House of the rising Moonglum

My wife and I have been laughing our behinds off at the Phelps “perfect human specimen” spots that NBC has been airing this past week. They talk about his (completely mutant) physique as if his mother decided that that is what he was going to look like. So when my wife ran across a similar account in Gawker this morning, she had to point it out to me. I took a quick look, and while the article itself isn’t particularly interesting, the comments are hilarious. A few of them are simply old Chuck Norris jokes rehashed, but there are a bunch of new ones in a similar vein. Including: “Michael Phelps is the new Chuck Norris… and Chuck Norris is OK with that.”

IANAL, IJLS: “Once again probability proves itself willing to sneak into the back alley and service Drama as would a copper piece harlot.”

I have GOT to remember that for the next time something breaks the odds in real life. Something with a 10% chance of happening is really unlikely something with a one in a million chance is a sure thing. Just awesome.

Apparently the Society for Creative Rock Anachronism is a real band. !! Who knew?

Just…. wow.

(Spoilers for Iron Man and The Dark Knight.)

Comparing Iron Man to Batman, two of the most testosterone induced movies ever, which is more feminist? Ha, ok, neither. Comic books have a well known problem, women in refrigerators. For those who don’t know it basically means that it sucks to be a woman in a comic book. You don’t get agency (true in much of pop culture anyway) and you end up motivating the hero or villain with your death. This translates regularly into the movies as well. Given that we have two of the more … womanizing? … heros this summer I have amused myself doing a compare and contrast.

In my opinion Iron Man from the comics is historically the more of the womanizing testosterone fest. I mean they have always both been playboy millionaires, but Tony Stark always seemed to get around more than Bruce Wayne. In the movie rendition or Iron Man he certainly still gets around, however the women are (mostly) all self motivated, not just scenery. The one who sleeps with him does it for her own purposes and gets what she wants out of it (modulo a catty back and forth with Pepper). And Pepper not only manages to NOT end up in bed with her boss (I TOTALLY thought they were going twist her around to have her end up with Stark in the end) but she is excellent at her job and even saves the day. Mind you, she is still the side kick, but she is the one who gets the SHIELD good squad, and who operates the Deus Ex Machina. Also, stark is driven by his own past crimes, not a dead woman.

In The Dark Knight on the other hand, all the women do is motivate the men by being held captive or killed. (Or going out with another man and having their own plans thwarted by “well meaning” men.) In my (probably incorrect) memory Batman always had a bit more gender equality than Iron Man, but here the only thing they do is get dangled off of buildings or have knives held to their throats. Or lain out on a boat in almost no clothing to be ogled by dirty old men. No, really. But back to the main characters, a quote from Gyllenhaal herself sort of describes it[1], “Of course, if you’re the girl in Batman, you’re going to be a damsel in distress to some extent but she’s a really great character.” Sad thing is, in the comics, it was just the acid burns that drove Dent insane in the comics as IIRC Rachel didn’t even exist.

Having said all of that, Batman was the much better movie, while Iron Man was a rollicking good time. The acting was amazing, and the tropes didn’t get in the way for me, but these particular issues are not my issues, so YMMV. (Aaaaaand… they appear to have made the Watchmen into a movie!!!)

[1] Totally stolen from Wikipedia, I so do not read that website.

Recently saw The Omega Man “I Am Legend”. It was totally awesome. If you like zombie movies you should see it. Two items I need to mention however. First: my wife said the zombies did not eat nearly enough brains. They spent all their time leaping thirty feet in the air when they should have been lumbering about moaning on about brains. Second: I apparently have seen too many post apocalypse movies. At one point he is wandering around the ruins of NYC, and I said, “There has to be a lion that jumps out and scares us at some point here. I mean it is NYC after the apocalypse!” And no more than three seconds later, there was a lion! This movie has it all, zombies AND the apocalypse. What could be better? (Admittedly there were no monster men to rock out with, but plenty of Marley.)

(Also saw Iron Man, which also totally rocked, but in a completely different way. I Am Legend was a pretty serious movie which was actually quite depressing at points, while I Am Iron Man was just a rollicking, unabashedly testosterone heavy, roller coaster ride of a movie.)

The Colbert Report word of the day “honored” George Carlin for banning 7 words. Awesome.

I don’t normally link the viral videos from YouTube, but this one just kills me. Weezer gathered up all the “stars” from last year’s virals on YouTube, and stitched them all together into this hilarious video.

Saw the movie, then read the book. They were both very good, although I like the book better. Main differences: the movie portrays the family as the reason the boy ran off, but the book places the blame squarely on his shoulders. The book was actually very careful to present a number of possibilities of what was going through his head, but to steer clear of judging him. It actually breaks the fourth wall regularly, describing the author discussing the boy’s motivations and reasoning. Another difference is that the movie says that he mistook a poisonous plant for an edible one. Krakauer suggests however that the seeds of an edible plant were in fact poisonous, though not described as such in any current books. (He even went so far as to collect some and send them off to a lab for spectra-analysis, which showed that they were alkaloids.) All in all I came away from the book thinking that the kid was less ill prepared than I thought initially. Having said that, the book did drive home the fact that no matter how separated we may feel from those around us, we are always connected.

Another thing I got from the book is that living off the land is REALLY hard. At one point some Alaskans are saying that the boy would have had to be stupid to die in the woods given that the Inuit have lived off the land there for years. The author then points out that Inuit have also been known to starve to death over the years. Paraphrased: “The life of a hunter is a hard one, always on the move, always afraid that the next encounter will be missed and the food supply will dwindle.” Given my obsession with Peak Oil however I do now have the urge to go hunting and get good at it, before I have to be good at it. (Turns out the killing part is the easy part, turning the dead animal into meat that will last until you can eat it is much harder. Takes practice among other things, and is location dependent. Smoking is good in the south in the summer, and simply slicing into thin strips and drying is better in more alpine climes.)

And finally, I have a friend who likes to say if he doesn’t know what something is he puts it in his mouth to find out. Turns out this is not always the best idea.

Oh yeah, and always carry a map. The irony of the whole story is that he wanted to go “off the edge of the map” but he was never more than 6 miles from a cabin that possibly had supplies he could have used, and 16 miles from a road. There is no more off the map.

Going up to the spirit in the sky. I heard this song on 97.9 the other day and had to look it up. It totally rocks, especially the reverbed sting at the end of the verse. But when I heard it on the radio, while it sounds old, I just assumed that it was some modern rock inspired christian thing. Turns out it is a one hit wonder all the way back from 1969!! The wiki entry is awesome: “after watching Porter Wagoner on TV singing a gospel song. Greenbaum later said : “I thought, ‘Yeah, I could do that,’ knowing nothing about gospel music, so I sat down and wrote my own gospel song. It came easy. I wrote the words in 15 minutes.” … In fact, the line “Never been a sinner, I never sinned” runs counter to the Christian concept of sin.”

I love it. It did sound a little odd to me, and if it really was old (and theologically correct) we would have been singing it in church when I was growing up. I mean we sang Cat Stevens every Easter. (Yes, I was raised in the wild by hippies.)

But back to this song. The guitar sound is so awesome, and was apparently generated by a home made effects box with a lot of homage to Jimi Hendrix. And the VIDEO!!!! Oh my good lord. The little flashes of the cross and the beach. The james bond backup singers. The trippy back and white matting. ALL DONE ON SUPER 8!!!!! I can’t even imagine how much thought and effort had to go into that drug induced extravaganza. Super 8 only came out four years earlier, so all those special effects had to be hand done, and all that fast switch MTV style cutovers had to be done by hand.

Theologically unsound, hand-built guitar effects, trippy gospel video, tons of effort on everything except for actually writing the song. I think I like it.

Jack Bauer’s Wife.
Jack Bauer’s Daughter.
Jack Bauer’s Friends.
Jack Bauer’s Co-workers.

In case you can’t tell, I have seen a couple more episodes of the first season of 24. It appears that the only people who are actually safe around Jack Bauer are the terrorists. Or as I like to say, “Put Jack Bauer in charge and the terrorists have already won.”

Also, I find it somewhat offensive that the Counter Terrorism Unit is trying to stop an assassination, and they don’t really seem to care that a whole jumbo jet blew up. And they keep calling the assassins terrorists. Assassin = kill important people. Terrorist = kill lots of people. Let the secret service take care of the assassins, and try to stop the terrorists from blowing up airplanes please.

One more item. I hope Obama never watched 24. It is kind of creepy to be watching with the current presidential primary going on.

I have been using Hulu a bit lately, more for the experience than anything else. However, after watching the first episode of the new Knight Rider and a couple other random things that I really don’t need to see any more of, I saw the first episode of 24. The interface is pretty slick, and the ads really aren’t that bad (5 ads for an entire TV show? Pretty ok IMO.) So I decided I would give it a spin and see if this is something that I really need to integrate into my life. I was going to watch the entire first season of 24 in Hulu. Well, just after I saw the third episode they decided, in their infinite wisdom, that they were no longer going to offer the first season. The last line of this article says it all. OK, people. I know you are control freaks, but please if you are going to offer something in online only format, LEAVE IT UP LONG ENOUGH FOR ME TO WACH IT!

I guess I’ll still prefer the iTMS.

Now this interactive ebb and flow of movie chart from the NYT is totally not something that I needed to see today. I totally should have been hired to write that. Oh the awesome.

I’ve been trying to be much more regular about going to the gym in the morning lately, with moderate success. In particular my 30 minute run is becoming somewhat bearable now, to the point where I have been doing things to make it more interesting, like increasing the speed or incline at times. One thing I have started doing that I have never done before, is turning on the TV. Someone had it on American Gladiator a couple weeks ago, and that was just awesome running TV. So I decided to try different channels and see what works for me. Most station it turns out are suck running TV. American Gladiator isn’t normally on when I run, and the only other thing I could find that really did it for me are mexican gameshows. But just the other day I discovered WISE TV.

It is the Chicago public television station. (I didn’t even know they did that!) But they have the awesome science and history items that completely distract me from the fact that I am running. Just this weekend they had a show on observations of the sky, and today they had one on the dawn of American power projection. It was a very interesting program because while I have read a lot about the history of Hawaii, I have read next to nothing about the history of the Spanish American. Interestingly is was intimately tied to the history of Hawaii and the US, though that might have to wait for another blog post. The thing that stunned me as I was watching the show was that I felt like I was watching current news casts.

The parallels between the Spanish American war and the Iraq war are stunning. There was a humanitarian crisis in Cuba and Iraq caused by the current tyrannical power. There were valuable commercial assets in Cuba and Iraq which US companies wanted to exploit. There had been a massive terrorist attack which was used to drum up support across the nation (the Main and 9/11). The leaders of both wars had missed out on fighting in the previous ‘good’ war (Civil War and WWII). And of course we would be greeted as liberators when we rolled into town. There are of course many differences as well, in particular Spain had a number of colonies that we fought over, not just Cuba, and we had the Vietnam war in between WWII and now to remind the leaders that war actually wasn’t a good thing. And in that war McKinley actually was a Civil War vet and wasn’t too keen on joining the war, in fact his hesitance gave Hawaii a reprieve of a number of years. But in the end Teddy and the Rough Riders got their “splendid little war”. He missed out on the Civil War himself you see, and needed to test his manhood. “Any war would do”. Wow.

But the spookiest similarity of all? The local insurrection in the Philippines against the US presence ended up taking more than 5 years and costing 4,000 american lives. Which is almost exactly where we are now in Iraq. I guess we were doomed to repeat it.

I have just watched this twice and am going back to work now, but oh my goodness. Closed captioning on hands as a music video?! The shocking thing is it is actually kind of cool. I tried moving my hands the same way and it isn’t as easy as it looks. There are a bunch of other Daft videos done the same way, but none of them are as good. (One of them only has one word, and is kind of funny.)

The Apple TV isn’t the only game in town when it comes to online movie rentals and purchases. In fact, the XBox 360 has almost exactly the same feature set. Joystiq did a nice compare and contrast of features. Just don’t try to play guitar hero on your Apple TV.

What I really want though is the same thing for Unbox and TiVo

Finally finished the Golden Compass, and followed it quickly with watching the movie. I’ll just assume that everyone else read it a long time ago, so no need to recap them here. The one thing I will say, Harry Potter has really upped my required level of prose for kid lit. I went into reading the book really expecting some outstanding writing. Pullman did an interesting thing in changing the style depending on who Lyra was trying to be, but to me it ended up falling short, as if he bit off more than he could chew. It ended up feeling disjointed rather than someone who flowed smoothly from one persona to the next.

As for the movie, it actually left me with a similar feeling, though for different reasons. In particular it felt like they were trying to hit every single plot point (up until the end anyway) while not giving nearly enough time to the characters or getting the plot from one point to the next.

Negatives aside though, both the book and the movie drew and interesting world, the book through a neat variation of steam punk, and the movie with some trantoresque CGI London. All in all worth reading and watching, but not my favorites. (Oh and could they have messed with Serafina’s discussion of free will any more in the movie? That was one of (IMO) the more interesting parts of the book, and they reduced it to one word?!?)

Blu-ray has just delivered some solid blows. Enough of this and I can finally go out and get my PS3 and HD (not to mention digital) TV. The battle rages, but today Warner Bros threw in with Blu-ray saying that it was confusing for customers. YA THINK!?! Idiots. Over the holiday Target only sold Blu-ray. Nothing final yet, but it does look to me like Blu-ray is winning, 6 to 2 (Warner, Fox, Disney, Lion’s Gate, MGM, and Sony for Blue-ray and Paramount and Universal for HD DVD.) Paramount and Universal are huge though, and both have massive libraries to bring to bear, but between the PS3 and the upcoming transition to digital, I think that we will see more and more consumers transitioning one way or the other.

Radiohead recently did an experiment with digital downloads where they allowed their fans to download a full non DRM version of their album for whatever they wanted. Apparently this was a major success and led the band to realize that traditional recording contracts fail in the face of the digital era.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the recording industry lately as the RIAA is attempting to claim that ripping music at all does not fall under the fair use guidelines. (Apparently that was an inaccurate claim, and it was specifically ripping for uploading.) If that claim went through, I would probably have never purchased another CD again. At this point in my life CDs only serve as high quality backups of my music. And very occasionally as high quality sources. In any case these cases have made me wonder about the future and past of music.

In particular the notion of “the album”. The album comes from the old album of records that were required before LPs were invented as each record could only hold a song or two. In rock music LPs weren’t used regularly to distribute music until the 60s. This means that prior to that time music was recorded and distributed as singles. I have to believe that that model fits the digital era much better than the album model. (Radiohead not withstanding.) The recording industry won’t appreciate that though, since it is very hard to say that a single is worth $25. But if the artists aren’t making anything off of digital sales, as we move away from physical sales (CDs) something is going to have to give. If the recording industry doesn’t give way, I can see artists stopping going to the bug guys and either going to smaller labels, or just going completely independent using a service like CD Baby or if you want to be on ITMS (and everything else), Tune Core.

Sure it will make the job of radio DJ harder, but wouldn’t that be a more interesting world to live in than what we have now?

Or Something. Turns out there are seven copies of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” out there. All handwritten by J.K. Rowling and exquisitely bound. Six were given to close friends, people who worked with her on the harry potter books, and one was auctioned off at Southeby’s. Turns out the winning bidder was Amazon. They got it for a cool £2 million. They put up a bunch of pictures and are going to be putting up reviews of the different stories over time.

The book is amazingly beautiful. I can’t even imagine holding something like that, let alone reading it. Reading a two million dollar book? No thanks. And yet… How amazing would that be, just to see it?

Also, what is up with the JKR is Satan in the comments section?

Let’s say you are meeting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time. That first handshake with dad might mean more than you think.