BillSaysThis

Dawn and the telco idiots: Must. Control. Fist. of Death.

Talk about irony! We go to see a film about folk singers and then after, in search of some evening java, end up at a coffeeshop where a folksinger is playing. Funny or what?

Which fits in perfectly with A Mighty Wind, the latest film from Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, and gang. Guest was also responsible for (co-wrote and directed) recent intelligent humor outings Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman; he first came to attention with a year on Saturday Night Live back in the ’80s but really as bassist Nigel Tufnel in This is Spinal Tap (compare that Tufnel pic to this still from Wind).

This movie tells the story of a memorial tribute concert for Irving Steinbloom, recently deceased and the number one impresario of the folk music scene of the late 1950s and ’60s, and the three groups that come together for it. In two weeks with Public Broadcasting televising it live, no less. The Spinal Tap trio (Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean) make up The Folksmen, who for unstated reasons haven’t seen each other in 30 years. Catherine O’Hara and Levy are Mitch and Mickey, who also haven’t seen each other in 30 years either but because Mitch went insane. The last group is The New Main Street Singers, a nine piece ensemble though none of the nine are actually original members or even close to old enough to have been one.

The script, by Guest and Levy, had plenty of jokes in it, which is hardly surprising but Wind also has a lot more subtlesituational humor. Some instances: Shearer’s bald head and under the chin beard; the former porn actress turned New Main Street singer (the terrific Jane Lynch, who played the lesbian lover in Best in Show) and her utterly fantastic cosmological explanation; Ed Begley Jr.’s public broadcasting honcho, a native of Sweden who peppers his speech with Yiddish; Fred Willard’s character, who is completely oblivious to reality yet able to operate successfully for decades in the entertainment business when in any other industry he’d be lucky to have a job packing up return shipments.

There is quite a bit of folk music throughout the 90 minute movie, which is a problem for some people, but even with this the filmmakers have gone to the trouble of writing songs that fit the period perfectly while effectively parodying the originals. The movie title is also the name of the closing song, performed together by three groups, but also a, well, jocular reference to a big fart. Plot, as usual for this group, is mostly ignored in favor of sketches but there is progress towards the concert as well as hiccups along the way and I think that any more plot would have just gotten in the way.

Definitely recommended

Last year today I looked back at the day of my birth. I can confirm that my parents are still not Martians, either fo them, but that they are still wonderful people and I have dificulty imagining a better pair, plus a great sister who is also non-Martian. What I didn’t have a year ago was a wedding coming up in six days. Oh yeah, TS1 is almost in the trap from which she will never escape! Although this could be the five cups of coffee talking, as I’ve had an extreme yen for the stuff today. For those of you who don’t understand this entry’s title, here.

Coolness coming: Imagining a Better Kitchen

My best man and I had a celebration last night featuring dinner at the amazingly delicious House of Prime Ribs and Michael Caine’s Oscar-nominated Best Actor performance in The Quiet American. HPR is only about two blocks away from the much better known Ruth’s Crist Steak House on Van Ness in San Francisco but better known does not equate to better dinner in this case–the entrees, for instance, are about the same price but HPR includes salad, potato, and delicious creamed spinach sides with unlimited refills while RCSH is a la carte. Yummy!

The UA Galaxy is only a few blocks south of the restaurant and it wasn’t quite raining so we walked over. Let’s just say this theater, part of the huge Regal Entertainment chain, looks better on the outside, is in serious need of a refurbishing, and leave it at that. The movie is based on the classic 1955 novel by Graham Greene and tells the tale of very early American involvement in Vietnam, just before the French lost their nerve (LOL, history repeats itself over and over) after Diem Bien Phu and pulled out, leaving the anti-communist battle to the gung-ho CIA cold warriers.

Brendan Fraser co-stars with Caine as one of these Americans. Fraser seems to be shaping his career in much the same way as Caine has, or Anthony Hopkins for that matter, making interesting, smaller quality films like this (or Gods and Monsters) while taking the big paydays (the Mummy films, Dudley Do-Right). He plays his part straight, the quiet American of the title, yet a man who knows his path in life, who doesn’t care if his arrogance shows, and one has to give Fraser a well done for the job.

The story opens in Saigon in 1952, where Caine is Thomas Fowler, a reporter for The London Times with an unloved wife back home in Blighty and an entrancing native mistress, played by Do Thi Hai Yen, when Fraser’s Alden Pyle accidentally on purpose meets him at tea time. Yen also shows up and Pyle can no more resist her charms than Fowler; this triangle forms the dramatic core of the film, along with the boiling Vietnamese politics.

Yen and Caine have been together for two years, he loves her desperately but his Catholic wife won’t give him a divorce and her concerned older sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa) is making a quiet fuss about their relationship because she fears Caine, like so many other foriegners, will simply pack his bags and leave Yen behind at his convenience. Fraser, in front of Caine, admits his instant love, but Yen turns him away. Still, Fraser has a job to do while Caine avoids a home office recall and eventually their paths cross again.

Director Phillip Noyce has made a number of critically acclaimed films, including the recent Rabbit Proof Fence, and he gives The Quiet American the sort of smooth, languid pace one expects existed in Saigon and in collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle uses an interesting, unusual visual style that mixes rough handheld shots, extreme closeups of the actors reacting to each other’s dialog or lost in thought, and colors that never seem to be truly lit. The key problem is the script by Christopher Hampton, which never quite breaks through the surface with sufficient dramatic tension though one assumes that the novel had an advantage in it’s ability to present the inner thoughts of the characters which an unseen narrator (voiced by English Patient director Anthony Minghella) can’t match.

Mildly recommended

Just had an annoying little episode with billsaysthis.com. I’m playing with a beta of some PHP software that suggests using .htaccess to password protect a particular directory. Only I was a little to quick with the enter key at one point and overwrote the .htaccess file in the webserver’s root document file (the one which serves up the homepage) and KA-BOOM! no more pages served here. Of course I had no backup and couldn’t remember the stupid include file syntax either. How annoying!

Cash in the Bank: Does Sun have an AMD in it’s future?

You’d think finding some type of contact information for someone as public, digital, and visible as John Brockman would be simple but it’s not. Even on the website for his Edge Foundation, the only kind of useful thing is a mailto link for editor@edge.org. He has/owns/runs a high profile literary agency called Brockman, Inc. but that website is “under construction.” So old fashioned but I had to look the company up in the white pages!

Boy’s night out and we decided to see director James Mangold’s take on the old locked room mystery, Identity. Good choice, because Mangold really knows how to work within some pretty serious constraints (which are self-imposed, but still) and the cast is really strong. You’d think, for example, that having nearly the entire movie set during dark hours at a beaten up motel in the middle of a Nevada desert while the rain comes down in non-stop buckets would make for simple and not too interesting visuals but what Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael put up on the screen is surprising and exciting and a strong accompaniment to the other elements of the film.

I really enjoy watching John Cusack, who has the biggest role, and he shows real range in this performance, with mannerisms and speech patterns very different than the normal laidback guy he often plays. Identity isn’t the starring vehicle for him that, say, High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank were but he owns this movie too, right up until the last few minutes. Ray Liotta gets a much better role than the dreck he usually takes, Vince Pruitt Taylor has a small but crucial part, Rebecca De Mornay and Amanda Peet not only act but add whatever sex appeal the movie has, and Bret Loehr (the only kid in the film) is quiet but provides a significant clue to sharp-eyed viewers.

Because Mangold and writer Michael Cooney have come up with a really different twist which most people won’t figure out until the plot shows it to them (I did figure it out about 20-25 minutes before that, but I’m not giving any spoilers here). A real surprise in the way that Bruce Willis’ true, er, nature, in The Sixth Sense was for most people, who then went back through the movie making little “Oh yeah” sounds as they revisited each scene.

Definitely recommended

Low carb (Atkins et al) must really be making strides in the pocketbook arena–I just saw a commercial for CarbSolutions products on television! Not to mention Russell Stover now offers a line of low carb candies. One of my friends who follows the Atkins Approach keeps wondering when mainstream food companies will get interested in this market and I think the time is getting close.

I’d never heard about Clifford’s Tower before. This was “the most horrifying event in the history of English Jewry,” a night in 1190 when the Jews of York where massacred, simply for being Jewish. Something that’s been hard down through the ages, right up to today.

[Cleaning out some accumulated mails, this seemed worth saving…]

With this stuff you can make some tasty non-grilled dishes very easily. For example, stir-fry, use fresh garlic, boneless chicken or beef (cut into small pieces), broccoli or spinach, mushrooms, salt, pepper, 5 Spice, oyster sauce, soy sauce, Rice wine vinegar and in less than 15 minutes of cooking you’re done. The only prep work is chopping and cutting the garlic, meat, green, and mushrooms–do it before you start cooking and then just throw stuff in and stir.

Big tip: when cooking something in a pan–meat, veggies, eggs–warm the pan first, then warm the oil or butter, then add your ingredients. Makes a big difference in taste. Only exception among the basics is bacon, no need to preheat for that.

These stay good forever:

• Sea salt or kosher salt (NOT Morton’s)
• Whole peppercorns (for your pepper mill)

Buy the smallest size of these you can find:

• Ground Cilantro
• Basil Leaves
• Oregano Leaves
• Arrowroot (a white powder, this is an excellent substitute for flour for you, used as a thickening agent for the sauce)
• Minced onions (handy for when you don’t have fresh yellow onions on hand)
• 5 Spice (gives an interesting Asian flavor)

A couple of liquids as well:

• Sesame oil
• Rice wine vinegar
• Oyster or plum sauce

I’m not sure how tomatoes fit in with Atkins, but I wouldn’t be too concerned with that, keep a few cans of peeled tomatoes in the cabinet, they are good for a long time and can be used almost anytime. Mushrooms and greens are best fresh. Try using shallots sometime in place of onions. Try letting the onions cook a long time, like 15 minutes, in just some olive oil, no garlic or anything else, then add in whatever else your cooking, and you will get some really sweet onions.

In an impressive cover story for The Nation, William Greider uncovers the Right’s plan for Rolling Back the 20th Century. Greider is an amazing writer–just check out some of his previous books like Secrets of the Temple and Who Will Tell The People–and he has an unusual ability to get people to really talk to him, even if on reading you’d think that such openness is against the person’s best interests.

Most of the effort being made by those who politically oppose the Bush Administration either focuses on foriegn policy issues like Iraq and globalization or on single points of contention like Patriot II or digital rights. Not to say that none of those are important but by focusing in such narrow ways the Left, which really does remain the bulk of the American polity, is missing the forest for the trees. Greider’s article shows that the leaders of the Right are not making the same mistake but instead have realized “that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress.”

The article, especially towards the end, gives some tantalizing clues that Greider believes he understands the way to combat the “Stalinist discipline” and I’ll support your bill if you support my bill work ethic of the Right. In other words, it reads like a teaser trailer for a new book and, with a little Googling, I found he does indeed have something on topic coming in late Summer: The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. Put this one down on my must-read list.

[via garret]

1) The NY Times gives Harlan’s new one a pretty positive review: Mayhem Dosed With Psychological Awareness.

2) There’s just something counter-intuitive about the fact that Intel feels the need to release x86 emulation software for Itanium chips.

3) j.lo’s prenup demands – the list sounds absurd to me, but then again I’m not one of the world’s most self-obsessed divas either. [via garret]

4) Rob Howard blogs a design review meeting with his ultimate boss, BillG. If someone were to ask me how a blog can interact (positively) with one’s job, this is the kind of entry to which I’d point.

One of my neighbors’ cars has a personalized license plate of webjnky. The frame for it says www. on the top and .com on the bottom. For months I’ve walked passed this VW Passat and said to myself I should go see if there really is such a site. I mean, who’s a web junky if not me? Maybe the URL has the missing ‘u’, maybe not. First I tried with the ‘u’ but that just resolved to a domain seller site–perhaps, I thought, the neighbor let his lease expire. In order to be certain, I tried www.webjnky.com and sure enough he was there, not much content excpet lots of pictures of VW Passats, but then maybe he’s obsessed. There are worse things. Mainly, I’m glad to have finally satisfied my curiousity. Without killing a cat.

Tivo Suggested that I’d enjoy these two movies and there was nothing else I could find (one can only watch the NFL draft for so long, after all) and so I pushed the button. But I just didn’t get either one, sorry. Fellini may be one of the greatest film directors ever but Satyricon is just a rambling incoherent mess of violent colors and homosexuality. I could care less about the latter but give it some context and dramatic tension, not just a poorly-lit set pretending to be ancient Rome. Mira Nair’s tale of the clash between tradition and modernity was (and this is, of course, just my opinion, no offense to film school students with no sense of humor) more successful but there are too many cultural roadblocks and places where I couldn’t understand due to the actors’ accents for me to enjoy this one either. I gave both of them about an hour and then I gave up.

Not Recommended

I am not now, I have never been nor do I ever plan to be a member of the National Rifle Association. The last, and really only, times I ever shot a gun were in 1971 and 1973 at sleepaway camp; they took us down to a rifle range and handed out .22s and I was bad enough to not earn a rank badge either summer. I am not now, I have never been nor do I ever plan to be a parent. TS1 and I have talked this over quite extensively and are in agreement on this, much to my parents’ chagrin. Nonetheless, I’m going to share with you my opinion on who should take the blame when a child walks into school with a gun (unloaded) or multiple guns (and kills the principal) or multiple guns with other weapons (Columbine).

It’s the parents’ fault! If a parent cannot know his or her child well enough to know what they might do with a gun or other deadly weapon, and the parents still bring/allow guns in the house, then those parents should be prosecuted as if they themselves had pulled the trigger. I’m sure the law as currently written wouldn’t allow such charges, though a case might be made for some form of conspiracy to comitt manslaughter if a prosecutor was creative and in front of a willing judge.

And why not? People will come to the defense of these parents and ask how could they have known? Teenagers are unknowable. Well, when I was that age, my parents generally knew about things I was up to or found out. There are two incidents in particular I can remember: one time I bought a bag of pot and another time I was stopped by the local police for driving before I had my license. I suppose I smoked my share of pot in high school but this was one of the very few times I actually brought any into the house–my dad drove me to the seller’s home and made me give it back, you can imagine the ribbing I took at school afterwards.

In the tragedy yesterday in Pennsylvania, the boy was worked up enough to talk about his plans with friends. Even if none of them was intelligent enough to mention the threats to a parent or other adult, I believe the shooter gave some signs off that his folks should have picked up. Further, even though the guns were kept in a locked safe, the boy had access to them, which means the guns weren’t secure enough.

Finally, parents are responsible for the actions of their minor children and if James Sheet’s parents aren’t prosecuted, they can’t serve as a wake up call for other families. Conservative politicians are generally the most strident supporters of protecting the ability of individuals to own guns yet they’re also the fastest to put up family values as a keystone of how life ought to be lived (paging Sen. Santorum, Bush Defends Senator Over Anti-Gay Remarks). So why don’t they make the obvious connection?

I generally like to change up when I buy a new car. Something very different than what I’ve been driving the previous few years. Have a little sports car, then switch up to an SUV. In fact, the last nine years are the first time in the 25 years I’ve owned cars where I went for the same type twice in a row (Honda Passport, now a 1998 Toyota 4Runner). I’ve had the 4Runner over five years now and though it’s still in fine shape with only 45,000 miles on it, I’m getting itchy to move on. TS1 will need her own car eventually and she loves our shiny white steed, so I’ll gladly turn it over for her use. But it’s this damn unemployment business that’s stopping me.

Ever since one of my pals got his Boxster, I’ve known my next car needs to be something fast and convertible. The Porsches are great but even if I could afford it I’m not sure I could pay what usually turns out to be well over $60k for a car. If I won the lottery or something and suddenly had tens of milions in the bank, I’d surely consider a Ferrari.

For a long time, I thought a Mercedes SLK was going to be my choice. Over $40k but not in Boxster territory. Maybe I could find a used AMG32 in good shape at a good price, right? With the MB tag, no doubt about the quality, construction or performance (though not equal to the Porsche’s, doubtful the difference would be noticable to me), and I just love the hard-top convertible. For some reason, maybe just the ability to sleep at night without worrying about some teenager with a knife and too many beers vandalizing it, soft-tops have never quite done it for me.

I think, though, that I just changed my mind. The 2004 350ZRoadster is just too droolicious and, even though I’m disappointed at the lack of a hard-top, the shape and performance per dollar are simply too much to overcome. The regular model is a tasty crumpet but how can I resist putting that top down on a sunny day? So now, dammit, someone hook me up on the jizzob so I can put down the scratch for this dream machine.

Oh yeah, the NY Times has a very flattering article today on the chief designer at Nissan and the work he’s done on the 350, Murano, and Altima.

This is not a real time report from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but I did drop by the happening at the Westin this afternoon for an hour. I didn’t have near the good time that Scoble did and even though I looked around I didn’t see him. The only person I met up with was the estimable Matt Haughey, creator and proprietor of MetaFilter and so much more, who actually realized who I was from my name tag; he was there manning the Creative Commons booth. I wanted to see Jason but he was somewhat invisible.