case this fits precisely with their historical behavior of hiding everything possible from the public.

New Beginnings is a paperback book that collects the first chapters of new, as yet unpublished novels by top name authors and its sales (US cover price is $9.95, ISBN 1596910542) will benefit Tsunami victims. Two of my favorite novelists, Harlan Coben and Nick Hornby, are among those donating work: Harlan’s is from The Innocent and Hornby’s from A Long Way Down. Also participating, to name a few, are Steven King, JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Maeve Binchy and Scott Turow. Nobody took up the offer two months ago to trade my Amazon gift certificate received as a holiday present for a donation, so this will be a good purchase for me.

No offense to Ben and Mena Trott but the LA Times is full of crap!

Holy dotbomb, Batman: The Seattle Times publishes an amazing look at a nasty criminal scheme at one-time highflier InfoSpace.

The NY Times becomes the latest media member to explore the mystery of Axl Rose and his 11 years and still not done music project Chinese Democracy: The Most Expensive Album Never Made. Worthwhile if you aren’t worn out from previous tellings. My GnR has a performance clips of a few of the songs which may end up a part if this ever comes out. Meanwhile, ultra-violent video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas surges to the top of the sales charts blasting the band’s 18 year old original hit Welcome to the Jungle.

We were a bit restless after dinner last night and planning on seeing this Vin Diesel comedy sooner rather than later, so TS1 and I got off our duffs and went to the 9:00 showing. Despite generally poor reviews, we both enjoyed The Pacifier and thought it compared well to, say, Arnold’s Kindergarden Cop (reasonably similar warnings about suitability for children under, say, nine too), which we also enjoyed.

As I proclaimed in my review of xXx, I think Diesel has the charisma to be a major action star; this is really his first comedy, though, and he needs to develop a better understanding of the difference in rhythm and timing if he wants to break out of that genre. Director Adam Shankman, following up the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah Bringing Down the House, manages to smooth around the edges and writers Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (partners on Comedy Central’s Reno 911, last year’s Jimmy Fallon English language remake of Taxi, cult troupe The State) thrown in a bit more creative whackiness than we often get in big studio fish out of water comedies.

For instance, there’s a subplot pitting Lt. Shane Wolfe (Diesel) against Vice Principal/Wrestling Coach Murney (Brad Garrett) over the behavior of oldest son Seth (Max Thieriot). Even lightly-used romantic interest Lauren Graham, playing the school principal, is taken in when Seth dyes his hair blonde and a Nazi armband is found in his locker. Lennon and Garant pull this one straight out of their lower body opening, so unexpected that I refuse to spoil it, but suffice to say much laughter ensued when Diesel’s bus chase on a little girl bicycle uncovered the reasoning. Later on, Wolfe and the Murninator settle their differences on the wrestling mat that also yields a couple of good laughs.

Laughter, after all, is the only useful measure of this type of movie. The Pacifier is entertainment, not art, and though there is a bit of the subversive via the scripters we’re after something different in watching this than, say, Heat or The Station Agent. Judged in this light, let’s list it as moderately successful.

recommended

Amusingly, this film beat out the favored Be Cool at the box office by over 25%, $30.2M v. $23.5M.

Released in 1995, Heat established Michael Mann as masterful film director. Mann was, of course, already famous for creating TV series Miami Vice, but his previous movies were respectable at best; after this he delivered The Insider, Ali and Collateral. Of all of those, Heat is most similar to Collateral and not only because both revolve around a criminal racing against the clock and the cops to finish a job and get out of town. While at the end of the day different, both movies are:

• Set up as a face-off between one main criminal against one main pursuer;
• Set all over Los Angeles, the incredible variety of landscapes combined with saturation of light and color breaks out of typically cramped urban visualization;
• Set to a pulsing, complex electronic soundtrack that throbs and beats; and,
• Set in motion by an outsider, a ponytailed Jon Voight here and a voice on the end of a phone for Cruise.

Hard to say which is better, really. The newer one is a bit crisper and more tightly focused, 120 versus 188 minutes, which might explain the differences in box office and overall reception. Not really any need to choose, both are well worth watching. Perhaps because film is considered a director’s medium, Mann’s writing ability seems often overlooked–he also wrote all four of the movies I mentioed–but I think his scripts and skill with dialog are excellent as well.

Heat pits two of the great modern American actors against each other, Robert DeNiro as the leader of an experienced criminal crew and Al Pacino running the LAPD Major Crimes Unit. But Mann cast recognizable, talented actors in almost every role. DeNiro’s crew are Voight, Val Kilmer, Dennis Haysbert, Tom Sizemore, and Tom Noonan, his girlfriend is Amy Brenneman, Kilmer’s wife is Ashley Judd, and Hank Azaria has a bit as Judd’s lover. Pacino’s squad includes Ted Levine, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi with Diane Venora as Pacino’s wife and a very young Natalie Portman as his troubled stepdaughter. Also featured are William Fichtner as a sleazy financial type, Jeremy Pivens, Xander Berkeley, Farrah Forke, Brad Cort and Tone Loc.

Heat has three major highlights: two honest conversations between DeNiro and Pacino discussing their substantial similarities and a midday gun battle between the cops and the crooks in which an awesome quantity of bullets are unleashed. But there are many smaller quality bits too, some that stand out to me are: Judds’ signal to Kilmer, DeNiro’s reaction to a barely noticeable sound during a preliminary robbery, Pacino’s disposal of a TV set, Brenneman’s realization that DeNiro is a crook and not a salesman, Haysbert’s on the spot decision to join DeNiro, and Pacino’s tenderness when Portman’s troubled nature is laid bare.

absolutely recommended

I am a member of a “weird community of people,” according to Carson Daly on last night’s Last Call, since I blog. Then again if you’re reading this so are you. This was the second late night show this week to poke fun at us: The Daily Show had a pretty funny bit with Rob Corddry on Thursday. Not surprisingly Corddry was funnier.

Blog fight: ClusterFuck Manifesto vs. Oligopoly Watch. Well, not explicitly on the part of either author, both of whom I find very interesting and insightful, but hard to see both being correct longterm. Then there’s Anderson’s Long Tail, more in line with Kunstler than Hannaford, and Jon Springer’s Peak Energy. All of which leaves out any consideration of the physical, economic and social changes that will come after the effect of rising global ocean temperatures are felt, probably within the next 10-12 years. But let’s spin off into a deeper question, shall we?

Reform or save Social Security? Ha! Growing availability of automabiles with hybrid engines, this is funny, I compared the hybrid and standard versions of the only car sold in the US with either choice, the 2005 Honda Accord sedan, and the difference is 7 miles per gallon! The endless search for America’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, goes on with the occasional Presidential sound bite but without results–perhaps there have been no tragedies on American soil since 9/11 but there are the 1,500 Americans and uncountable tens of thousands Iraqis dead in Iraq. Maybe the Supreme Court will proclaim the legitimacy of posting the Ten Commandments on government grounds and will cheer some people up.

Trivial diversions, all of them, while (most of) the richest among us grab as much as they can before all these problems collide. Seems like these people are no longer even concerned with manuvering discretely to reach their goals and instead have developed sophisticated communication machines that put populist bread and circus sheens on everything. You know, like a guy using a fake name claiming to work for a fake news organization who was given White House press access for two years so he could lob softball questions whenever the “real” journalists’ questions were edging out of the comfort zone.

Makes me wonder if, far away from prying eyes and almost certainly outside the United States, some very large, well secured estates are being developed as refuges for the ridiculously wealthy. Lots of space for growing food and raising livestock, temperate climate away from coastlines that might be submerged by rising sea levels, modest accomodations for the manual labor and security to keep them in line, with political cover bought and paid for.

Now that would be worth a serious investigation by a journalist, academic or anyone with the time and resources to uncover. Me, paranoid? Sure but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

[instigated by JRobb]

Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones is now a radio DJ in Los Angeles, supposedly a very cool non-corporate one even though the station is owned by Clear Channel, but what gets me about the linked photo is how normal and middle-aged he looks. You can’t be 23 forever but some images create terrible cognitive dissonence nonetheless.

In conversations with non-blogging friends and with people I don’t know well (at social networking events and job interviews, for instance) I’ve had to explain blogs and RSS. In the last little while, though, that hasn’t really been the case. Of course living here in Silicon Valley most people are tech-oriented even if they don’t work for a computer company.

Today The Big Guy and I had coffee with a friend who is setting up a site to promote her (very local) landscaping design business. Of course a blog will be the core content management tool. So that’s on the tiny end of the scale and on the other we have the New York Times buying About.com and (through one of it’s subsidiaries) BostonDirtDogs. Frank Rich, eulogizing Hunter Thompson, calling Doc Gonzo a blogger before there were blogs (or a web).

Scoble ripping a marketing team in his own company for setting up a new website without including an RSS feed. The team, taking the criticism in stride, promptly adds one. Coverville, previewing one possible future radio replacement, makes a deal with ASCAP and BMI to become the first(?) licensed music podcaster and immediately gets covered in Time.

Scoble teams up with Shel Israel to write what is probably the first big (that is, hyped) business blogging how-to book. Practicing what they preach, part of their deal was that the publisher start blogging himself and another is that the duo will write the book in public, posting chapters to the blog and incorporating feedback from the comments.

Dan Gillmor quit a pretty cushy, high visibility gig with the San Jose Mercury News to go out on his own and start a company (still in stealth mode so details are thin) to provide tools for citizen journalists. ABC News named bloggers People of the Year for 2004.

As they say at Club Med, it’s all good baby.

Free software: Karen’s Power Tools (Windows only but some seem pretty useful)

Jossip: Newsweek opts for Martha Stewart photo illustration. Because even the doyenne of modern American womanhood isn’t physically perfect enough at her age. Wonder what NBC and Trump will do when they shoot her version of The Apprentice. [via applehead]

Quite amusing how the two Google ads showing at this moment at the top of this page are headlined “God loves you” and “World Peace” because, sadly, I don’t really believe either is possible. But for entirely different reasons.

SCOTUSblog: How Bitter Will The Next S. Ct. Nomination Be? Speaking of Bush, the use of language and political expectations. Public life is nasty these days, from any point on the spectrum, and it will get worse before (if) it gets better. I find evidence of this discourtesy lately on every level of politics and every situation–internal business decisions, volunteer groups, discussion boards–where politics comes into play.

Perhaps I’m lately too close and too observant and this is only an example of “the grass is always greener” except, of course, with opposite meaning, intensified and more visible because modern technology has increased the breadth and amplified the speed of communications. But I doubt it; I think our civility has decreased on both absolute and relative levels.

[Post title’s reference]

In Allah and Democracy Can Get Along Fine Dilip Hiro makes an enlightening discussion on the possible forms an Islamic Iraqi democracy may take. More interesting to me, though, was this sentence from the first paragraph: “This prospect is sending a chill down the spines of many Westerners, who see it as a preamble to the rise of a theocratic regime in Baghdad that would be a far cry from the liberal, secular Iraq envisioned by the Bush administration.”

Anyone who seriously suggests that anyone in the Bush Administration expected a secular Iraq is feeding the audience a line; while some of the Neocons may have wished fondly for a secular Iraq, even I do not believe them to be that naive. What really caught my attention was the other adjective Hiro used: liberal. This guy may have written two books (as his end of essay credit mentions) about the Middle East but he clearly isn’t a member of the same reality-based community as me.

Alternatively, Hiro is correct in using the liberal label but does so in a 1984-like style where words mean what the government says they do rather than, say, the OED. In that case, of course, he is free to use liberal in this instance but then we are left with a term that no longer has any semantic value. After all, the Republicans big curse in the 1980s was to call someone (*cough* Dukkakis *cough*) a “card carrying Liberal” to dismiss any of the person’s positions or policies as worthless. If the Bush Crew did indeed use the term in reference to post-liberation Iraq I can only sit here and gaze blankly at my screen.

SCOTUSblog has a preview on tomorrow’s argument in Deck v. Missouri before the Supreme Court. The case presents an interesting question: Decker was convicted of murder and during the sentencing hearings he was required to wear legirons and was handcuffed to a belly chain and now contends that these restraints predjudiced the jury against him so that they gave him the death penalty. Another one of those where does the line get drawn situations, though generally speaking I don’t think that death is a useful sentence.