BillSaysThis

Marketing executives have begun to realize that the Hispanic consumers make up more and more of the people spending money in America demographic, hence the numerous Spanish language cable networks, TV and radio stations, and newspapers. All good, all good, for sure but this also means more movies targeting the same audience, and Hollywood likes nothing better than turning out a good chick flick.

Now I’m not a chick, but I’ve seen and enjoyed my share of them. Sadly, Real Women Have Curves is only a chick flick and not a very good one. America Ferrera is quite appealing as the lead actress, playing Ana, a chubby Mexican girl graduating from high school in Los Angeles. Lupe Ontiveros also gives a real performance as Ana’s bitchy, bitter mother.

But even a chick flick needs things like plot and character development to succeed. 90 minutes is enough for the typical teenage-focused movie but writers Josefina Lopez and George LaVoo simply meander among the mother-daughter relationship, the business difficulties of the other daughter, Ana’s budding but meaninglessly (artificially?) shortcircuited romance, and her teacher’s (played by George Lopez) efforts to get her to attend a good university rather than simply repeat her mother’s life.

Director Patricia Cardoso is ultimately responsible for leaving us with little more than eye candy. Movies, the saying goes, are a director’s medium and I just never felt her hands shaping and guiding this film. From beginning to end, there is no change in how Ana relates to her mother, no change in how the mother sees her daughters or acceptance that what was the right choice for her 35 years earlier might not be the best option in the new millenium.

Not recommended

New Mexico Magic–and G, I vote for you to get yourself out of bed waaaaay early to get us some tasty balloon photos!

Update, 10/5/3: He did, he did!

No Bay Bridge World Series this year.

A last minute letter to the editor at the Mercury News:

Several times now, when confronted with questionable behavior or choices, Arnold Schwarzenegger has said, literally, “Trust me.” Most recently in regard to the sources of the money that will repay his multimillion dollar bank loans but also in response to the accusations that he groped and otherwise sexually harassed numerous women. Why should we trust him? “You know me,” Arnold said. And while he has been a public figure for the last 30 years, the public has only had the opportunity to know him as an actor. Someone, that is, who lies for a living. What do we know about the real Arnold? With only three days left until the voting, instead of showing us the answer to that extremely important question, he seems to recede further and further into the distance.

The clock says 4:00 Friday but why do I feel like its 4:00 Saturday? Probably from reading too many stories like this one and this one. And especially the latest from Cringely, even though he is often way overblown.

Don’t rub your eyes too hard, but this is the actual source code for a real application called Hunt the Wumpus. Written in one of those ‘hear of by 10 people, ever’ languages called Befunge.

Emotional Design will probably be one of the hotter books in the tech world after the holidays. Several sample chapters are available now from the linked page. Donald Norman is probably best know for the 1988 classic The Design of Everyday Things.

I’m starting to get a bunch of spam with the ‘Microsoft Corp’ upgrade patch attached as a virus. More annoyance, hope you’re not getting hit. Looks like a variant of SoBig and I hate it even more.

Chin hair, just think chin hair:

One, on the day the campaign was announced, Arnold said he was rich enough to pay for it himself, would not need the assistance of special interests or others and therefore would not be beholden to others. Since then he’s collected as much, or more, in donations than the next closest candidate.

Two, he has criticised Bustamante consistently for accepting campaign contributions from Indian tribes which cross, or at least evade, the lines. So then he skirted, or evaded, campaign finance rules by going to a bank for a loan (to the tune of a few million dollars), and lent it to his campaign.

Three, after taking continual criticism for his (perceived) attitude towards women, when six women came forward to the press with accounts of having been groped on various movie sets over the years, he apologized. His campaign managers are trying to spin this as fantasies dreamed up by Democratic Party operatives but then why did he apologize and promise that his attitude to women has changed, matured?

Four, after much criticism for not providing specifics on how his stated goals for the government would be reached, he gave us a ten point plan. Unfortunately the plan reads like a fantasy since whoever wrote it is completely oblivious of legal and political realities. For instance, one point is rolling back the recent increase in car registration fees but that cannot be done by executive order and will require legislative approval and, perhaps more importantly, would require finding $4.2 BILLION in some combination of spending cuts or revenue increases.

Five, Schwarzenegger has spoke often of his ability to get things done and that he knows how to run a business, but for all the rhetoric of candidates and pundits who think that government is, or should be, just like a business, it isn’t. Command and control works fairly well in a corporation, especially smaller businesses like the real estate companies in which he’s had a hand, but state government requires cooperation from many other people to get anything done. Just passing a bill requires the agreement of several dozen legislators.

So Arnie, grow up. Give up. Drop out of the race now in favor of, say, a real politician like Tom McClintock and go back to the drawing board. Maybe the short campaign season this year looked like an easy pass to Sacramento but you obviously need more time to understand and prepare for this job.

Bruce opened three nights of concerts at Shea Stadium last night; the last, which is the final show of this year’s tour, is Saturday and I surely wish I could be there. Not only for the band’s incredible music but because the man is finally getting directly and unamiguously into politics in a way that he’s essentially avoided thoughout his career.

Springsteen wove strong criticism of the administration of President Bush into the first of the final three shows at Shea Stadium on Wednesday night, playing a recording of Bush talking about weapons of mass destruction, questioning America’s motives for the war in Iraq and calling for Bush’s defeat as he seeks re-election next year. “It is time to impeach the president and put in somebody that knows what they’re doing,” Bruce told the audience.

Bruce’s name has been bandied about for political office, always by others and immediately disclaimed by Springsteen himself, but I would so like to see him run for the US Senate from New Jersey. One can only imagine that he would be more electable than the Governator is out here and much more honest and able to boot. Frank Lautenberg is only a year into his term and Jon Corzine three, so we can still get another record from him first. But Bruce, I really think the time has come for you to think long and hard about how you might best contribute to America.

“Favorite Folders is available only in the Mail pane. The Favorite Folders pane cannot be removed, hidden, or resized. It is not possible to display Favorite Folders in other panes, such as Folder List.” Annoying indeed.

In a science fiction/horror-ish movie (Beyond Re-Animator), would anyone really expect the mad scientist to wait for FDA approval? I think the Sci-Fi Channel is pulling our legs in their promo.

How in the world did I get on a Christian Singles spam mailing list? I’m not even single!

There’s a squirrel sitting on top of the fence, just outside my sliding glass doors opening onto the patio, swishing its tail. And now it’s gone.

Not being very skilled with photography, whenever kind words come in for my modest efforts I’m quite happy. So the call and email this afternoon asking for permission to use one of my photos (from the MV City Hall Post-9/11 Gallery) was a definite pick-me-up. That the photo will (probably) be used as the background image on the title page on the upcoming State of the City Address by Mountain View Mayor Mike Kasperzak, a nice guy I met just this past weekend, makes it even better.

Since I’m clearly in a complaining mood today, let’s just go with it. CNet Tech News is running a Reuters article today about a new piece of crap software called Lover Spy (being sold through spam, of course) that allows users to send what appear to be email greeting cards but in reality install a keystroke recording application on the recipient’s computer and then reports that information back to the sender (and the company of the same name behind Lover Spy as well).

But the article’s author makes no attempt, beyond perusing the Lover Spy website, to see who is doing this or get a comment from these people on why they think offering this clearly illegal software service is acceptable. The article simply states the website “did not list contact information” and that’s that. Did the writer even try to lookup the domain contact information in the WHOIS database? The company must accept credit cards, be hosted somewhere, and so forth. Was any attempt made to find a contact through these routes? Just bad, incomplete journalism.

Still, the bigger story is that you best be very careful in opening any greeting cards, even those sent by people you know.

Update, 10/1/03: About 30 seconds of spelunking, if it can even be called that, shows that the domain used by these piles of moron shiznit is registered to a guy Down Under named Jeff Romelus, and let’s just hope that email address in the WHOIS database actually goes to him. But sadly, it does not, but if you know this guy…

The one time in recent months that I didn’t Alt-A, Alt-C a copy of my post before hitting the Publish button of course is the one time when the system screws up and loses it! Uck-fay!

“The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, root@ssdhcp-10-32-56-65.corp.google.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.”

Anything I might have done? So now clicking the Publish button would cause an error? Or perhaps Google’s servers didn’t like the political tone of the post. At least it wasn’t a hugely long one and I can retype it without too much trouble. Still: Uck-fay!

Five seconds later: Or, amusingly enough, perhaps not. As soon as I hit the Post button (after carefully copying it to the Clipboard) for this entry–for non-blogger users, the difference is that Post stores the entry into the Blogger database while the Publish button does that as well as generating the HTML that is sent to the public page–I saw that the ‘missing’ entry was sitting right where it should be. Which is better than losing it but not what I would call thrilling.

This came to mind only yesterday, so perhaps I cannot fault the journalists and pundits who are following Issa’s folly, but there’s still a week left and I’d love to see someone ask Mr. Muscles this–of course he wouldn’t give a meaningful answer, he rarely does. Even just putting this thought into the minds of the electorate may be useful, which is good enough. If Davis is recalled and he is elected, Schwartzenegger will have to work with overwhelming majorities in both houses of the California legislature. How, I’d like to know, does he expect to get any bills on his desk for signature that haven’t been formulated to be amenable to all those Democrats?

Are there any journalists willing to stick a microphone in Ah-nuld’s face and ask him this one little question?