friar's fires

Fear of an Oozing Planet

2012-01-29T19:50:00.001-06:00

As writer Ian O'Neill notes here, some of the planets astronomers have been finding in other solar systems are weird.

Among the weird worlds is 55 Cancri e, a planet about 45 light years from Earth orbiting the star 55 Cancri A. It's roughly the size of Neptune and it orbits its star every 18 hours because it's 26 times as close to its star as Mercury is to our sun.

So you'd think it would be a hot ball of half-melted rock, but that's only part of the story. Immense pressures beneath the surface of the planet mean that liquids which would ordinarily boil away remain liquid in a state called "supercritical fluid state." Under great pressure, liquids don't boil at their usual temperatures. Supercritical carbon dioxide, O'Neill notes, is used to decaffeinate coffee beans.

This means that the supercritical fluids ooze to the surface of the planet through cracks in the overheated rocky surface and there sublimate to make an atmosphere we can actually see from 45 light years away. In other words, this thing is a Neptune-sized super-sauna. It is doubtful that any life exists under such extreme conditions, but scientists have theorized that if it did, it would have very open pores.

Prescience Fiction?

2012-01-28T21:58:00.002-06:00

The young Friar avidly consumed science fiction novels, but being young he leaned towards some more action-oriented stuff. The measured, cerebral work of Lithuanian-born Algis Budrys didn't hold his attention, and he returned Budrys' 1977 media-centered tale Michaelmas to the library with only a chapter or two read.

Today's Friar, thanks to a trip to the superb little store Aladdin Book Shoppe, gave Mr. Budrys a second try and found him to have had more than a little prophet in him when he created the story of the famous independent investigative reporter Laurent Michaelmas, pursuing an amazing story of an astronaut's resurrection in 1999.

Michaelmas also happens to more or less rule the world through the secret artificial intelligence he calls Domino, a computer program able to spy out things in almost every corner of the world, eavesdrop on almost any conversation and control what other computers do. Using Domino's abilities and influence, he has calmed most world conflicts and brought countries to work together through the United Nations. On the eve of the millennium, the greatest achievement of his combined space agency is preparing for its launch of a manned mission to the outer planets of the solar system. But the miraculous return of the American mission commander, presumed dead in a training accident, could restart old rivalries. The Soviet Union's astronaut was elevated to command of the mission when the American died and the Soviets are unlikely to quietly accept his demotion. But a nationalist group within the U.S. may have evidence that the accident which injured the American astronaut wasn't an accident. Michaelmas must use every advantage his media celebrity and Domino can give him to find out who is behind these developments before the world resets to its Cold War footing. He also has to see where Clementine Gervaise, a video producer who strongly resembles his late wife, may fit into the situation as well as his own personal life.

Budrys does a very good job of predicting some media developments which played out in real life, such as the kind of information glut brought about by the internet and the meaningless nature of a good deal of modern news, entertainment-based and otherwise. Michaelmas and other independent reporters file their stories via personal recording/transmitting units that also gather up and play back information from other sources -- not unlike the role laptop computers and personal data pads play today. Politically, shady Gulf state oil barons fund unrest in the Middle East similarly to the way they still do today. Budrys has some misses -- having the Soviet Union still around seven or eight years after it fell, for example, and his foreseen level of technology of 1999 both undershoots the level of the actual technology of 1999 and overshoots it. Unless there really is a secret artificial intelligence named Domino hanging around in the electronosphere, in which case, howdy!

Much of the novel is made up of conversations between Michaelmas and Domino as they try to puzzle out what happened with the astronaut's return. They frequently wax philosophical, and Michaelmas' own thoughts about the world he more or less helped to make are sometimes rueful. But Budrys' rich prose and low exposition quotient reduces the boredom level of such passages considerably. Michaelmas is a short 183 pages packed with fascinating retro-speculation, food for thought and an intriguing premise. The young Friar might not have been able to keep with it when it was published, but his older counterpart found it worth the time.

Not Exactly? Exactly!

2012-01-27T21:59:00.001-06:00

Talking about a book turned into a post better for the long-post blog, here.

A Mighty Long Time

2012-01-25T16:56:00.000-06:00

If you were to be asked who was the earliest-serving United States president to still have living grandchildren, who would you pick?

Given that it's grandchildren and not children, you might figure you could safely go back into the 1890s, maybe even the 1880s. Garfield? Cleveland? Hayes? Well, it seems that would be shooting too late in the game -- by almost forty years. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., (87) and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (83), can look at a picture of our tenth president, John Tyler, and say, "That's my grandpa." Tyler, born in 1790, served as president from 1841 to 1845. He died in 1862, but not before becoming a father (for the 13th of 15 times) at 63 to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Sr, in 1853. The elder Lyon welcomed his namesake in 1925, when he was 71, and his younger brother Harrison in 1929. So although Pres. Tyler is their grandfather, they obviously never met him.

Tyler was the first president to take the office when it became vacant. His predecessor, William Henry Harrison, was the man who wouldn't wear a coat to his cold and damp inauguration, caught pneumonia, and died a month after taking the oath of office. Tyler set the precedent that a vice-president taking the presidential office became president in his or her own right, rather than serving as an acting president in between elections. The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution established that precedent as law when it was passed in 1967.

The story notes that the oldest living presidential grandchild is Jane Garfield, granddaughter of James Garfield. She's 99. The oldest living presidential child is John Eisenhower, 89, son of Dwight Eisenhower.

For those who still have a little room for the trivial in their heads, the Tyler family has a long history with the College of William and Mary, stretching back to John Tyler -- the grandfather of the president -- who attended it in 1704, 11 years after it was founded.

Efficiency

2012-01-24T15:59:00.002-06:00

I have heard people say that the failure of the United States Senate to pass a budget in the last thousand days is a failure of leadership on the part of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev).

Nonsense. Senator Reid, being a longtime Washington, D.C., fixture, knows that government budgets are meaningless. Spending can be shifted from one budgetary year to the next by simply moving it ahead one day and thus charging it to next year's budget. It can be moved "off budget" completely and not counted against a year's expenditures. Senator Reid is simply eliminating the middleman of pretending the government has a plan on how it spends money and going straight to the spending because he knows any claims that the government will spend money the way it says it will spend it are a sham.

And Senator Reid knows shams, having used the word "leader" in his job titles for the last seven years -- first as Senate Minority Leader from 2005-2007 and as Senate Majority Leader beginning in 2007 -- while never actually displaying any leadership.

Get Back, Get Back...

2012-01-24T08:22:00.000-06:00

The young Friar read a lot of science fiction, and among those offerings were Robert Heinlein's "juveniles" series for Charles Scribner. Those stories and a number of Heinlein's short stories in his "future history" series were all set inside our solar system. They dealt with what were at the time science fiction ideas of space stations and trips to the moon, things that later became reality. They also dealt with ideas that have yet to come to pass, such as moonbases and manned travel to other planets in the solar system, as well as ideas which have been proven wrong or unlikely by later exploration, such as life on Venus or advanced civilizations on Mars.

Back to the Moon, by NASA scientists Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson, brings to mind some of those old Heinlein juveniles, following in that author's path of accurate scientific descriptions and real-world feel of the technology and situations. Heinlein, in writing for younger readers, didn't varnish his style a great deal, nor did he spend a lot of time adding depth to his characters. Neither do Taylor and Johnson -- the lead character is a stalwart astronaut named Bill Stetson, fer cryin' out loud -- and they don't display half of Heinlein's style and skill even though they're not writing for a younger crowd.

But those things aide, Back to the Moon is still a fun romp, a just-the-facts-ma'am kind of story about events surrounding the United States' first manned mission to the moon since Apollo 17 left in 1972. The time frame seems to be the early 2020s and relies on the now-canceled Constellation program as the basis for the U.S. effort. The manned mission is only months off when a private company also launches a flight to the moon, although this one is just a flyby carrying wealthy tourists. The tourists, though, catch a distress signal from a wrecked Chinese moon mission. What had been announced as a robotic test flight had actually carried a crew and is now stranded on the moon's surface. Stetson convinces his NASA superiors to scramble his planned flight for an immediate launch to rescue the stranded Chinese crew. But will the glitches shown in test flights mean his ship can't reach the moon? And will the Chinese crew, facing political pressure from a system that would rather have a failure on its own than success with help, actually go through with the rescue?

Taylor and Johnson move us through the mostly predictable plot with an engineer's straightforward prose -- no frills and not a lot of flavor. The appeal is in watching tried-and-true heroes do tried-and-true heroic things and seeing resourceful quick thinkers solve the problems that come their way quickly and resourcefully. Back is also fun because it uses recognizable and plausible technology instead of way-out stuff like warp drives and hyperspace jumps that are far beyond anything current science can manage.

Of course, a moon landing in the early 2020s is also far beyond anything current NASA technology can manage. In an afterward, Taylor describes how bipartisan presidential and congressional indifference starting with the Nixon administration starved the space agency of funds, requiring it to put off spacecraft development time and time again in order to keep what it had running. That culminated in the current administration's myopic ending of manned U.S. spaceflight, it being one of the very few things that the president and congressional leadership didn't want to spend money on. Both the possible Chinese moon mission and spaceflight by private corporations could happen within Back to the Moon's timeframe, but the idea that there would be a NASA mission waiting in the wings could not.

Taylor and Johnson offer a clue about what they probably think the solution is, as their privately-owned spacecraft and its wealthy owner play important roles at crucial points in the story. Private enterprise and free-market forces may or may not be the actual future of humanity's presence in space, but at least betting on them takes the matter out of the hands of people who ask whether or not additional soldiers on an island might make it capsize.

Hitchin'

2012-01-23T23:10:00.002-06:00

Wondering if I stood outside the gate with my thumb out I could catch a ride?

Probably not, but since NASA's been tasked to do things like investigate Toyota accelerations and other silly non-space stuff, I'd have a better shot that way than some of the actual astronauts would.

Everything Gets Digital?

2012-01-22T20:57:00.001-06:00

This article in Scientific American (it's behind the paywall but you can read a preview at the link) describes an experiment by Fermilab director and University of Chicago physicist Craig Hogan, who hopes to test out something about the way the universe is put together.

Most standard views of the universe hold that space, objects and random protoplasm like you and me are at their most basic level "smooth" or continuous. But Hogan's experiment will see if that is actually true. If he is right, at the smallest possible scale, we are made up of discrete particles and the universe is actually "fuzzy" -- the same way that a smooth curve on a digital picture becomes a clunky series of squares if you zoom in close enough. These are not atoms, like we may remember from school science courses, but much much smaller on a scale called the "Planck length."

If he is right, we do not actually move smoothly through space, either, but rather we kind of jitter along by occupying first one set of the Planck-sized doodads (real physicists say "quanta" instead of "doodads," by the way) and then actually jumping to another set of them a Planck-distance away. Planck distances are also so small that they can't be detected by any usual measuring instrument, but Hogan's experiment will show certain results if the lasers it uses are affected by this jitteriness.

The Holographic Principle is another idea that may go along with the universe's "jittery" nature. It's kind of fuzzy to me its own self, but the upshot is that each of these little Plancks is actually encoded information, like the bits in a computer that store its information. I will be a good boy at this point and deliberately not say "mind of God, anyone?" although I am sore tempted. Not that I believe Hogan's experiment would prove that the universe is somehow contained within God's thoughts. But it points out that folks who suggest that scientific views of the universe crowd God from the picture just aren't conversant with how weird the universe might really be.

I was asked once why I like this weirdo scientific physics stuff, considering that I make a point of describing myself as a pretty orthodox Christian theist. Aren't we the ones that deny evolution and insist the universe is 6,000 years old and stuff? Some of us do. But I personally believe that if I worship a God who is among other things, the source of all truth, then nothing that moves me closer to the truth can move me away from God. So neither side -- atheists or "young-earthers" -- has it right when they insist that the scientifically discovered or theorized view of the universe pushes God aside.

You might say that both views have a flaw -- and if Hogan is right, the flaw is that they are pointing out the mote in their opponents' eyes while ignoring the Planck in their own (Oh, c'mon, you knew I'd do it sooner or later).

Market Forces

2012-01-21T22:51:00.002-06:00

You remember the last time you flew on an airplane and how you thought, "This experience -- removing my shoes, dumping my pocket contents into a plastic bin, being radioactively scanned and/or groped, getting six pretzels as a 'snack' -- would be absolutely perfect if my chair cushion was just a little bit thinner, there was an inch less legroom in front of me and my seatback could recline all the way from 'vertical' to 'still vertical, who are you kidding?'"

Yeah, me neither.

Just a Suggestion...

2012-01-20T22:40:00.000-06:00

...to one of the high school basketball coaches in the local tournament this evening. When your game strategy seems to include the idea that time of possession during a basketball game earns you points like riding time does in wrestling, you should perhaps be less willing to disgustedly bawl out one of your players for a defensive lapse. After all, you don't let them play defense that much and they may be a little rusty by the time the other team actually gets the ball back in its hands.

99 Words But He Uses Just One

2012-01-19T09:22:00.000-06:00

Apparently soon after his daughter with wife Beyonce was born, rapper Jay-Z was supposed to have said her presence in the world would make him forswear the use of the starts-with-a-B-rhymes-with-witch word that many of hip-hop's most popular songs use as a synonym for "woman."

This has turned out not to be the case, according to Mr. Z's own representatives. The assertion was made in a poem erroneously attributed to the rapper but actually written by a blogger named Renee Gardner. Those representatives did not comment on the possibility that if Mr. Z were to actually stop using offensive and derogatory words, his next album would be an instrumental.

Backwards

2012-01-18T10:44:00.001-06:00

Rosie O'Donnell, in an interview with Piers Morgan, commented on the campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination. The positions and comments of the candidates and their supporters or opponents led her to say "We're a backward nation in many ways."

I was going to post something arguing against her statement, but then it hit me that Rosie O'Donnell was being asked about her political opinions on national television, and I realized I had to agree with her.

Look It Up

2012-01-17T23:39:00.000-06:00

So in a few minutes from this post, Wikipedia is going to "go dark" to protest the Stop Internet Pirace Act (SOPA), which many online folks say will result in government censorship of the internet like China has.

Word is many college professors are expecting an upturn in the amount of legitimate factual information that appears in their students' assignments. On the other hand, you could always go find a couple of students, tell them that Eli Whitney invented a way to make gin from cotton and then take them to a library and watch them wander around aimlessly, unable to use a reference section.

ETA: Or not; as of 7:30 AM Wednesday, Wiki was still pedia-ing.

ETA 2: Ah, just have to hit refresh, apparently, and now we have the blackout screen.

Fame and Glory Imminent!

2012-01-16T11:36:00.000-06:00

Well, I guess we can now start betting on which one of the acting pair of Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco becomes the multiple Oscar winner and major league Hollywood royalty and which one winds up on Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show.

Their show Work It, about two men who cross-dress because the network boss thinks it'd be funny, has been pulled from ABC's lineup. It will be replaced by reruns of Tim Allen's new show, Last Man Standing.

Rumors that Allen engineered the cancellation in order to make sure that Work It did not surpass the monumental two-season run of his Toy Story co-star Tom Hanks' early '80s cross-dressing comedy Bosom Buddies have yet to be addressed by Allen or Hanks.

From the Rental Vault: My Favorite Year

2012-01-16T11:22:00.000-06:00

Everybody's got a favorite year of their memory, and for Benjy Stone it was the year Alan Swann guest-starred on the TV show where he gofered, King Kaiser's Comedy Cavalcade. Benjy's an aspiring comedy writer, and Cavalcade is the hottest sketch comedy show on television in the late 1950s. Swann is a swashbuckling movie star with an -- ahem -- somewhat dissolute private life whom Benjy is assigned to squire around in the week before the show airs. His mission: Keep Swann more or less sober and out of trouble long enough to make the broadcast.

Complicating Benjy's mission is his own personal quest to woo the lovely K.C. Downing as well as the threats that mob boss Karl Rojeck has been making against the show for lampooning him in its sketches. Complicating it even more is that Swann wasn't born yesterday and his abilities to elude Benjy for to partake of the random debauch far outweigh Benjy's nursemaiding skills.

Although the story is important to Year, the movie is more or less a showcase for Peter O'Toole as Alan Swann. The role earned him one of his eight Academy Award nominations, although he lost to Ben Kingsley's Gandhi (The others nominated were Paul Newman for The Verdict, Jack Lemmon for Missing and Dustin Hoffman for Tootsie. 1982 gave the Academy three of the best performances of many years, and voters bravely chose the fourth best of the year as the winner). Year asks O'Toole to range between more or less straight-up slapstick to anguish to charming to wordless introspection and he pretty much never hits a false note. Despite his character's well-known lament towards the end of the movie, O'Toole is an actor and a movie star, and one without many peers.

As Benjy Stone, Mark-Linn Baker doesn't stink up the joint. He manages to keep Stone a nicely- wrapped collection of nervous jitters as he rides herd on his movie hero. Although he is not really up to some of the emotional confrontation required of him to set up the movie's great finish, those scenes go pretty quickly and anyway, Baker would soon have much more to atone for by starring in eight seasons of Perfect Strangers.

Year is littered with great "small roles" that help fine-tune its impact, such as Selma Diamond playing a cigarette-puffing wardrobe mistress, Lanie Kazan as Benjy's mother, Bill Macy as the spineless head writer Sy Benson and Joseph Bologna as comedy legend King Kaiser. Jessica Harper as Benjy's love interest K.C. is mercifully outside the main line of the plot and thus not onscreen for any great length of time.

Executive producer Mel Brooks helped shape the movie based on his years as a comedy writer for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and Dennis Palumbo used the idea of Errol Flynn's appearance on a Show of Shows episode as the basis for his script, although Flynn's guest-star turn was actually uneventful. Year was director Richard Benjamin's first movie behind the camera and it benefits from his long experience as a comedic actor. But the real draw as well as the real center on which the movie turns is O'Toole, in one of the best of a slew of great performances in his distinguished career. Although as he himself noted in wavering about accepting an Academy Honorary Award in recognition of his body of work, he's still "in the game" and so there's no telling what he might produce between this stage and the one to come.

Time...Is on My Side

2012-01-15T20:13:00.000-06:00

Were I still a deadline-working fellow, I'd be waaay behind to pick up this April 2011 profile of David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine. But since Eagleman's work focuses on how our brains perceive time, I think I could get myself off the hook.

You should read the whole thing, but there were some really neat pull-out nuggets in the story. One pointed out how our brains work to match up our sense of sight with our sense of smell. As you may remember from school, light travels much faster than does sound. This is why you may see lightning in a thunderstorm and not hear it until several seconds later.

But closer than a certain distance, we seem to see something and hear it happen more or less simultaneously. We might think that was because the distance was so small that even the slower sound waves traveled too fast to perceive the gap, but some of Eagleman's experiments showed that the human ear can distinguish gaps between sounds as small as five milliseconds. So even at short distances, the gap between sight and sound is enough that some people might notice it. Except, Eagleman found, the brain's audio processor works many times faster than its visual processor, meaning that even though the light gets a head start on its way from the eyes to the brain, the sound makes up for it by running a faster race. Only when the distance is great enough to overcome that speed difference do we start hearing things after we see them.

In fact, because our brains do take a definite time to process sensory inputs, we actually are a little bit behind the world around us. Not much -- we're still talking in fractions of a second here -- but a time discernible to sensitive instruments. So all of us, even the hippest hipster that ever hipped, are behind the times.

One other thing that caught my eye was an experiment in which a person was shown a series of pictures of the same object several times in a row, but every now and again a different picture was inserted into the series. Test subjects almost always said the picture of the different item was on the screen longer than the others, even though they were all on for the same amount of time. Eagleman says it may be because our brains develop a kind of short-hand processing for things that we're familiar with, and that means we don't pay attention to them for as long as we do to something new and different. There's a lesson in that somewhere. Probably a bunch of them.

Second Leap

2012-01-13T23:58:00.000-06:00

I'm telling you this now so you'll be ready on June 30th. On that day, we will add a second to the official time as it is kept at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris, France.

The IERS uses an atomic clock based on the rate of vibration of a cesium atom. That atom shimmies just more than 9.1 million times a second and so that atomic clock keeps precise time that never changes. Our dumb ol' Earth, on the other hand, isn't nearly as careful about how quickly it spins on its axis or revolves around the Sun and so the amount of time in a day isn't always the same.

Every now and again, the folks at IERS either add or subtract a second from the world's calendars and clocks in order to make the Earth's time match the atomic clock time. They last did it in 2008 and this year will do it between June 30 and July 1. Once your clock hits ~~12:59:59~~ 11:59:59 on June 30, it will actually take it two seconds to go to 0:00:00 on July 1 instead of one second.

This also marks one of the few times that France manages to tell other countries what to do instead of surrendering.

(ETA: Clock reset thanks to Dustbury)

From the Rental Vault: Never Say Never Again

2012-01-12T12:47:00.001-06:00

If you're a Bond-ophile, you know that the iconic James Bond, Sean Connery, quit the series after the fifth movie, You Only Live Twice, and was replaced by George Lazenby for On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Lazenby's agent argued against accepting the reported seven-film contract offered by the Bond series production company, thus ensuring his client's enshrinement on Trivial Pursuit cards everywhere. The studio chief made it clear that Sean Connery was to be brought back, with money as no object, and so he was offered 1.25 million pounds to do Diamonds Are Forever, after which he reportedly said of playing Bond, "Never again."

"Never" came in 1983, when Connery agreed to do the "non-canon" Bond adventure Never Say Never Again, a title suggested by his wife Micheline in light of his earlier declaration. The movie is a second screen version of Ian Fleming's 1961 novel Thunderball, the first being Connery's 1965 outing as Bond in...Thunderball.

Never wasn't made by Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman's Eon Productions, so it lacked the gun-barrel opening sequence and Monty Norman's iconic "James Bond Theme." Screenwriter Kevin McClory, after a long legal battle with Eon Productions and Ian Fleming, had the rights to film a version of the Thunderball novel based on his claims to have supplied much of its plot. McClory won his fight and tried to make his movie a couple of times before finally succeeding. He didn't have the music and he didn't have the opening sequence, but he did have one thing that the "official" Bond franchise lacked: Sean Frickin' Connery wielding his official license to kill and unofficial license to thrill. Given that the official franchise's 1983 entry was the tired Octopussy, featuring the increasingly tired-looking Roger Moore, that's a major-league head start right there.

Never also bests its competition in the form of its villain, pitting Klaus Maria Brandauer's playful psychopathic Largo against Louis Jordan's surprisingly small-scale Kamal Kahn. Largo is aided by the scenery-chewing Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush and bossed by the sinister Blofeld, master of SPECTRE. His weakness -- Domino Petachi (played by Kim Basinger), sister of traitorous air force officer Jack Petachi -- proves to be the handle that Bond will use to pry his way into SPECTRE's plan to use nuclear weapons to extort money from NATO. Bernie Casey also uses his brief time to good effect as CIA agent Felix Leiter.

At 52, Connery was actually three years younger than Moore and at that point had aged much better. The Never screenwriters and director Irwin Kershner used his slightly long-in-the-tooth status to good advantage in the movie, highlighting Bond as something of a Cold War dinosaur in an age of supposedly different needs and standards. Service Director M has little use for Bond and gadget-man Q's slashed budget can't offer him much in the way of spyware. But when it counts, the somewhat older and wilier 007 can outsmart any would-be world-dominating megalomaniac and still outfight most of them. The idea that Bond's time has come and gone gives Never a kind of wry tone that Connery carries off well, probably appreciating the fact that he was back playing spies again a dozen years after he said he wouldn't. And although he's 22 years older than Basinger, she was already 30 when the movie was made -- not some 20-year-old coed -- which reduces the creep factor for this movie, at least. That, and the fact that he's Sean Frickin' Connery.

Never isn't flawless -- it's at least a half-hour too long and it's one of the many movies that labors under the delusion that murky underwater fight scenes between stunt doubles are exciting. Basinger is kind of bland, even more so against the colorful backdrop of Connery, Brandauer and Carrera. Bond movies had been trending towards more active heroines, especially in For Your Eyes Only's Melina Havelock, but Basinger was a throwback to the more passive model of the early 1960s.

It was a splash of fun in the Bond series, though, and fun was something that Octopussy and A View to a Kill, Moore's final Bond outing two years later, lacked. It didn't always take itself so completely seriously, making it a nice change of pace as well as a much better Bond finale for Connery than the jokey Diamonds. It was also a welcome chance to see the original "Nobody does it better" guy back in action, one last time. We might wish it wasn't the last time -- even though Connery is 81 and officially retired from movies and Dame Judi Dench has been spectacular as M in the last six Bond outings, it could a hoot seeing Sir Sean glower and harumph at his just-this-side-of-rogue agent 007 as he overstepped his authority...again.

MGM, which distributes Eon's Bond movies, bought the distribution rights to Never Say Never Again in 1997, which means it's included in multivolume Bond sets of DVDs and is no longer an orphan.

Corporate Criminals!

2012-01-11T15:58:00.000-06:00

The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act requires U.S. oil companies to include substances called cellulosic biofuels in their petroleum production. These are biological fuel substances made from things like corn cobs or wood chips, and the plan was that the increased use of cellulosic biofuels would decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil and sidestep the problem of farmers selling their corn to be made into fuel rather than food.

According to the law, the amount of this kind of biofuel the companies are required to mix into their gasoline and diesel supplies is pretty small -- the goal for 2011 was 250 million gallons of biofuel mixed into the overall gasoline production of 135 billion gallons, or less than .002 percent. The actual required amount was even smaller -- just 6.6 million gallons for 2011 and only 8.65 million gallons for 2012. Or a percentage so small my calculator gives me an error message when I try to divide the 6.6 million by 135 billion in order to compute it.

And yet these arrogant oil companies, these corporate pirates, these one-percent big-business enviroment-destroying doo-doo heads wouldn't even do that little. Just 6.6 million gallons, an amount equal to how much gasoline the oil companies make just about every four and a half hours, and they wouldn't do it. Sure, the Environmental Protection Agency fined them, but it was just a paltry $6.8 million -- barely more than a dollar a gallon for what they didn't make and surely nowhere near what you and I pay at the pump for our gasoline. Is this all the EPA, our watchdog, our protector of the planet, our environmental conscience could do? Couldn't they fine the companies an amount that actually got to them, or stage surprise inspections and threaten shutdowns if the inspectors didn't find any cellulosic biofuels? This paltry little fine?

I'm sorry, what? Cellulosic biofuels don't actually exist yet? You mean that elected officials heard about something that sounded good and decided to tell people they had to do it even though technically there wasn't yet an "it" to do?

I guess that explains the warning letter the captain of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise received from the EPA telling him that at least one quarter of the trips made on and off the ship during the next year had to be by transporter.

Collegiate Till

2012-01-10T22:31:00.000-06:00

Apparently last night's BCS National Championship Game was so bad (Q: Did you hear the LSU team bus is still stuck in the parking lot? A: Yeah, someone painted a 50-yard line across the exit) that even people involved with the system think it will be different next year. Tampa Bay Times writer Michael Kruse, in a piece at Grantland, suggests the awful game will make the creation of four 16-team "superconferences" and an actual playoff system that much closer to reality.

Ordinarily I disagree with people who suggest a playoff system would create a "real" national champion, because the suggested systems would boot the problem of arbitrary team selection from the top two teams down to the top eight or ten. However, Kruse hits on several ideas that would help overcome that problem.

And most importantly, he acknowledges that the superconference idea -- which would sort collegiate football teams into groups of haves and have-nots and leave the have-nots out of the discussion of who got to play for the title -- would pretty much bring to an end the fiction that collegiate athletics is a non-profit operation that shouldn't have to pay taxes. So what, Kruse says? That's almost certain to happen anyway, so why not bite the bullet and set the circumstances under which it does? I think here he overestimates the ability of NCAA officials and college sports folks to accept the reality that Uncle Sam is sniffin' the fine scent of greenbacks on the ol' quad, and Uncle doesn't let you play with his money unless you let him wet his beak a little. I think the superconference move will happen after the NCAA loses some future legal fight to maintain its nonprofit fairy tale.

Kruse also addresses the matter of the have-nots by saying that may wind up being the best thing for them. Too often schools without Division 1 NCAA athletic programs try to make the jump to that level and spend money they don't have in doing so, with dismal results. Snake-oil salesmen in the administration somehow convince university trustees that within five years of becoming a D-1 program, it'll be their school logo on the jerseys surrounding the national trophy and one of their own SAT-challenged "students" flashing his three-quarters of a degree in interpersonal communications in the first round of the draft. At the college where I used to work, the university president's wife always told people she wanted to see us "the best" in everything, including moving from NAIA competition to NCAA. The immense costs involved were one of the many things she didn't understand, and that idea was one of the unfortunately-not-as-many things on which she was ignored.

As Kruse points out, if you say from the get-go that these 64 teams (whichever ones they are) are the only ones who'll have any chance to play for the national title, then you keep schools below that level from spending themselves into the "world lit only by fire" status they'll be forced into when they sell all of two season tickets and have to choose between paying off the loan on the Jumbotron or lights in the library after 8 PM.

In the end, we'll see how it happens, whether Kruse's higher opinion of university athletic officials' intelligence or my pessimism about the same is warranted. But I'm right behind him on the fact that it will happen one way or the other, as all the school colors bleed into one -- deceased presidential green.

Muon It on Over

2012-01-09T11:43:00.002-06:00

While it's important to know what goes on inside a volcano, it's pretty darn difficult to get one to come by the doc's office for a checkup. That makes it tough to x-ray the thing, and although the Transportation Security Administration swears its scanner machines don't show your face to the people they let see you naked, volcanoes are apparently having none of that either.

So enter the muons. Literally. Muons are subatomic particles that pass through most things because they are so very small that even what we call solid objects are more like empty space to them. They're set free when cosmic rays strike other atoms and break them up -- which is not what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby told us that cosmic rays can do, but the real world sometimes just doesn't recognize a great idea when it sees one.

After being liberated from the oppressive power structure of their former atom (#OccupyNucleus), muons sail along their merry way until they strike another atom. As mentioned above, that doesn't happen very often because of the small size of the particles involved, but there are enough muons movin' on that they can be tracked and the rate of this interruption can be measured. Denser materials stop more muons (Washington, D.C. is pretty much a muon-free zone), so the muon detectors get a kind of a picture of what something looks like by imaging the denser and less dense areas. This is pretty much exactly how an x-ray machine works.

In volcanoes, the liquid magma is denser than the solid mountain because it is under pressure. Muon detectors can track more or less where the magma is inside the volcano and see if it is close to the surface or if it is flowing near weaker spots in the volcano's rock. If it is, then folks living nearby can be alerted to have their bags packed and fire insurance updated.

Discriminating Taste?

2012-01-07T22:13:00.000-06:00

Actress Huong Hoang of Texas has identified herself as the woman who sued Amazon.com, owner of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), for publishing her birthdate on her IMDb profile.

Ms. Hoang works under the name Junie Hoang and originally sued the company anonymously, claiming that Hollywood age discrimination meant she would not be considered for some movie roles when it became clear that her actual age is 40. A Seattle judge threw out the suit until she refiled it under her actual name. A quick check of her IMDb profile shows an attractive woman who could pretty easily play a decade or so younger than her age, especially with movie makeup. It also shows that her résumé lists such credits as "Sandy" in Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, the third entry in the series telling the story of a cookie possessed by the spirit of an executed murderer. In it, it seems, the murderous pastry time travels to 1976 to slay some disco folks.

This lawsuit would seem to be another example of how our nation has too many folks whose first response is to reach for an attorney, but as it happens I agree that information from IMDb's page for Ms. Hoang could keep her from getting roles in movies. Of course, the problem information is not so much her birthdate as it is the fact that she lists such credits as "Sandy" in Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, but I don't know what to advise her about that.

Edenic

2012-01-06T23:35:00.000-06:00

San Diego veterinarian James Paul Czajkowski sold his first manuscript when fantasy mainstay Terry Brooks was one of the judges in a writing contest he won. But an obvious problem loomed, so he wrote under the pen name James Clemens. As Clemens, Czajkowski wrote a fantasy series called The Banned and the Banished.

He adopted another pen name for some standalone techno-thrillers and the SIGMA Force series, and it's under that name of James Rollins that we meet him here with 2010's Altar of Eden. He also wrote the novelization of the poorly-received Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which he would probably rather you keep to yourself.

In Altar, we meet veterinarian Lorna Polk as she hurries to her special southern Louisiana research facility after its power has gone off in a storm. Just as power is restored and her team sees there is no damage, Dr. Polk is whisked away by a division of the Border Patrol that's investigating a beached boat on the Louisiana coast. They find no survivors except for some strangely changed -- and in some cases deformed -- animals. She helps the team, which is led by Jack Menard, brother of a high school boyfriend whose death she witnessed many years ago and is blamed for by his family except for Jack, determine that one of the deadliest of the altered animals escaped the boat and is headed for the Louisiana swamps. And yes, the relationship between Polk and Menard does to this novel exactly what that dependent clause did to the previous sentence -- makes you scratch your head and wonder why such a complication exists.

The pair discover the animals are part of some kind of experiment that has affected their brains as well as their bodies, and that the secret corporation behind it is very interested in keeping a low profile. So interested, in fact, that its employees are more than ready to murder to insure it.

Rollins writes a peppy, taut action scene and his veterinary background gives him a good working knowledge of much of the medical science at the root of his thriller. In its three main action set pieces -- the hunt for and confrontation with the escaped animal, fighting off corporate thugs at Polk's lab and storming an island research base -- Altar hums along uncluttered.

The exposition that comes in between the first two set pieces and the concluding one does almost the exact opposite. Clunky, wordy and littered with useless features, it sticks out in the book like a Windows Vista operating system among Mac Snow Leopards. It doesn't help that it also serves to introduce the shadowy CEO megalomaniac at the root of the experiments, who is so much of a stock character he's got to exist on some thriller author keyboard macro somewhere. He is, of course, greedy, ruthless and eeeeevil, but has the "unexpected character trait" of being a religious hypocrite. The mad scientist responsible for the experiments is just about as cookie-cutter, but he does allow Rollins to identify John 1:1 as a quote from Genesis so he -- or perhaps his creator -- is not without comic relief.

If you allow your inner Evelyn Woods to take over during the exposition passage and skim through it to the action and overlook Rollins' attempt to build Dramatic Tension by giving his two leads a Shadowy Shared Past, Altar of Eden is a diverting read and not likely to be the worst book you could buy from the Wal-Mart discount bin.

Some Similarities?

2012-01-05T13:49:00.002-06:00

Yes, technically the sharing of content is an important part of my faith. It is not, however, the primary part of my faith, as it would be if I followed the Missionary Church of Kopimism, an officially recognized religion in Sweden.

Like many Christians, I hold it important to share the gospel message with others, because I want them to understand what I believe to be the truth about the human condition and God's response to that condition. Also, Jesus told us to. The recently-approved church of Kopimism believes in file-sharing as its most important value -- the free sharing of any information between anybody who wants to do so, regardless of copyright laws or other restrictions. So for them, the act of sharing is far more important than the content of what is being shared.

The opposite is supposed to hold true for us -- we think it's most important that we share the central message of God's love for humanity and his desire to heal the relationship with humanity that was broken by human sin, and how that desire was made reality through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We certainly don't know everything about that message and we might get it wrong now and again, which is one reason we trust God to do the work our limitations prevent. But we usually try to match our sharing with that message.

Of course, there are some pray-now-send-money-get-rich-quick churches, "Buddy Jesus" messages and hipper-than-thou schools of thought that offer different ideas, but those have histories of fading into the background after a little while anyway.

Schrödinger's Rinse Cycle?

2012-01-03T14:36:00.001-06:00

This has apparently been around the net for awhile, but I just ran across it for the first time and since I've been on a little geek binge I thought it was worth some riffing.

Physycist Brian J. Reardon brought his knowledge of quantum physics to the problem of socks that go missing from the dryer, as well as the mysterious but related problem of other people's socks appearing in a public washer or dryer that was empty when checked.

Professor Reardon suggests that the same forces at work in the arcane corners of quantum mechanics somehow operate at the macro level to produce similar results in socks. You will note he uses a lot of equations, so please take necessary precautions when reading his article, like keeping your index finger on the scroll button of your mouse to enable a quick escape before catatonia sets in. Please, profit from my hard-earned experience.

Anyway, the professor's Quantum Theory of Laundry (QTL), takes advantage of a peculiar property of some subatomic doodads, like photons or electrons. These doodads can appear at one point to be particles, but at other times they act like waves -- this is why I called them doodads, because saying they are "subatomic particles" is not always accurate. Experiments designed to detect photons or electrons if they are particles will measure them and prove they are particles. But experiments designed to detect them if they are waves will measure them and prove they are waves. In other words, there is no way to know whether they are particles or waves until the experiments are done, and the experiments themselves will "cause" them to act like particles or waves.

An Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger described some aspects of this relationship in a very complicated equation and illustrated it in a somewhat gruesome "thought experiment." He imagined a cat in a box that was rigged with a device that would release a poison gas if triggered by a certain kind of radioactive decay. The decay was random, so there was no way to predict whether or not it would go off and trigger the gas. If the box was opaque, there was no way to know whether or not the cat was alive without opening the lid, meaning that the cat could be alive or could be dead, just like the photon or electron could be a wave or could be a particle. To the observer, the cat was both alive and dead at the same time (or neither alive nor dead) until the lid opened. In the same way, the photon or electron is both a wave and a particle until it is measured and its "wave function" collapses.

Reardon uses the same kind of idea to talk about socks. The washer or dryer is a closed system, and there is no way to know if the sock is inside the machine until the door is opened and the laundry is retrieved. Once the door is opened, the sock function collapses, and it becomes a sock or it disappears. Reardon's theory also allows for the possibility that a sock in the dryer becomes lint, because it can't leave the closed system of the washer or dryer. So someone doing a future load of laundry may open the door and find that the sock function has again collapsed, but this time instead of an existing sock disappearing, a previously lost sock has reappeared. Unless, of course, you clean your lint trap and mess up the closed system.

Although I can't put together the equations that would describe it, I would like to propose a corollary to the Schrödinger-Reardon model that actually brings both of them together. As I said, I don't know the math for it, but I have observed it to be true on many occasions. I suggest that, for every unique load of laundry that is brought out of the dryer, there exists the potential of one unique cat which will appear at the center of the warm and dry clothes to take a nap there, whether the cat was visible anywhere near the dryer before the load was removed from it or not.

(H/T The Newton Blog)

Raise Your Hand

2012-01-02T22:52:00.001-06:00

...if you can't wait until the Iowa caucuses are over so it'll be at least six or seven weeks before we hear the blathering class talk about who'll win them in 2016.

Tell Me Why

2012-01-01T19:11:00.001-06:00

Another tasty treat allowing me to get my geek on can be found here in the online edition of Wired magazine, dealing with some of the problems that scientists have when studying very complex systems like the human body.

Jonah Lehrer outlines a drug study and the history of treatment for back pain as two ways to look at how gathering more information about a problem doesn't always lead to its solution. A drug company studied what's called the "cholesterol pathway" to figure out a new way to treat people who have high levels of the so-called "bad cholesterol" in their systems. This pathway is the way that the body and its enzymes use and then break down both good and bad cholesterol. It is pretty widely understood, and the drug company had a compound that would assist the good cholesterol in removing the bad cholesterol and thus improve the health of people whose cholesterol levels were too high. The drug did exactly what researchers thought it would do and was in its final trials before being approved for public prescriptions. Except that when it did exactly what the researchers thought it would do, it actually endangered people's health instead of improving it. Although all of the chemicals acted exactly as they had in experiments, the effect of those actions was the opposite of what was intended.

Lehrer's article is long but is worth the read as he explores one of the problems the drug company's situation demonstrates: Complex systems are not easily understood. Well duh, we might say, but the truth is that a whole lot of the dietary and medical advice given out today is based on assumptions about causes and effects that themselves might overlook crucial elements.

He mentions an experiment done by a Belgian psychologist in the 1940s in which people saw short films with a moving red ball and a moving blue ball. The red ball would move across the screen and touch the blue ball and then stop. The blue ball would then move in the direction the red ball had been traveling. When people described it, they said the red ball hit the blue ball and made it move -- they almost automatically spoke in terms of causation, even though the film showed nothing that supported that idea. That interpretation matched most people's experience of watching what happens when a moving object hit a stationary object, of course. But there was no evidence for saying what happened in the film was the same thing that happened in those other cases. People shortened the process and supplied their own understanding.

Lehrer points out that's the way the brain works and if it doesn't work that way we can't operate in the world. It's sort of like we're hard-wired to produce a narrative explanation for things we see, whether there's any kind of explanation like that or not. We simplify a process by removing steps. Instead of giving the most complete and accurate description: "The red ball moved until it touched the blue ball. The red ball stopped. The blue ball then started moving in the same direction that the red ball had been moving," we take the shortcut and say "The red ball hit the blue ball and knocked it away."

Most of the time that works. In the experiment, we don't lose much information by using the shortcut version. But when systems become very complex, we don't know what kind of impact removing steps can have, and that's why the drug company's compound didn't do what they thought it would do.

Scientists, of course, usually expect this sort of thing. They're used to not knowing things, and even not really knowing what it is they don't yet know. But a lot of goofballs who insist on a rigid cause-and-effect relationship in systems where it may not even be possible to know all the causes mostly overlook it and make all sorts of wild claims about the universe and knowledge that they can't really back up. Your Friar, mired as he is in his traditional Christian theism, understands this because he takes a lot of things on faith as well.

Of course, he admits it.

Homes Without Mirrors

2011-12-31T20:34:00.001-06:00

At least, that's what I figure a couple of Philadelphia city officials have. Because I am an optimist and believe in the innate goodness of human beings, I can't see that these people could ever look at themselves in the mirror again. Otherwise, they just might be approaching the event horizon of irredeemability.

A Philly city councilwoman and a functionary with the title "Recorder of Wills" both retired from their jobs last week. No problem, except that their retirement lasted all of one day; they'll be back on the job Monday to start the new year. For that one day of retirement, the city councilwoman will take home $478,000. The irreplaceable Recorder of Wills, who after his one day of retirement decided the city could not do without his services and also returned to the job, pocketed $376,000.

This cash grab was made possible by a retirement system which allows exactly this kind of one-day "retirement" and multi-thousand dollar payout, approved in a bill introduced and voted for by the city councilwoman herself. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed the bill -- he may be one of those rare public officials who has yet to have his shame removed -- but the councilwoman courageously led a fight to overturn the veto.

All this makes me realize my dad is doing it wrong. See, he also went back to work after retiring, but he waited several years and, rather than spend his days figuring out how to put six figures of other people's money into his bank account, he drives around and takes census surveys. I don't know exactly what he clears, but if it's 400 K he must be blowing a lot of it at the track based on what I see around the folks' house.

Villains Victorious

2011-12-31T14:28:00.001-06:00

No mangled poetry; just my own verse. Which is neither classic nor epic:

How long shall your victory's savor last?
How long till your triumph's tang is past?

'Tis Monday morn, and 'pon your boss's desk -- See, there doth appear a
collegiate seal. The legend reads: "Quæcumque sunt vera."

Double Booked

2011-12-29T09:53:00.001-06:00

Thriller author Steve Berry moves his puzzle-solving man of action, Cotton Malone, to the United States where he finds himself trying to unravel a two-hundred-year old mystery and deal with modern-day pirates.

Malone answers a note from a friend in the intelligence community and finds himself in the middle of an assassination attempt on the president. He foils it but is thought to be involved, so he has to run from the Secret Service. His girfriend, the beautiful and deadly Cassiopeia Vitt, helps him out but also finds herself on the run from the law. Eventually they meet with the president and learn that they're in the middle of a conspiracy with roots that stretch back to the War of Independence. The shadowy Commonwealth, a group of men whose ancestors were privateers and pirates who fought for the United States during the Revolution, are being pressured by the government and they have decided to strike back. We learn they've done this before -- every presidential assassination has happened when the Commonwealth felt threatened. Malone must track down the centuries-old documents that give the Commonwealth their power, but since they have allies in some of the U.S. intelligence services it will not be easy.

Initially The Jefferson Key might seem like a good move for Berry -- rather than some of the historical flights of fancy he's thrown at Malone based on Biblical or medieval texts, here he deals with some fairly straightforward material. The "Key" of the title is an actual cipher device invented by Thomas Jefferson and displayed at Jefferson's home of Monticello, and the code Malone must solve has its roots in an actual code Jefferson invented. But the book is shot full of plot holes and its overall sloppiness send this to near the bottom of the Berry pile. Supposedly brilliant and savvy field operatives do things like neglect to double-check escape routes to see if they've been discovered by enemies or turn on flashlights while wearing night-vision goggles. There are too many similar characters messing around in parallel strands of action to easily keep straight. OK, here's Knox -- wait, is Knox the Commonwealth's quartermaster or enforcer, or was that Hale? No, Hale is one of the Commonwealth's four captains. Now we follow disgraced former agent Wyatt as he battles Knox and a person from one of the intelligence agencies -- I think it's Wyatt, anyway, or is that Knox again?

The other major problem is plausibility. Malone's quest for the documents is urgent because if the Commonwealth finds them, then the "letters of marque" that allow them to act completely on their own against the enemies of the U.S. will be verified and they will be legally untouchable. Yes, the United States government will be powerless against four private citizens because they hold two-hundred-year old agreements with that same government. The sound you hear is every American Indian who's ever lived, laughing.

Berry also uses brief, staccato-like passages when the action heats up, sometimes changing scenes after only four or five lines. The intended effect may be something like a jump-cut in a movie but it feels much more like the shaky-cam that's made Dramamine one of the nation's moviehouses' best sellers. Each passage ends with some cliffhanger-like pause, but the intensity ebbs because so many of those pauses are well-worn cliches -- up to and including that lurching zombie of shots "ringing out."

Whatever skills Berry has brought to earlier books -- narrative flair and a knack for action scenes -- may or may not be here in The Jefferson Key. Its stylistic and storytelling flaws have covered them up well, but we can always hope they haven't erased them entirely.

-----

Although lately he's been focused on his dystopian speculative Assassin series, Robert Ferrigno opened his career smack in the middle of the hard-boiled guys who operate just this side of the law -- on both sides, of course -- and the femme fatales whose beauty endangers as much as it entices. Heartbreaker was the way Ferrigno said goodbye to the 20th century, as ex-cop Val Duran juggles pursuit by a psychopathic gangster, a new ladylove and her lethally dysfunctional family.

Val fled sunny Florida when he saw his best friend beaten to death on the orders of drug runner Junior. Now safely living in Los Angeles, he's put his plan into motion to lure Junior out to California so he can have his revenge. But then he meets the beautiful marine biologist Kyle Abbott and wonders if he can still take care of his business with Junior without getting her hurt. That won't be his only problem, though, because Kyle's wealthy family has its own share of issues and one of them is her stepbrother Kilo's involvement with the beautiful but psychotic conwoman Jackie and her partner, the ugly but nearly as demented Gulf War veteran Dekker.

Some aspects of a good crime noir novel are clockwork, and the skillful Ferrigno knows what to wind up and let go, as well as where to both weave his own touch into that rhythm and how to interrupt it with unexpected twists in the story. His dialogue is witty and profane, and he does an excellent job of painting Val as the tarnished hero who's seen too much to have faith in right and wrong but who somehow can't seem to quit doing so, no matter what it might wind up costing him.

Ferrigno doesn't write with the terse economy of Robert Parker or the lighter touch of Robert Crais but his works are well worth the read, and mistaking him for one of the other crime-'ritin' Roberts will turn out to be no mistake at all.

Ongawa!

2011-12-28T10:55:00.002-06:00

Cheetah-Mike, a chimpanzee who was believed to have played Cheetah in some of Johnny Weissmuller's earlier Tarzan movies, died on Christmas Eve of kidney failure. He was thought to be about 80. Since chimps in the wild usually live to be about 35 or 40, Cheetah-Mike's equivalent in human terms would probably have been something like 150. Either way, he was one old chimp.

Anyone who's read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels knows there's no such thing as Cheetah. There's also no such thing as swinging on a vine through the trees, at least not for full-sized human beings, but a combination of physics, tensile strength of jungle vines and the average person's weight clue us in on that without any assist from ERB. Burroughs gave Tarzan a companion monkey named Nkima -- a vain, selfish and fearful but loyal sidekick who offered some comic relief and a sometimes-reliable method of transporting messages from Tarzan to his friends.

The moviemakers probably decided that trying to work with a monkey would be tougher than working with a chimp, since chimps tend to be quite a bit smarter than monkeys, and thus Cheetah was born. He also offered some comic relief and served as Weissmuller's message delivery service on occasion. I imagine he offered a pretty good hook for critics to use when bashing the Tarzan movies, too, since they could compare his acting to that of the movie's leads, Olympic swimmer Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane. That's probably accurate in Weissmuller's case but not so much in O'Sullivan's as she had a varied and well-respected career before, after and during her six Tarzan movies. But to be fair to Weissmuller, he was apparently a pretty good fellow and respected by his co-workers, and his "Tarzan yell," carried on today by comedienne Carol Burnett, is as much a part of modern pop culture as Superman's cape.

The Tarzan movies are silly fun, transforming Burroughs' lost English lord into a verb and adjective deficient Saturday afternoon serial character for kids -- although O'Sullivan's high-cut loincloth two-piece in her first movie might have drawn attention from a few dads as well and mom probably didn't hate a couple minutes of watching the broad Weissmuller shoulders and chest. They made some excellent diverting entertainment for a nation in the middle of the great depression and during the early, uncertain years of World War II, but their endurance probably owes more to nostalgia than to appreciation of their cinematic quality. Which is just fine by me, especially if it's Saturday afternoon during the era of six or seven channels and it's too cruddy to be outside and the family room reverberates to the ululating call of the Lord of the Jungle.

Cheetah-Mike was the last remaining major cast member of the Weissmuller-era Tarzan films. Weissmuller passed away in 1984, O'Sullivan in 1998 and Johnny Sheffield, who played "Boy," in 2010.

Update -- Three Associated Press reporters who don't have enough to do have filed this item calling into question whether Cheetah-Mike was indeed one of the chimps who played in the Tarzan movies. Looming economic crisis, unrest in Iraq, potential nuclear weapons in Iran, European monetary woes -- nah, let's not dig into those. Let's get some grind with his own horn to toot to say that the chimp in question was a hoax used to drum up business and use three reporters to file it.

No Reductions

2011-12-27T22:06:00.001-06:00

Nice holiday with the family, but over too quickly. The drive home along a major turnpike featured a construction zone that stretched a 15-mile section of the trip into better than 30 minutes. This is not really a problem; I like it when the state resurfaces, repairs or expands the highways.

Of course, the fact that the turnpike toll was exactly the same as it would have been if I had been able to take advantage of its supposedly speedier travel kind of rankles a little bit, but I'm cheap like that.

Honor Amongst Whom?

2011-12-26T15:14:00.001-06:00

I'm not a big online game player -- Words With Friends is about it, and I'm not nearly as hung up on it as Alec Baldwin is -- but this article is interesting when it talks about people who cheat while playing online games.

Gaming communities will spot and label cheaters. These could be people who use some sort of programming shortcut in a game, like the old keystroke combinations from Doom! that would let you have a chainsaw whenever you wanted (answer: All the time!), as well as walk through walls or be invulnerable. Or they could take advantage of some kind of computer assistance, like people who will play Words With Friends via a program that will automatically calculate the best words and positions to play them.

These are only a couple of the ways people cheat, but what happens in the different gaming communities is that those folks may or may not be banned from playing the game -- but they are identified and might find themselves shunned. "Join a game with these folks at your own risk," is the unofficial warning.

Some folks in one gaming community tracked some statistics about the cheaters among their members. They tended to congregate in the same games or on the same forums, apparently, which made me wonder what a game would be like if nobody followed the rules. A friend suggested maybe like "Calvinball," but Calvinball has rules. They're made up on the spot and they change from one second to the next, but they do indeed exist. You never break a rule in Calvinball, you just make up a new rule that gives you the advantage you seek.

Also cheating seemed to be contagious. People who weren't identified cheaters but who were linked with the cheaters were more likely to be labeled as cheaters or to start cheating on their own. But people who were indentified as cheaters starting upping their privacy settings and cutting themselves off from their networks within the gaming community.

So catching the games' cheaters is like a game of its own. I expect an Xbox version any day now.

Paging Mr. Kafka...

2011-12-25T00:54:00.002-06:00

... Mr. Franz Kafka. Please call your office...ah, nevermind. Even you wouldn't believe this one.

A Thought for Today

2011-12-25T00:45:00.002-06:00

"God bless us, every one."

Amen and amen.

Sanctified

2011-12-24T13:34:00.002-06:00

Yes, I did indeed brave Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve service requires bread for communion, and the easily-torn, minimal-crumb, janitor-friendly sweet-tasting King's Hawaiian (AKA "God's communion bread") was available only there.

But I survived without harm. I was, after all, on a mission from God. With all the protection that implies.

Don't Stop Believin'

2011-12-22T22:42:00.001-06:00

It's been Christmastime on the ol' internets for the Friar: Hard on the heels of the über-geeky odds of your existence article from a couple of days ago comes this piece by Alan Lightman about the problems the idea of a multiverse poses for scientific inquiry (recommended Lightman work: Dance for Two. Einstein's Dreams a close second).

You should read the whole thing, but here's the box score. There are a lot of different forces and situations that make up the universe, and the more physicists have studied them, the more they have found out that if some of those forces were a little bit stronger or a little bit weaker than they are, the universe would not exist. Or life might not exist in it. The name given to this set of coincidences is usually the anthropic principle, and it has strong and weak versions. The strong version is that these things are the way they are because God (or some other being) set them all that way with the purpose of making a universe that would produce us. The weak version is that those things are all that way because if they weren't, neither we nor anyone or anything else would be around to know about it. There are all kinds of ranges in between; I lean towards a stronger version myself but not as far that way as I described above.

Well, one of the things that scientists have thought, Lightman says, is that because the universe is the way it is, we can get to the basic principles that make it go and we can then understand it in purely physical terms. No supernatural beings or forces required. We read articles about this every now and again, like the recent flurry over possibly tracking down the Higgs boson within the next few months. Or some other advancement that brings us closer to theories that describe all the forces in the universe, sometimes called the Theory of Everything or ToE.

Some of the theories of how the universe was created, though, have brought problems to that idea. Theories that involve concepts like eternal expansion (the universe keeps expanding and never stops) and superstrings (I got no idea, certainly not one brief enough for a descriptive parenthetical aside) also suggest the possibility that other universes exist besides ours -- hence the name multiverse. In these other universes, the physical laws that have governed ours might be a little different and those important forces mentioned earlier might be those few percentage points off that makes the other universes empty and dead.

We have no idea how many other universes there might be, and we have no way to verify their existence experimentally. We probably never will -- we may verify some aspects of the eternal expansion or superstring theory experimentally and if verified those things might imply a multiverse, but there's no way to know for sure.

In other words, a key facet of the creation of everything that exists just might have to be...taken on faith. And I know I've heard that before.

Your Likelihood

2011-12-20T11:18:00.002-06:00

Ran across some "Friar candy" in this post that describes how likely it is for you -- yes, you -- to exist. Or me, for that matter, or anyone else. Dr. Ali Binazir, a quirky fellow affiliated with the Harvard School of Law, played around with some odds after hearing a presenter suggest that the probability that you exist as you at being one in four hundred trillion. If you like your strings of zeros, that is 1 in 400,000,000,000,000. Scientists write that 4×10¹⁴.

That got Dr. Binazir to thinking about a Buddhist story that he had heard about the same subject matter. The odds that you are here as you are the same as if there was one turtle swimming in the world's oceans and one life preserver tossed onto the waves and the turtle, in surfacing, poked its head through the life preserver on the first try. He decided to quantify that chance using actual figures for the surface area of the world's oceans, the size of the turtle's head and the size of a standard life preserver and an ability to do math that has escaped your humble correspondent since the alphanumeric collision referenced last week. That story, he said, put the odds of any one human being existing exactly as who and what they were as one in seven hundred trillion -- 1 in 700,000,000,000,000 or 7×10¹⁴, to use the formats from above.

Obviously a difference of 300 trillion is pretty big, unless you are a scientist or a Washington politician spending other people's money. But in terms of the scale at which we're working, it's not a huge difference. The one in 400 trillion figure doesn't represent a significantly greater likelihood that you exist over the one in 700 trillion. Either way, the chances that you would show up and be you are pretty remote. Of course, the chances that somebody would show up are not all that remote -- but we're talking about you, or me, or any one specific and unique individual.

Dr. Binazir was not finished. He wondered if those figures were anything like an accurate representation of the probability of a person's existence. So he looked at the main steps that had to take place in order for people to exist, made some reasonable assumptions about how they happened and then calculated the odds that they would happen in the precise way that made you. You can read his blog entry if you want to see what all of those were, but for this post I'll just mentioned that he covered the odds of your parents meeting each other, their parents meeting each other, the particular sperm and egg cells which grew into you being the ones that were fertilized, and things like that. He didn't get into things like life experiences, where you were born and so on, figuring there's not much of a way to quantify those.

After he had finished his math -- and perhaps smoked out his hard drive -- Dr. Binazir came up with the odds that you exist: 1 in 10^2,685,000. How big is that? Well, notice that the "hundred trillions" above have 14 zeros, which is what the little "14" raised up above the other line refers to. So the number Dr. Binazir reached is a one followed by more than two million zeros. How big is that number? Compare it to the number of atoms believed to exist in the universe, which is 10⁸⁰, or a one followed by only eighty zeros. Dr. Binazir compared it to the entire city of San Diego playing a game with trillion-sided dice and rolling the exact same number at the same time.

And if you were to somehow be able to add in those fuzzy factors like your life experiences and such, the odds that you would be you increase even more. Remember, these are not the odds that you would be someone. These are the odds that you would be you.

Dr. Binazir seems to come from a perspective much more invested in Eastern philosophies than my own traditional Christian theism. But he and I agree that figures such as this might prompt us to reflect on what had to happen in order for us to be here, and that to give that "what" its proper name, we are left with only one word: "Miracle."

Perhaps the season of the year in which we find ourselves suggests to you thoughts on the miracle of a particular Birth. Perhaps you are a person who accepts the story of that Birth as reasonably true. If so, I commend to you reflections on what it might mean about the character of the Being behind that Birth creating a world in which there are seven billion of those 1 in 10^2,685,000 chances walking around today. You might wish to use the word "love."

(H/T Think Christian)

From the Rental Vault: 100 Rifles

2011-12-19T08:05:00.000-06:00

It's hard for us to believe it, but 100 Rifles was a controversial movie when it was released in 1969. Not because it was too violent -- The Wild Bunch was going to hold on to that title for awhile. Not because it had a little nudity -- no small number of pictures had showed more by that time and would show even more afterwards.

No, 100 Rifles was controversial because it featured one of mainstream Hollywood's first interracial love scenes, between co-stars Jim Brown and Raquel Welch. Something that we wouldn't blink at today raised more than a couple of eyebrows just more than forty years ago.

Brown plays Lyedecker, an Arizona lawman chasing a bank robber into Mexico in 1912. The robber, Yaqui Joe, is half Yaqui Indian and stole the money to by guns to arm his people against their oppressors. Burt Reynolds plays Yaqui Joe, and Welch plays Sarita, a female leader of the Yaqui guerrillas. Fernando Lamas is General Verdrugo, whose autocratic rule of the Mexican state of Sonora requires a pacified Yaqui people -- and whether that happens because they lay down their arms or because they're laid six feet under the earth is of no consequence to him.

Lyedecker and Joe are held prisoner by Verdrugo until freed by Sarita and the Yaqui. While on the run, Lydeecker must decide if he will help the Yaqui in their fight or take Joe back to Arizona to face trial.

Aside from the controversy over the Brown-Welch love scene, there's not a lot worth remembering about 100 Rifles. Some of that comes from director Tom Gries, who spends too much time filming different groups of people riding across unremarkable stretches of Spanish scrubland that stand in for Mexico. Only a year earlier Gries had directed Charlton Heston in Will Penny -- one of that actor's best roles and probably Gries' best work as a writer and as a director. But here he lacks fire, scope and any real sense of a linear point A to point B plan for his movie.

Much of the problem comes from the story, written by Clair Huffaker from a novel by Robert MacLeod. We may be used to an evil villain strategically inept though convinced of his own brilliance, and 100 Rifles supplies that in Verdrugo. He repeatedly fails to anticipate the Yaqui responses to his actions or take advantage of his enemies' own strategic weaknesses. And those are also many. The guerrillas and their rifles flee from Verdrugo and stop in a Yaqui village. Scouts alert them that the general -- who has been following them since they rescued Lyedecker and Joe -- is close behind. Now, what do you think a vicious general who aims to exterminate the Yaqui will do when he learns one of their villages is nearby and his quarry may have passed its way? If you picked "Kill most of its adults, kidnap its children as hostages and burn it to the ground," you're smarter than Lyedecker, Joe, Sarita and every Yaqui guerrilla in that band.

Of the lead cast, only Reynolds and Lamas offer much. Reynolds seems to recognize the ridiculous story he's in so he goes into full smart-aleck Bandit mode, mugging and grinning as much as this movie lets him. Lamas throws a big slab of ham on the grill and proceeds to chew whatever scenery he can sink his teeth into. Brown and Welch aren't exactly bad, but neither of them had developed yet into actors that can transcend their material, and this is material that desperately needs transcending.

100 Rifles may seem like a paint-by-numbers Western, but its lack of focus, screwy story and average or below performances make it more like a paint-by-numbers without the numbers.

On the Other Hand...

2011-12-18T17:10:00.002-06:00

A few days ago I suggested that while Mr. Gingrich would be an awful GOP nominee. he was not so abysmally awful as to make me shirk my responsibility of voting in next year's presidential election should he be on the ballot.

Well, kudos to Mr. Gingrich for not shying away from the hard work of edging himself closer to that category.

You Had Me at Nano

2011-12-17T22:30:00.000-06:00

"Nanotechnology," or engineering of things that are really, really small, has always seemed to be limited to science fiction. But real live scientists work with it in a whole heap of ways, one of which is apparently devising ways to eliminate laundry from the world.

Before you get all excited and/or repulsed about the prospect of global nudity, what I meant was that some of the developing nanotech would make clothes that would either clean themselves or repel any substance that might stain them. Some of the fabrics would be made of substances that couldn't absorb moisture or be coated with something that blocked it -- and without moisture, there's no ability to stain the fabric.

The downside is that, according to Star Trek: The Next Generation, nanotechnology can develop into a self-replicating race and form its own civilization that must be understood and negotiated with by a wise bald human and the galaxy's dumbest android. Fortunately, the catalyst for such a mechanical race is an experiment by an preternaturally smart and eternally annoying wish-fulfillment adolescent character who would never be allowed near that kind of technology anywhere but in Gene Roddenberry's blinkered vision.

From the Rental Vault: Youth of the Beast

2011-12-16T21:36:00.003-06:00

Since a lot of folks who watch international movies seem to emphasize the snooty, art-housey ones, it's easy to forget that other countries had their own "genre pictures." And just like with our own American industry, that meant a lot of formulaic stories, recycled plots and so on, every now and again spiced up with a dash of "Holy cow!" when someone with real talent and vision grabbed hold of the reins within the genre's restrictions and made something special.

Welcome to maverick Seijun Sazuki's 1963 noir thriller Youth of the Beast (Yajū no seishun in Japanese, which can also be translated Wild Youth. Neither title has anything to do with the movie's story). Sazuki directed about a million B-movies for Nikkatsu Studios -- Youth was one of four titles he released in 1963 -- mostly in the Japanese "Yakuza film" genre. Like the gangster pictures from American studios in the 1940s and 1950s, these were stylized tales of crime, corruption and tattered honor among the members of the yakuza, or Japanese criminal syndicates. Youth represents Sazuki starting to stretch the restrictive envelope demanded by Nikkatsu in terms of story, acting performances and cinematography, although it was nowhere near the acid-trippy sequences he would stick into Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill a few years later. Those would get him fired.

Youth is the story of ex-cop Joji "Jo" Mizuno (Sazuki mainstay Joe Shishida), kicked off the force after being framed for taking money. He wants to avenge the death of an ex-cop that stood by him during his trial, and so he infiltrates two rival yakuza gangs to try to learn just what happened. He will play one against the other in order to uncover the truth, and if broken limbs, black eyes and bodies are parts of that play, he's got no problem providing them. Sazuki brings Youth home in a zippy 91 minutes, leaving you little time to notice some of the more conventional conventions and limitations of this particular kind of genre movie.

Shishida carries the movie, and he had his own extreme side. After a few years getting blandly handsome leading man roles, he had plastic surgery to add cheek implants and give him more character in his look. It got him noticed and his switch to grim, tough-guy roles soon followed. He doesn't smile in Youth and he rarely changes expression, but the pain of his past and his losses is easy to read on his face when he talks about those times.

Sazuki throws in strange soundless segments, startling color splashes, bizarre settings (one scene takes place partly in a sandstorm that looks like it's happening on Mars) and some realistic butt-kicking by Mizuno and company. They make Youth a lot more interesting that the average genre picture of any language has a right to be.

The other star is Hajime Okumura's soundtrack, a Mancini-esque jazz-bop swirl of sax, trumpet, cool cymbal and swinging bass. Think of "Tank!," the Seat Belts' theme song for Cowboy Bebop, stretched over an entire movie, and you get the idea. If you want a foreign movie that has someone stare meaningfully at a stick for an hour, then you should probably creep someone else's Netflix queue. But if you want to see how skilled performers can work within familiar patterns to create thoughtful and interestingly composed stories, check out Youth of the Beast.

Aw, Nuts

2011-12-15T23:23:00.000-06:00

Christopher Hitchens was a gifted essayist and keen thinker; he passed away today at 62.

Although he could be virulent and petulant in his arguments against religion (he was a committed atheist), Hitchens could also present his case and argue his point with courtesy and charity -- which he did often, although not as often as one might wish. He was willing to show respect towards faithful people more often than ranting pedantists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or Philip Pullman -- even though he sometimes didn't.

Either way, it was a load of fun to watch him take aim and fire when his target was one that a reader might also wish to see suffer a few blows. He had an understanding of satire that escapes probably more than 90 percent of those who claim to practice it.

And not having new Hitchens around to read will make life a little more boring, to be certain.

This Is Cool...

2011-12-14T21:26:00.000-06:00

A special kind of camera captures the way light moves through a Coke bottle in a video here.

As far as I can tell from the story, the camera works by shooting light into an electric field, which makes the light bounce off -- and one of the directions in which it bounces is towards the camera. The camera is then shifted downrange for the next shot and the next, and so on, until it captures images from the light all the way through the bottle.

The only reason this works is because the light is being sent along the same path every time, so the conditions can be replicated each time. According to the scientists who built the camera, it's working at what would be roughly a trillion frames a second. You'd think it would take forever to make the shot then, but the light takes only a tiny fraction of a second to reach the next place where the camera takes its picture so they finished in a little over an hour. Computers then stitched the images together to make a continuous video.

You might also scratch your head at the headline of the story's reference to light particles. Wait, you might have thought -- isn't light made up of waves? When did it come to be made up of particles?

Welcome, O fellow confused traveler, to the concept of complementarity, in which light behaves like a wave when it is measured by experiments that treat it like a wave, but like particles (photons, to be precise) when measured by experiments designed to treat it like it's made up of particles. But waves and particles are different things. Indeed. In essence, light is both of those things at once until you measure it, when it becomes the thing you measure for.

Physicist John Polkinghorne, also a retired Anglican priest and one of my favorite science writers, has said that this "wave-particle duality" only seems like a contradiction when we speak about it in words. The equations that physicists use to describe it eliminate the contradiction and make it clear how something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time.

But unfortunately, ever since a horrible accident in the seventh grade when some irresponsible teacher put letters and numbers up on the board in the same math problem I have been unable to speak Equation. So I take Rev. Dr. Polkinghorne's word for that.

Rhymin' Reason

2011-12-13T13:45:00.000-06:00

There's a clever director named J.J.
Who'd best listen to his audience say, "Nay! Nay!
"If you try to do Khan
without Montalban,
in droves we shall all stay ay-way."

Mass

2011-12-13T11:26:00.001-06:00

OK, buckle in because it's about to get weird. We're going to a place where we measure mass in voltage, where scientists hunt a mysterious particle that has more mass than the particle it makes up and which everyone calls by a name that is pretty much the complete opposite of the name a book author wanted to use. So be vewy, vewy quiet...we'we hunting bosons!

Specifically we're hunting the Higgs boson or Higgs particle, the subatomic particle that gives all other particles mass. Ol' Professor Higgs' elusive namesake has been referred to before in these spaces, here. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have put off creating a black hole that would destroy the world long enough to narrow down the places where they think the Higgs boson could be. And by places, of course, I mean "ranges of mass," because obviously the darn things are everywhere if they exist.

The LHC folks smash things together at immense speeds because, well, why wouldn't you if you could and because the intense energy such collisions create often helps them see things that in normal conditions are pretty tough to see. Most of the time matter is pretty sedate, just rumbling along in a coherent and connected fashion doing whatever it does depending on what it's a part of. But when you increase the amount of energy in the matter in some fashion -- say, by holding a lit match to the seat of its pants -- then it begins to give off energy and act in a much different manner than when it's not energized. Put enough energy into it and you can find out all kinds of things you never could before. Hence the high-speed collisions at the LHC and the hunt for the Higgs boson.

LHC scientists believe that if the Higgs particle really exists, its mass is somewhere between 114.4 and 131 "gigaelectronvolts" or GeV. A gigaelectronvolt is one billion electron volts, and an electron volt is the amount of energy gained by a single electron when its energy is shifted one volt. So although "gigaelectronvolt" sounds like a massive amount of energy, it might be helpful to remember these are very very small things being considered here. A thousand GeV is a "teraelectronvolt" or TeV, and one TeV is the energy released when a mosquito slams into something at full speed.

In fact, these things are so small that their mass has to be measured in voltages. When we talk about the mass of larger objects, we can use the same terms we use to talk about their weight, even though those are not the same things. Mass is always the same while weight depends on gravity. But subatomic particles are so small that the only kinds of instruments that can detect their mass measure energy and so we use terms like GeV and TeV to do so.

Anyway, the LHC scientists figure the Higgs boson has a mass between 114.4 and 131 GeV. A regular proton has a mass of 1 GeV. Yes, this means that the particle which actually gives the proton its mass has more mass than the particle it gives it to, but protons and other particles aren't made up of a bunch of Higgs bosons. Rather, the Higgs boson creates the Higgs effect, which is what does give mass to the others.

Finding this little fella could really change a lot of things, like maybe even allowing near direct creation of energy from mass without all the little pesky details like accelerating it to the speed of light squared. There's really no telling.

But it wouldn't fix everything, which is one reason why scientists -- including Higgs -- get annoyed when people call the Higgs boson the "God particle." The title comes from Leon Lederman's book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? but Lederman had wanted to call it The God***n Particle because physicists like himself had spent so much frustrating time trying to find it.

The nickname also annoys the scientists because finding the Higgs boson would answer plenty of questions but leave plenty more. Highly physicist-sounding things like quantum chromodynamics, electroweak interaction with gravity and so on would remain unaffected by proof of the Higgs boson's presence. In other words, finding the Higgs boson will be something very very cool indeed, but it will not be the same as finding God.

Which means I'm not out of a job yet.

Ahem...

2011-12-12T23:44:00.000-06:00

To: Battleship director Peter Berg

Re: The cynicism about your upcoming board-game based movie being displayed by the "cinema intelligentsia"

I am not listed in anybody's Rolodex as "cinema intelligentsia," nor in many as intelligent in many other ways, either. So I am not being a cynical elitist when I say that basing a movie on a board game is a stupid idea.

I'm just being a plain old moviegoer.

Is There a There There?

2011-12-11T23:29:00.000-06:00

Despite their name "black holes" in space are not the absence of something.

They are collapsed stars so incredibly dense that not even light can escape their gravity (Random Joe Biden joke). Because any light or radiation they emit is captured in the gravity well of the collapsed star we can't actually see them, and we never will. We can only see the effects as matter or energy cross into that gravity well at a border called the "event horizon."

Astronomers working at an observatory in Hawaii -- a thought which makes me wish I had taken that so-called Mickey-Mouse astronomy course I had in college much more seriously -- have found evidence of two "supermassive" black holes in our neighborhood, so to speak. Our sun's mass equals .0000000001 percent of either of these two phenomena (Random Ron Paul's chances of winning presidential nomination joke).

Supermassive black holes are usually found at the centers of galaxies -- because there are stars near them which their gravity affects and we can see those effects. But a supermassive black hole outside of a galaxy center is tougher to detect, because over time its intense gravity has sucked everything nearby into itself (Random Newt Gingrich and GOP primary joke).

So are there other supermassive black holes relatively close by? Maybe even close enough that as our solar system moves through the galaxy, it might be seduced by their saucy gravitational pull and begin a slow, steady journey towards their event horizons and certain disaster (Random President Obama second term joke)?

Only time will tell.

When 0 = 25

2011-12-10T18:03:00.001-06:00

That would be at the local franchise of one of the nation's speedy haircut stores, which had a sign lit up in the window that said "No Wait" but which didn't seat me for my haircut for 25 minutes. It was understandable, given that I was the fourth person in line...waiting, even...for a haircut.

Infamy

2011-12-09T20:59:00.001-06:00

George "Machine Gun" Kelly was one of the first big hauls for J. Edgar Hoover's nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, brought in by veteran agent and former Texas Ranger Gus Jones. Kelly supposedly told agents who cornered him in Memphis, "Don't shoot, G-men!" and gave them the nickname that would help publicize them as well.

Kelly focused mostly on small-town banks until marrying Katherine Thorne, who raised his profile by convincing him to use a Thompson submachine gun in his robberies and aim for bigger stakes. Although Kelly was the one with the reputation as a ruthless criminal, apparently Katherine played a large role in raising that profile and pushing him to the bigger jobs.

In Infamous, Ace Atkins tells the story of the Kellys' last big job -- the kidnapping and ransom of Oklahoma City oilman Charles Urschel in 1933. Although they would net $200,000 for the crime, it placed them on Hoover's radar and ultimately led to their arrests. Kelly would die in prison in 1954 and Katherine would not be released until 1958, and several other participants in the crime drew life sentences as well, including Katherine's mother and stepfather who helped hold Urschel captive.

The story zips along with Atkins' usual skill -- this is the fourth fictionalized "true crime" story he's told in addition to a couple of his own series -- and if it drags in places it's because the schemes and manipulations and double crosses of the nefarious cast seem like they play on an infinite loop. Katherine works an angle to make sure she's OK if things go wrong; some other thugs try to cut themselves in on the take and plan to get hold of the ransom themselves; other participants in the crime make deals of their own with lawmen or the second group of lawbreakers and so on. None of these people have any loyalty to anyone but themselves and the mare's nest of schemes bogs down the forward motion of the story.

But it also highlights something that may or may not be apparent when we read crime fiction or watch crime stories -- a significant number of these people are losers. On the one hand that would seem obvious. The actual criminal masterminds didn't have nicknames and media profiles. Nobody knew who they were and thus they didn't do time like Kelly did. But because of the romanticizing nature of the media coverage, people like Kelly, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, John Dillinger and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow took on characteristics they probably didn't have or deserve. At best they were losers and bullies who felt that the world owed them something for nothing and used threats and violence to take that something from people who had actually earned it. At worst they were sociopaths who left bodies and ruined lives in their wakes.

Atkins, even though he fictionalizes the lives of George and Kathryn and other members of their underworld set, shows a much truer picture of what kind of people they were. Their apparently incurable greed, lack of self-discipline, addiction to adrenaline and power and flat-out stupidity meant that even though they cleared an amount that would be equal to nearly $3.5 million today they couldn't find a way to take the money and run out of the reach of the law or their own fellow crooks. They spent it on new cars, clothes, hotels -- basically, they acted like 8-year-olds given a thousand dollars and free run at a Toys "R" Us.

Showing the loser beneath the media spitshine isn't easy. Yes, Mario Puzo may have lionized his Corleone family in The Godfather but Al Pacino visibly sold his soul to obtain and keep power as Michael Corleone in the movie version of the story. Only it was the swagger and the style and the nicknames of the button men and the capos and such that people remembered. The Sopranos had much of the same issue: No matter how often Tony gave orders to harm or kill an enemy, he was frequently "lovable mafioso" when people wrote about the show.

Anyone who reads Infamous can't come away with that kind of picture of George and Katherine Kelly or the others involved. And in the end that may be one of the best things about Atkins' adaptation of this story.

War Criminal!

2011-12-08T23:39:00.000-06:00

The International Red Cross has apparently made sure that every prisoner of war across the world is properly fed and treated and every disaster victim cared for, because it has now decided to monitor war-themed video games to see if they conform to the Geneva Convention.

I always thought it would truly be a great day for world peace when the Red Cross did not have enough to do. I was wrong.

Here Now The News...

2011-12-07T16:52:00.001-06:00

An unnamed Islamic cleric living in Europe is supposed to have said that women should not handle certain vegetables or fruits, such as bananas or cucumbers, because the relatively phallic shape of said food items will make them think of sex. Carrots and zucchini are also on the banned list. Should women like to eat those foods, the items should be cut up into small pieces out of their sight -- preferably by a father or husband -- and then served.

Don't know if this is true or how widespread the belief is. It sounds outlandish enough to be a joke or at the very least the idea of a lone crackpot, but a group of scholars in Saudi Arabia presented an official report on how allowing women to drive would increase prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce, and eventually mean no more virgins in that country, so who can tell?

I guess we'll know if someone really said this and it's being taken seriously if we hear reports that the fresh fruit and produce sections of supermarkets in mostly Islamic countries are being overrun by hopeful-eyed Islamic husbands.

"I've Handled Jaywalkers Who Were Tougher Than You"

2011-12-07T15:29:00.001-06:00

Harry Morgan, an invaluable character actor who said the above line while portraying Officer Bill Gannon in Dragnet 1967 (the third version of Jack Webb's police drama), passed away today at 96. Gannon and his partner, Sgt. Joe Friday, were interrogating a suspect who began by giving them some attitude, probably thinking that the medium-sized Friday and even slighter Gannon were easily intimidated. He was, of course, incorrect.

Morgan was also well-known as Col. Sherman T. Potter, the commanding officer of the fictional 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M*A*S*H*) chronicled in the long-running TV show M*A*S*H*. As Col. Potter, Morgan had a number of memorable lines, most of which summed up his blunt, no-nonsense and unvarnished persona. I'll leave you with this one, spoken when the 4077th receives some welcome fresh fruit after a long time of only processed meals: "I haven't had fresh fruit in so long, my colon will think it's a stick-up."

Limited Visions

2011-12-07T10:17:00.001-06:00

I, along with quite a few other folks, have complained about the lack of creativity found in the moviemaking and TV show production areas these days. Generally, those complains center on recycled plots, uninspired and unnecessary remakes, endless trips to the same well for jokes, situations, characters and whatnot.

But this guy put together several collections of movie posters to show how you can judge significant features of a movie -- sometimes most of its plot -- by the movie poster itself. Different kinds of movies will have their own similar kinds of posters - and if you see certain images or themes in a poster, you can tell a lot about the movie even if you haven't seen it or even heard of it.

You might notice it's not just Hollywood that's caught up in the visual cliché game -- several of the posters featured are from international films but they seem to follow the same patterns.

Not to Worry

2011-12-06T23:08:00.001-06:00

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was concerned about the possible ego explosion if Newt Gingrich became the Republican presidential nominee and debated President Obama.

I am not nearly as concerned about the same possibility if Mr. Gingrich participates in a scheduled debate moderated by Donald Trump. Oh, the egos involved are just as massive, and if anything, Mr. Trump is even thinner-skinned than Mr. Gingrich. The potential for an explosion is just as great.

But in this case, we will be shielded from harm by whatever the hell that thing is that Mr. Trump has on his head.

Millions Lost in Crash?

2011-12-05T16:00:00.001-06:00

Not a stock market crash -- a 20-car smashup on a Japanese highway that involved eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini, in addition to damaging two oncoming Mercedes with flying debris. No one, fortunately, was seriously hurt.

But I know a gecko that's gonna be drinkin' pretty heavily for awhile...

Timing Is Still Everything

2011-12-04T20:39:00.001-06:00

Me to youth director when locking up the church, since his group tonight was solely our more rambunctious crowd: "So, did you get five minutes of learning into their little heads in the midst of the chaos?"

Youth director to me: "I got seven! And then one of them threw something."

God bless middle school teachers.

From the Rental Vault: Goemon

2011-12-03T09:31:00.000-06:00

The idea of the thief who robs from the rich and gives to the poor is not limited to Sherwood Forest. In Japan, the real-life character who takes on that folk-hero role is Ishikawa Goemon, the title character in Kiriya Kazuaki's 2009 release Goemon. The real-life Ishikawa was caught up in the events that led to the Battle of Sekigahara and the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and while Kiriya's movie uses many historical characters, it has as much to do with that real history as Braveheart does with the real William Wallace.

Which is of course no problem, because Goemon is an excellent story carried off by top performances wrapped up in a rip-roaring action movie. Ishikawa Goemon is a master thief who regularly robs from rich nobles to distribute the money to Japan's peasants. Those peasants groan under the constant warring of the nobles and can use all the help they can get, but when we first meet their benefactor he seems to work as much for his own amusement as he does for their good. Something he steals gets him more caught up in politics than he wants, ensnared in the plots of Mitsunari Ishida, his feudal lord Hideyoshi Totomi and Tokugawa Ieyesu. It brings him to the attention of Hideyoshi's loyal ninja assassin Saizō and Tokugawa's retainer Hattori Hanzo. As the story moves forward, we find that Goemon, Saizo and Hanzo have shared history and that Goemon himself has a more layered past than his wastrel thief persona suggests. He and others, including his assistant Sasuke Sarutobi, Saizō and Lady Chacha, niece of a slain warlord, will have to make painful choices as events unfold.

Kiriya has a lot of things to keep in the air and at times doesn't manage it as well as he might. He's also the cinematographer, and designs Goemon with the kind of stylized CGI look Zack Snyder used in 300. Most of the time that works as well, although certain scenes would have benefited from a subtler use of the technique. Given the folk-hero nature of the story, most of the fighting characters in the movie engage in superhuman feats of strength and endurance and that reinforces the mythical quality of the movie.

Most of the cast excels. Some have parts that are too small to matter and at least one actor -- Gori as Sasuke -- puts too much slapstick into a character that's going to have to carry a pretty heavy dramatic load. But Eguchi Yōsuke as Goemon brings to life a man who realizes that the transformation from merely appearing to care about people to actually caring about them will have a cost, and that he may not be the only one to bear it. As Saizō, Osawa Takao quietly provides the voice of conscience that prods Goemon into real action instead of gestures, and Ryōko Hirosue makes Chacha another pivot point as the characters must consider their actions as well as the consequences.

Both in terms of story and appearance Goemon doesn't bear much similarity with real life or actual Japanese history -- but in terms of portraying the kinds of choices people must often make on a smaller scale, choices about vengeance, violence, destiny and other weighty ideas -- it delivers quite a bit of real food for thought.

Era, Ending

2011-12-02T13:54:00.001-06:00

This mall will no longer have everything.

Warning! Warning!

2011-12-02T13:19:00.001-06:00

For a bunch of reasons, I hope former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is not the Republican nominee for president. One of those reasons is that, despite the many shortcomings he has that make him unsuited for the job, he is not so completely unqualified as to make me skip going to the polls on Election Day. I could justify bidding my ballot bye-bye if my choices were between, say, President Obama and Herman Cain, or between President Obama and Ron Paul. If any of those three men is in the White House in January 2013, ain't nobody gonna be able to blame me for it.

But unfortunately, Newt's not quite that bad. He's bad, alright, but voting is a responsibility and he's not bad enough to make me shirk it. So if he becomes the Republican nominee, I may be forced to vote for him, unless there is some third-party choice, and I don't think anyone who put up with him in the mid-90s wants to vote for Newt Gingrich.

The main reason, though, is the prospect of the presidential debates that we would see. I know some conservative folks are salivating at the prospect of Gingrich, verbally adept and quite good at the ol' rhetorical thrust-and-parry hack-and-slash, debating the President, who does very well with prepared remarks but can get a little flustered when trying to think and speak on his feet. Not I.

What worries me is the presence of two of the modern American political scene's most massive, over-inflated egos and thinnest skins in the same room with each other. On the one hand, we have a man who gave the Queen of England -- a woman whose living memory contains listening to none other than Winston Churchill rally his nation when it stood alone against the Nazi might -- an iPod with his own speeches on it and who actually said of his view of one of his own achievements, "I try not to pat myself on the back too much." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might disagree about the President's claims.

And on the other hand, we have a guy who really believes that the news cycle and polling flavor of the month culture it's created translates into an actual chance that he will be the nominee, and who said out loud in front of microphones that his being required to exit Air Force One by a rear ramp contributed to the 1995 government shutdown.

Putting those two forces in a room together is madness -- we have no way of knowing what might happen if they somehow interact wrongly. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen are all unspectacular elements, but combined in the correct amounts they make highly unstable nitroglycerine.

And given that the debate will be extensively covered by the media, there is the likelihood of the presence of many somewhat smaller but still dangerously expanded egos that could also be set off if the Obama-Gingrich meeting goes wrong. We could witness a disaster of biblical proportions.

Origin Stories

2011-12-01T09:46:00.000-06:00

Faithful Place is the third novel Tana French has written using a cast of characters working for the Dublin, Ireland police department. Francis "Frank" Mackey, the commander of the department's undercover unit who played a small role in an earlier book, takes the lead role in this one.

More than 20 years ago, Frank planned to run away to England with his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, so the couple could escape both his dysfunctional, abusive family and Rosie's family's hatred for Frank. But the night they were to leave, Rosie never showed and hasn't been seen since. In the meantime, Frank joined the Guards, or police, married and divorced and is a weekend dad to his daughter Holly. He has little contact with his family but returns to the old neighborhood when a suitcase that may have belonged to Rosie was found. Distrusted by the police for his closeness to the investigation and a habit of acting on his own, and distrusted by the old neighborhood because he's a detective, Frank has to exhume more old secrets than he'd like in order to learn what happened to Rosie. What impact that has on him, his daughter and his relationship to his family isn't clear, but it's unlikely to be good.

French, an American citizen who now lives in Dublin, has an excellent ear for the speech of her adopted land and gives Faithful Place a much better layer of local color than a few dropped "Faith and begorra" exclamations here and there. She has a good sense of place and a deft ability to communicate it. What she doesn't have is a mystery that can keep its secrets past the 100-page mark or a reason to stick with it once that secret is out. The cast of present-day characters is limited and the cast in the flashback sequences even more so, leaving just a few likely suspects to start with. Since French isn't writing a Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes mystery, telegraphing her guilty party doesn't have to be a fatal flaw. We know where the roller coaster ends up but the ride can still thrill. In this case, though, it doesn't. Faithful Place spends a lot of time telling us where Frank came from and what made him who he is, but it never tells us why we should care. Only people who've read the earlier books have met him before and even in them he's not that important. The destination's obvious, the ride is nothing special and the pretty paint of French's stylishly crafted dialogue only distracts for so long.
-----

When we first met Jack Reacher in 1997's The Killing Floor, he was trying to find out what happened to his brother Joe. He was already a drifter, setting up the pattern that author Lee Child would follow through most of the rest of the series. But before that, Reacher was a decorated military policeman, and series fans have wondered what exactly set our protagonist off on his wanderings. He's told people he left the Army when it was downsized in the late 1990s and that he wanders because he'd spent most of his life as a military brat and then as an officer himself doing just that. But in The Affair, Child uncovers the story behind those choices.

Reacher is sent undercover to an isolated Mississippi Army base as an unofficial backup to the official investigation of a young woman's death. The county sheriff -- the fortunately attractive female county sheriff -- enlists Reacher to ask questions about the death that the Army doesn't want asked, let alone answered. Reacher may not yet be the wanderer he will become, but he likes lies, stonewalling and injustice no more now than he will later. How will he match his toughness and quick fists against powerful enemies who fight in the halls of power at the Pentagon and Capitol?

In a lot of ways The Affair is more fun than many of the more recent Reacher books. Some have been clunkers and some quite good, but they've been near uniformly bleak, grim and almost glum. The Reacher of The Affair deals with the world with a healthy slice of wry; whether because Child felt the younger version would be less jaded or because he rediscovered some of his own lighter tone it doesn't matter because it's a welcome change.

The lighter tone helps cover up some missteps; Child goes a little too far in using Reacher's "undercover" drifter status to foreshadow his upcoming drifter status more than once. He also overwrites his plot -- the appearance of a civilian paramilitary crew complicates things without much benefit to the story. But still, The Affair shows that unpacking the origin of a known character with a history is usually a lot more successful than unpacking the origin of a previously little-known walk-on part.

Who's Happy Now?

2011-11-30T10:35:00.001-06:00

Because San Franciscan parents were unable to tell their children, "No, you can't have McDonald's because it's unhealthy, and I don't care what toy they put in the thing," the city of San Francisco passed a law that said restaurant meals with free toy giveaways had to meet certain healthy-food standards. Since McDonald's Happy Meals don't meet the standards, the problem is solved and parents don't have to do the hard work of parenting, right?

Nope -- the law was passed last year and will go into effect Thursday, which means the corporate sneakies hiding behind Ronald's wig had a little while to figure out a workaround. McDonald's will no longer give away the Happy Meal toys -- they will now charge you ten cents for them, with that ten cents going towards building a Ronald McDonald House. Sounds like a winner, right? Before, you could just buy the toy for the price of a Happy Meal, but now you can get one for a dime!

The problem is that the law prohibits selling the toys separately as well as giving them away with a Happy Meal. And in order to comply with the law, McDonald's can't sell you the Happy Meal toy unless you buy the Happy Meal. Once you buy the Happy Meal you can throw it away if you like, but if you're the kind of jelly-spined person who needs the city of San Francisco to tell your kids no because you can't, you're still going to have to buy a Happy Meal in order to get junior the toy that he is apparently able to force you into buying through his mysterious power to cloud men's minds or well-honed MMA submission skills. Meaning junior gets his toy, McDonald's gets its profits, and you get a wallet that's a couple of bucks lighter.

Not to mention the justifiable derision of people who live in most other cities.

(H/T Reason.com)

Seasons Don't Fear the Reaper...

2011-11-29T10:22:00.001-06:00

Scientists create super flu virus in lab.

Walkin' Dude reported to be verrrry interested.

Gutless?

2011-11-28T23:01:00.001-06:00

Whether the difference is audible to the average listener or not, musicians claim that classical music played on instruments with metal strings doesn't sound like the same music played on strings made of the traditional beef gut.

And since metal strings came into use after some of the greatest composers lived and worked, the only way to play their music the way they meant it to be heard is to use period instruments strung with the gut strings. This has become a problem as string makers in the Europe have run into regulations regarding the use of beef products -- regulations which are designed to protect people from contracting the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. In people, the disease is called "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJd)," an unfortunate coincidence for people named Jacob Kreutzfeldt. It has the same effect of degenerating brain tissue leading to death.

Cows get BSE when they eat pieces of cows that have had the disease, something they only do when cattle remains are ground up as a part of the artificial feed given on some ranches and dairy operations. It specifically lingers in the brain, spinal column and digestive tract of the diseased animals, and that leads us to the problem that musical stringmakers have to face. Beef gut, being a part of the aforementioned digestive tract, can hold the BSE organisms in it. Those organisms can infect humans, causing the nvCJd. Because outbreaks of both diseases have been reported in different countries in Europe, strict regulations govern the use of potentially infected cattle products. Up until recently, stringmakers were given special exceptions from the rule, partly because of a couple of factors we'll look at in a minute. But recently those exceptions have begun to lapse and several companies are either switching to synthetic string material or are considering it.

Stringmakers say the danger to people is slight -- although even affected meat cooked well-done may not be entirely free of BSE organisms, the stringmaking process is a lot more than just cooking. Part of the string creation involved the beef gut material being bleached as well as varnished, chemicals which will kill most disease germs and no few non-disease full-size creatures. In order to risk exposure similar to the risk people face when consuming untested or untreated cattle, a person would have to eat several "metres" of string, the story says. A "metre" is a little more than a yard.

Yes, you read correctly: In order to risk true exposure to the BSE disease organism, you would have to eat your instrument strings. And not just your instrument strings, but probably strings on a couple of other instruments around you -- more if you are a violinist, fewer if you're a bassist and you may be able to pull it off by your lonesome if you play the harp.

I'm all for reducing the risk of disease and I've got no special interest in whether I hear Handel the way my many-times great grandparents heard Handel. But it seems to me that if a disease vector depends on chewing up and swallowing yards of bleached, varnished beef gut, most folks are at low risk of exposure. And those that go ahead and test out that theory may have had a few holes in their heads to start with.

How Not to Buy

2011-11-27T16:04:00.001-06:00

A fellow named Lee Eisenberg wrote a book called Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What, and in it he outlines some of the "tricks" that merchants use in order to prompt us to buy things we might otherwise not, or to buy more things than the one or two we had in mind starting out on our shopping trip.

The website Big Think posted some ideas from Eisenberg's book in an article titled "How to Resist the Irresistible: A Buyer's Guide to Shopping Tricks." They posted it on November 27th, a couple of days after many Americans might have found it a useful read while they waited in line for stores to open at midnight on the so-called "Black Friday." But it still might help the holiday season shopper think twice before spending.

The key to most of the ideas in the article and in Eisenberg's book is that retailers have spent considerable time, money and effort to try to learn how people's minds work so they can tailor their tactics to maximize sales. This isn't illegal or underhanded even if it might seem a little sneaky at times.

A simple counter-tactic might be to know what you want to buy and what you have to spend, compare prices for the product if it's available in different locations and then spend what you have budgeted for. We're most vulnerable to over-shopping or over-spending when we're trying to work an angle in our purchases. We cross over from trying to make sure we get a fair value for our money into the idea that we're somehow putting one over on someone -- whether it's the store or the manufacturer -- and we may feel cheated when we find out that the retailer or the maker still made plenty of money on our purchase that was supposed to be to our advantage. It may have been to our advantage anyway, but sometimes we don't appreciate that. Folks looking to con others often rely on a version of this principle to snare people into their schemes. The line is "You can't cheat an honest man," meaning their ability to fleece someone depends on that someone's desire to get something for nothing, or at least for less than what seems like fair market value.

It's always good to remember that low prices and good products are the means to an end, rather than the only end in themselves. Low prices and good products get us to give money to a retailer or supplier, and that's their main goal. They give us a good product because they want us to come back and spend more of our money and good products make us more likely to do that than do bad products. Sure, many take pride in their work and want to do their best, but they also recognize how that helps the bottom line.

Eisenberg's book, by the way, lists at Barnes and Noble for $26 and at Amazon.com for $19.76. But you can buy a bargain edition at Amazon for $10.40, and a used copy also from Amazon starting at $5.97 (price plus shipping). Should you decide you don't need it, well, that's free.

Creeping Frozen Death!

2011-11-26T21:46:00.001-06:00

"Icicle of death" is a phrase that might seem to belong to one of the many idiotic contrived death scenes from the anencephalic Final Destination movies, but it's actually a nickname scientists give to a "brinicle," or frozen brine icicle that forms in certain special conditions. A BBC crew recently filmed one being formed, which you can read about here.

Seawater contains dissolved mineral salts, which is why we refer to it as "salty." It's also sometimes called "brine." Because many of these chemicals don't freeze at the same temperature of the water around them, the sea ice will be more like a sponge than a solid sheet, with tiny channels through which the brine flows.

The air above the water may be very cold, but water itself can only get down to around 32º Fahrenheit (0º Celsius) before it becomes ice and stops cooling. That temperature may vary a little depending on what other chemicals are in the water but not much. Since the water is relatively "hot" compared to the air, its heat will act like other heat and rise, carrying salty water through the small channels in the spongy ice. At the surface, the cold air freezes it -- but it's heavier than the water it's in so it sinks back down towards the sea floor. And it's super-cooled compared to the less salty seawater through which is sinks, so it freezes that seawater when the two come in contact, and that makes the plume or "brinicle (brine icicle)" formation descend from the ice. It continues to channel freezing water through the brinicle tube, which then freezes in whatever direction it flows along the sea floor.

The video at the link shows the ice overcoming starfish and sea urchins, which don't move fast enough to get out of the way. They are, apparently, too stupid to come in out of the freezing rain, and we're back to the Final Destination movies again, it seems.

Sir Real

2011-11-25T14:11:00.001-06:00

While visiting the folks, we watched some episodes from their DVD collection of The Dean Martin Show, a variety-comedy series that ran from 1965 to 1974. This particular edition seemed to have been hamstrung by estate licensing, as it didn't feature some of the top-name guests Martin often drew, like John Wayne, Frank Sinatra and so on.

It did, however, feature a performance by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, the semi-psychedelic outfit with whom The Gambler made his first mark on the charts. After they played, Dean joined them to sing Hank Williams' "Hey Good Lookin'" in a tag-team style that had them attempting to woo First Edition singer Mary Arnold.

Dean Martin and Kenny Rogers singing Hank Williams -- if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I might not have believed that turkey to have been completely cooked.

Thanks and Blessing

2011-11-24T13:13:00.001-06:00

"Some hae meat and canna eat, and some wad eat that want it.
But we hae meat, and we can eat. Sae let the Lord be thankit."
~Robert Burns

As We Approach This Solemn and Wonderful Day...

2011-11-23T19:37:00.001-06:00

Let us remember that, while turkeys can taste good baked, broiled, fried, roasted, sliced, sandwiched, mustarded and mayoed...

While they can provide a common meal around which family members will gather, and can provide tryptophan in sufficient amounts to make the afternoon seem like one continuing football game instead of three or four separate ones...

While they can provide us with endless adolescent amusement because a part of their body is named "wattle..."

While they can offer a proper Cimmerian air to any event with their large, barbarian-appetite sized drumsticks...

There is still one thing they cannot do:

Earth Turns, Water Is Wet, Homeowners' Association Loses

2011-11-22T15:09:00.001-06:00

The retired NYPD officer who wanted to fly a flag with the name of people who died in the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City has been told he can do so, as his homeowners' association reversed their earlier decision to fine him.

I hope you were sitting down when you read that. My apologies for not warning you first.

From the Rental Vault: The Killer Elite

2011-11-21T10:44:00.000-06:00

Before there was Killer Elite with Jason Statham, Clive Owen, and a scene-chewing ham that used to be Robert DeNiro, there was a movie with a definite article: The Killer Elite, directed by Sam Peckinpah and reuniting James Caan and Robert Duvall three years after their essential roles in The Godfather. The two similarly-titled movies don't share plots and were adapted from two different novels.

Caan and Duvall are Mike Locken and George Hansen, two specialists who work for a private company that does contract work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are assigned to guard a valuable defector, but something goes wrong and Locken is left crippled, put on the shelf by his superiors. When a kill squad threatens an Asian diplomat, the company recalls Locken to safeguard him, and he recruits two outsiders (Burt Young and Bo Hopkins) to help him.

The movie is one of Peckinpah's least known, coming at the tail end of his best work as his health and odd creative choices (a movie based on the C.W. McCall novelty CB-trucker song "Convoy?") began to move him from the "must see" to the "we'll see" category. It revisits one of his standard themes of men who have lived by a code trying to deal with a world that no longer respects that code. Locken and Hansen find themselves among people whose only loyalty is to themselves and the offered paychecks and they handle this disorientation in different ways. Locken seems to want to try to keep some semblance of what used to be, but his friend Mac (Young) argues against it.

Peckinpah seems to have little control over his story, as it bounces around between buddy comedy bits, bitterly cynical observations on the world, inspirational rehabilitation sequences and noble soliloquy from the Asian diplomat Yuen Chung (the always-welcome Mako). But it makes all these caroms without anything really invested in any of them, giving the impression of several skits or short scenes related only by the appearance of the same characters in each. Caan and Duvall were at their peak when the movie was made in 1975, but unfortunately Peckinpah was not. Neither the story nor the movie take full advantage of the star power at their command and so The Killer Elite winds up in-between: More than an interesting footnote, but much, much less than a top-flight main feature.

Oh, For Pete's Sake...

2011-11-20T23:48:00.001-06:00

I, like many people, have often resorted to making jokes about how few clues politicians seem to possess. And sometimes I only wish they were jokes. But politicians ain't got nothin' on homeowners' associations, who never seem to pick up on the idea that asking someone to remove a powerful symbol like the flag will never turn out well for them.

A couple of years ago, it was a Virginia group telling a 90-year-old Congressional Medal of Honor winner he couldn't have a free-standing flagpole in his front yard. Now a similar association in Coral Springs, FL, is arguing against the display of a special commemorative flag featuring the names of the 9/11 victims written in blue and red and organized in striped patterns like an American flag. Owned by a retired New York City Police officer. Who ran into World Trade Center Tower 1 and pulled people to safety before it collapsed. Who has cancer.

The association's guides are clear -- only one flag displayed per house, and the former NYPD officer already flies an American flag. So he is technically outside the association rules, and the property management company president said there had been complaints. But even if you're the kind of person who just can't live if someone else is "getting away with" something you're not, surely, surely a neuron or two will fire in your head and tell you that no matter what happens in this fight, you'll lose. Even if you win, you lose, because then you become the city that won't let a retired NYPD hero battling cancer fly a banner with the names of people he didn't get to save, including members of his own department.

Just the thought of that kind of publicity sends Chamber of Commerce directors straight to the liquor cabinet. Realtors listing property in that area are trying to get as many deals closed as possible, because however tight the market is now, it's going to get worse in a neighborhood that told a retired NYPD hero battling cancer he couldn't fly his commemorative banner. No matter how many people might like the idea of living next to him, who wants to live next to cowards who hide behind property managers and homeowners' associations instead of doing a retired NYPD hero battling cancer the courtesy of speaking to him directly.

Anybody care to bet this ends well for the homeowners' association? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

From the Rental Vault: Yellow Sky

2011-11-19T21:14:00.001-06:00

A scruffy band of outlaws rob a bank in a town on the edge of a wasteland, and in fleeing from lawmen, they head out across the barren salt flats. Nearly dead from thirst, they stumble onto a ghost town inhabited only by an old prospector and his granddaughter. They initially intend to stay long enough to let their horses rest before crossing the last short stretch of the flats to the nearest occupied town, but begin to wonder what brought the prospector and his granddaughter to the desolate area. The answer will offer considerable complications for their plans.

One of the advantages that later Westerns have over some of their mid-century counterparts is the use of color -- the blue sky, green rolling hills, snow-capped mountains and so on. But black-and-white movies like Yellow Sky can use their grayscales just as effectively, and Yellow Sky cinematographer Joseph MacDonald skillfully uses the unmatched combination of light and shadow B&W movies can offer to make you not miss the color at all. Three-time Oscar nominee William Wellman directs his tightly-wound story in the middle of a desolate ghost town (a wrecked Tom Mix-era set) and the even more desolate Death Valley.

And his top-level cast keeps this loose adaptation of The Tempest clicking along nicely. Gregory Peck plays the outlaw leader Stretch, who seems to have taken to robbing banks after the end of the Civil War because he doesn't have much desire to do anything else. Stretch will have to confront the idea that he can lay claim to nobility of character while making a living stealing from others. The always enjoyable Richard Widmark brings his trademark charming psychopath to life as the band's lieutenant, Dude. The rest of the outlaws, including a ridiculously young-looking Harry Morgan, are more or less stock characters, but they fit into their parts well. Anne Baxter, who at the ripe old age of 25 already had 20 movies and a Best Supporting Actress win for The Razor's Edge under her gunbelt, makes the granddaughter "Mike" a much richer and deeper character than The Girl often is in a lot of Westerns. She understates it just about perfectly, apparently saving up all of her hamminess for her work in The Ten Commandments seven years later.

Although their spread had been slowed by World War II, color movies were becoming common by 1948, the year Yellow Sky was released. But many directors preferred black and white moviemaking, and not simply because it cost less -- some felt that the limitations imposed by the lack of color pushed them into making creative choices that improved their movies. Yellow Sky is a prime example of a movie that thrived within the limited color scheme and put quite a few movies with more expansive palettes to shame.

The More Things Change?

2011-11-18T22:48:00.001-06:00

Border's Books and Music is gone, and other national chains may be teetering as well. People buy fewer physical books in favor of using their preferred e-reader. So the bookstore is dead, right, to be followed after a short illness by the public library?

Well, maybe not. As this author notes, even though we're still limited by the widespread practice of publishing paper books, online book retail is a mess. A changeover to primarily e-books may only heighten the problem because of something as simple as not having any idea what's worth buying.

Many books available through online retailers may only have a publisher's blurb to let us know what the book is like -- and those are not necessarily objective. A move to self-published e-books, though, may snuff out even those dim lanterns and leave a book buyer with next to no way to know anything about a potential purchase. The reviews posted at the sites are rarely good guides and your faithful Friar can only evaluate so many lightweight airport novels, let alone try to offer insight into nonfiction works in all of the many fields that interest you. Should I ever have actual readers, I'm hosed.

The solution may be a figure from the past, from the days pre-BordersBarnesWaldenBooks-A-MillionAmazon: The bookseller. Not, as the story notes, the part-time clerk making money during school, but the bookseller who studies what's being sold, knows something about the different offerings on her shelves and can recommend what might match a customer's desires. A combination of GPS and e-reader devices would mean that the bookseller could even get credit for a sale made on an e-book, opening up the possibility of a new revenue stream, even if it's not all that much per book. Other than the part about revenue, the same setup can work with a knowledgeable librarian.

The key, according to the idea that's presented in the story, is that there will be a place for a certain kind of brick-and-mortar bookstore even for folks who aren't old-fashioned curmudgeons who think that there is value in preserving ideas in a format not at the mercy of battery life, screen quality or seller's whim. Not that I know anyone like that.

TV Keeps Getting Smarter

2011-11-17T23:49:00.001-06:00

But starting from zero means there's a long way to go. Either way, please pardon my unseemly happiness at the news that Joy Behar's talk show on the Headline News Network will end next month.

The item confirming the cancellation contained this pithy quote from the HLN general manager: "Joy and her team produced over 500 episodes of a show that featured news-making interviews, great conversation and plenty of humor."

HLN probably should have aired some of those, then.

Gripe, Gripe, Grumble, Grumble

2011-11-17T11:03:00.001-06:00

I own a pre-paid cell phone that I will use in emergencies, such as being in my truck and it stops running someplace. It is, other than that, a royal pain. Four people have the number, but I have to clear about five wrong number missed calls and twenty-plus spam messages off it per week.

So I was predisposed to think poorly of the behavior of the gentleman dining a couple of tables away from me last week. He was at lunch with his wife, and three times during the 20 minutes we were in proximity to each other his phone went off.

The first problem was the ring tone. It was the startup of a jet engine, set at a volume audible across the restaurant. I'm sure that sounded like a neat idea when he thought of it -- "Hey, a jet engine ring tone! Cool!" But speaking as someone who was near it, I have to strongly disagree. If my phone rings loud enough to disrupt your conversation, I am being rude to you.

The other problem didn't affect me, but I wonder at what point we decided that it was OK to interrupt time spent with someone across a table from us to talk with someone else on the phone? As I mentioned, the phone rang three times during the couple's meal, meaning that three times their interaction was placed on hold to address other matters. The gentleman's voice carried well enough that I could tell his side of the conversation didn't sound like he was directing life-saving efforts that required his immediate attention. Despite my online persona, I'm actually a pretty laid-back guy...but I would have finished my meal and said "We're done" if my companion or conversationalist answered three cell-phone calls during our time.

I appreciate the benefits of cell phones and I'm amazed at how technology has enabled us to maintain and develop connections across great distances. But when we make our face-to-face interactions pay for them we can send a message to the people we're actually around all the time, one that says their importance isn't as great as that we attach to the people on the other end of the phone.

You Get What You Pay For

2011-11-16T22:40:00.001-06:00

I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I'll be doing some sermons on why (and maybe a little bit of how, although I'm not sure how to go about that) adjusting the pace of our lives to include significant slowdown spaces matters.

Common sense suggests that we observe better when we pay attention, but a lot of modern "multi-tasking" practice works against that. Come now some studies that suggest common sense is closer to the mark. We are far more likely to be aware of something when we pay attention to it, and attention itself is a limited resource. We can't pay attention to very many things at once. This information should add some interesting dimension to the sermons, at least as background.

Whether or not I can get people to pay attention to the sermon, of course, is an entirely different question.

Anybody Missing a Gas Giant?

2011-11-15T21:38:00.001-06:00

Now, you might think the post title is a Barney Frank joke, and I admit it would be worth a snicker even if it's a little on the cheap side. Of course, I just made the joke anyway, so apparently I'm a little cheap. Who knew?

Anyway, the post is actually about a theory an astronomer in Texas has about the planets of the solar system. Our sun has four interior rocky planets -- Mercury, Venus, li'l ol' us and Mars -- and four gas giants -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- and one demoted mini-planet -- Pluto. But David Nesvorny from the Southwest Research Institute suspects there may have been a fifth gas giant planet at one time.

Dr. Nesvorny studied the Kuiper Belt, an area of asteroids outside the orbit of Neptune. He put that data into computer models and projected the orbits of the various planets back into the early history of the solar system. About 600 million years after it came into being, some kind of orbital click-clackery occurred and some of the planets apparently migrated from their slots into the ones they have now. Dr. Nesvorny's problem is that when he looks at what used to be and what currently is, he finds out he can't get there from here.

The problem is Jupiter, which could not have moved slowly from its earlier position to its current one without affecting the orbits of the inner planets, including us. We might have smacked into one of our neighbors and at the very least, our orbit would not have been as steady as it is now, meaning there probably wouldn't be an us to wonder about this. But if Jupiter had moved quickly from one position to another, it would have spared us but probably knocked Uranus or Neptune out of the solar system, so clearly Dr. Nesvorny could not choose the cup in front of him...er, the swift-Jupiter model.

Ah, but he could, if there had been a fifth gas giant planet similar in size to Uranus or Neptune. Then Jupiter could spring from there to here and wreak its havoc on an outer planet which we wouldn't see because it would be gone.

So far, there's not much empirical evidence to support Dr. Nevsorny's idea, just his mathematical models and projections. Ironically, Neptune was found based on mathematical models and measurements of Uranus' orbit, but it had the advantage of being someplace it could be found. Our possible evictee enjoys no such privilege, meaning it remains just a theory for now.

Reload? Revolve? Regurgitate.

2011-11-14T15:51:00.001-06:00

Seen at the gym on Sunday afternoon, the two sequels to the 1999 hit movie, The Matrix. The second movie of the trilogy is The Matrix Reloaded and the third is The Matrix Revolutions. The following will be a bit spoilery so if you've never seen these movies and want to watch them sometime, skip it.

Has there ever been a trilogy in which the later movies have fallen so far short of the level set by the first? I didn't catch either of these in the theater and this may have been the first time I saw the first half-hour or so of Reloaded, but great gosh and gee whillikers are these two movies ever bad. Unhook them from the first blockbuster and you have some stuff that straight-to-DVD schlock-fests laugh at and take lunch money away from. Connect it to original and you have one of the most bewildering missteps I think I've ever seen in 40-some years of moviegoing.

The original Matrix movie married a familiar story, some surprisingly serious philosophy, good old-fashioned karate-choppin' action and beyond-the-cutting edge special effects to make it a box-office smash. The uber-cool style and unexpected braininess covered over quite a few logical gaps -- like why the machines didn't tap geothermal power like the human beings in Zion did, or why the machines decided to pick human beings that had already tried to kill them as the creatures to make into batteries instead of something a lot dumber or...you get the point. It ends with Keanu Reeves character Neo telling the machines that he knows their game and he's not going to play anymore. Moreover, he's going to start telling other people what he knows and the whole Matrix program will fall. No sequel required. Fine popcorn movie that also tickles your thinkin' bone.

But it made a mint, so the creators cranked up a couple of sequels without bothering to include a story worth a darn. Except for the highly entertaining highway chase scene in Reloaded and the quiet grace moment where Trinity sees the sun in Revolutions, the sequels are either too talky, too repetitive, too murky, too convoluted, too dumb, too mystical, too goofy...again, you get the point. From the weird rave scene and ridiculous presence of Cornel West and cloned fight scenes -- by which I mean that the scenes repeat each other, not that Reeves fights clones, although I guess he does -- of Reloaded to the big dumb CGI battle and hive of new-and-unnecessary characters and Neo's powers suddenly working outside the Matrix in Revolutions, the second and third movies of the Matrix trilogy are a textbook case for using time travel technology to wipe them out of existence.

In the unofficial competition of "which moviemakers most destroyed their own legacy," the Wachowski brothers and their less-than-pointless sequels edge out George Lucas and his loud, dull "prequel" trilogy to Star Wars -- if only because by the time he released the prequels people were already beginning to suspect Lucas was a hack, and until Reloaded spilled out into the theaters nobody dreamed the Wachowskis only had one good movie in them.

Right On Time

2011-11-13T19:56:00.001-06:00

A hundred years ago today, John Jordan O'Neil arrived in the world in the tiny town of Carrabelle, Florida, and that world is the better for it.

"Buck" O'Neil played all or part of a dozen seasons on the Negro Leagues' Kansas City Monarchs baseball team, and the post title is taken from his 1997 autobiography, I Was Right On Time. It came from the response he developed to the many people who lamented to him that, living as he did in baseball's shameful era of segregation, he didn't get to play against the best players in baseball and he was too old to benefit from the integration begun by Jackie Robinson. O'Neil, perhaps reminding those folks that he played with or against Josh Gibson, "Cool Papa" Bell, Satchel Paige, "Double Duty" Radcliffe and such, would say, "Who's to say I didn't play with the best?" And of his best playing years predating Robinson, he would say he wasn't too early at all -- he was "right on time" for the life he lived and what he got to do.

By all accounts a great man with a truly gentle spirit, O'Neil spent several years scouting for the Chicago Cubs and in 1988 moved to the Kansas City Royals. Though he was instrumental in creating the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and in securing recognition for many of the NL's great but overlooked players, a stupefyingly short-sighted group of mouth-breathers did not vote him into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. O'Neil's stats were by no means Hall-of-Fame worthy, but the man who did more to raise the profile and bring appreciation to some of baseball's greatest players than he did has not been born. O'Neil, of course, was far more gracious than I have just been, saying no cross or sad word about what must have been a keen disappointment until his death later that year.

I'll close with the best line of Kansas City musician Bob Walkenhorst's tribute song from the above video: "Giving out love, instead of hate/I want to play on Buck's baseball team." Indeed I do, to follow in his steps and cross barriers the way he crossed color lines, with his heart instead of his fists. Happy birthday, Buck!

ETA: Walkenhorst helped members of a first-grade class in a Kansas City school write the song after they spent some time studying O'Neil's life and work. More information about that and about the book the children produced can be found here.

From the Rental Vault: The Comancheros

2011-11-12T09:46:00.000-06:00

In all but a couple of movies he made after 1955 or so, John Wayne was the center around which the story and characters coalesced. His real-life persona took over so much of his image that most of the change in a movie had to go on around him -- other characters could develop and grow but most of the time he didn't. In fact, movie plots sometimes had to be re-written in order to give Wayne's role the center that his audience expected. The Comancheros is one of those movies.

Wayne plays Jake Cutter, a Texas Ranger during the later days of the Republic of Texas. He's been sent to apprehend Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman), a gambler wanted because he dueled and defeated the son of a vengeful judge. Paul Wellman's 1952 novel used Regret as the lead character, and in fact Whitman is onscreen driving the action for awhile before Wayne's Cutter shows up. Regret escapes but is later re-apprehended when Wayne encounters him during an unrelated investigation into gun smuggling. The pair find themselves allies in the fight against Comanche raiders, their Latino allies the comancheros and the smugglers, led by Nehemiah Persoff's Graile. Their one chance is the connection Regret has with Graile's daughter Pilar (Ina Balin), but the hatred of Graile's lieutenant Amelung (Michael Ansara) may prove problematic.

Many of Wayne's later "Wayne-centric" movies work out quite well when the movie itself gives the other characters room to work, but The Comancheros really doesn't do that as well as it should. Whitman's Regret is a likable rogue but loses most of his color once he has to play off Wayne's Cutter. Lee Marvin is mostly wasted in a throwaway role early in the movie.

Nor does The Comancheros have a strong enough story to rank with the best of Wayne's best work once he'd hit icon status; important plot points early in the movie get dismissed when it's convenient to do so. Cutter talks about the importance of the oath he took to uphold the law when he tells Regret he's still going to take him in even after the gambler fights at his side during an attack but that importance is apparently gone once several Rangers decide to break it by false testimony on Regret's behalf.

The Comancheros has a great look and it really only lags when it has to stop for some exposition. Director Michael Curtiz knew his way around action movies and high-quality pictures -- he directed The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk as well as Casablanca -- and he had a reputation for keeping the storytelling pedal pressed to the floor. Curtiz was too ill to finish The Comancheros and Wayne finished for him, but without a noticeable dropoff. The movie's main problems were its makeshift story and its unwillingness to let its lesser stars shine as brightly as the center. The combination doesn't make a bad movie, but it leaves The Comancheros firmly in the middle of the pack of Wayne's icon-era work and well below his best.

A Remarkable Day

2011-11-11T09:58:00.001-06:00

Today is Veteran's Day in the United States, where we remember and honor those who have served in our nation's armed forces in wartime and peacetime, those who made it home and those who didn't.

Today is also "11-11-11," the next-to-last "triple day" we will have this century. Next year's December 12 will be the last until January 1, 2101.

So if you can read this, thank a teacher. If you know that 111111 in binary is 63 in decimal, thank a math teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a veteran.

And if you can't hear this read out loud, thank Nigel Tufnel.

Compare and Contrast

2011-11-10T21:03:00.001-06:00

At the gym, on television No. 1: A few minutes of the interview ABC News will air next week with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, injured in a shooting in January, and her husband astronaut Mark Kelly. Though shot in the head at nearly point-blank range, Giffords has steadily worked to regain mobility, communication skills and strength. Her husband retired as an astronaut following his space shuttle flight in order to help her.

On television No. 2: That lacquered sack of crap Al Sharpton moralizing about the many shortcomings of Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno. Paterno failed to use his position and stature to prevent horrible wrongs when he could have done so, but Sharpton -- who has never apologized for claiming prosecutor Steven Pagones was one of the men who assaulted Tawana Brawley and who refused to pay the verdict which held he had slandered Pagones with his false accusation, nor for inflaming tensions in the Crown Heights riot instead of working for peaceful outcomes -- is most definitely not the man to sit in judgment of him. Compared with the strength of character shown by Giffords, never has the morally miniscule Sharpton seemed so small.

What's All This, Then?

2011-11-08T23:48:00.001-06:00

Scientists in Hawaii (!) recently photographed a star with spiral arms through the Subaru telescope (no telling what we'll see when the Volkswagen or Lexus telescopes become operational, snicker snicker).

This is weird because stars are usually orbited by one of three things: planets, like our sun; a big disk-shaped cloud of gas that will one day turn into planets; or nothing. Although some images of stars before have shown different clumps and thicknesses in those dust disks, this is the clearest image yet of one of them that isn't just a diffused field of dust.

The astronomers who photographed the star, SAO 206462, say the spiral arms inside the disc may mean that it is much farther along in its process of planet formation. The current main theory for how planets form is that when the massive center of one of those dust disks kindles into a star and begins shining, the rest of the disk will eventually coalesce into one or more planets. The gravity and radiation of the star help eddies and swirls form in the cloud, and as more and more particles of dust group up in them, their gravitational pull on nearby dust increases. Eventually they form small rocky planets like Earth or large gas giants like Jupiter. The thought is that the spirals might be one of the steps along the way from dust cloud to planet.

Although SAO 206462 is only four hundred light-years away and so relatively close by in interstellar distances, the process of planetary formation takes billions of years, so it's not likely we'll see the outcome even though we're just around the corner from it.

Still plenty cool, though.

Brain Re-Boot?

2011-11-07T11:18:00.001-06:00

Scientists in Israel have developed a way to implant a computer chip in a rat's brain that helps it learn things. While the market for rat-cyborgs is probably pretty limited (we hope), the scientists believe that their research may one day allow for implants that help stroke victims regain lost mobility, memory or other brain function.

According to the story, the scientists put the chip in a rat's brain and then disabled a certain section of the brain itself. They then tried to teach the rat to blink its eye when a certain tone sounded by good old Pavlov's method -- they blew a puff of air into its eye (my least favorite part of my eye exam) when they sounded the tone and eventually hoped to make the rat blink when they sounded the tone.

But with its brain impaired, the rat couldn't learn to associate the tone with the required movement. Scientists could sound the tone all day and Mr. Rat blinked whenever he darn well pleased. Then they switched the chip on, which allowed the neurological connections their surgery had artificially blocked. Lo and behold, Mr. Rat was now able to learn how to blink when the tone sounded.

Such an achievement obviously has awesome possibilities for stroke victims or other people whose brains have been damaged by accident or disease. It is, of course, also potentially dangerous -- since the brain works mostly by means of electrical impulses, it could be possible to encode particular sets of commands on a chip that could turn our recovered person into some sort of robot by sending a particular signal. There's a taut action novel lurking in here someplace.

In fact, one has already been written; Michael Crichton's 1972 The Terminal Man, about a fellow who has electrodes and a computer implanted in his body to help control his epileptic seizures and blackouts. The computer will help him by stimulating a pleasure center in his brain when a seizure strikes, defusing the man's violent behavior that accompanies the seizures. But the brain learns if it has a seizure it gets a jolt of feel-good, so it begins initiating more seizures in order to get more happy jolts. And the violent behavior only accompanied the seizures; it wasn't caused by them, so more frequent seizures equaled more frequent violent psychotic outbursts.

Unforeseen consequences of scientific breakthroughs were also at he core of Crichton's novels Jurassic Park and Next, as well as his movie Westworld. I think the potential good of the Israeli scientists' work is amazing and I hope it bears out. I also hope they've read their Crichton and they're very, very careful.

(H/T Histories of Things to Come)

Irrelevantly Important or Importantly Irrelevant?

2011-11-07T00:33:00.000-06:00

I can safely say that none of the sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain have changed the likelihood of his receiving my vote.

For one, I am not a registered Republican, so should Mr. Cain still be actively campaigning for president by the time our primary rolls around, I could not vote for him. For another, should he be the GOP nominee, I will without qualm forgo my opportunity to cast a ballot for the office of President of the United States on the basis that both of the candidates listed on that ballot are insufficient for the job. In other words, I already had a bunch of reasons I'd never vote for Herman Cain, so the truth of the allegations doesn't matter to me as a voter.

Mr. Cain is simply not a credible candidate for president. He has a compelling personal story as a cancer survivor and a self-made millionaire. He has some engaging ways of communicating with an audience. He has executive experience and has demonstrated some ability as a leader. But the latter is the only advantage he holds over President Obama and Mr. Cain's many shortcomings negate nearly all of that advantage. His "9-9-9" tax plan sounds simple but has drawn quite a bit of fire from conservative economists as well as liberal ones. Even if it had not, the creation of a national sales tax is a bad idea, for yet to dawn is the day when the federal government can look upon an existing tax without thinking about how to raise it. What would be a nine percent national sales tax today under a President Cain could with great ease become a ten, 15 or even 20 percent national sales tax under a potential President Clinton (Chelsea, to be specific).

Closer scrutiny of Mr. Cain's campaign shows a candidate who hasn't thought much about foreign policy or other important areas of the presidency, and who has little experience in the politically necessary art of dining with the devil -- er -- opposition, in order to get things done that the country needs done. The flaws in the "9-9-9" concept betray a lack of follow-through thinking about other important manners in which Mr. Cain may actually have some expertise useful to the office. He knows something about how to energize a business and that experience could translate into helping energize the national economy. If some reflection helps reposition that experience from the context of a single business to the national economy, that is. Evidence of that reflection is still sketchy.

What looks to me to be his greatest flaw is Mr. Cain's apparent embrace of his insufficiency. In contrast with President Obama, who is more passively insufficient for the office, Mr. Cain is almost aggressively insufficient. His pleasure at running an outsider's nontraditional campaign seems too easily to slide into pleasure at the fact that he doesn't have too many ideas about things that presidents should know about. Just because a good chunk of the reporters covering you are indeed members of the D.C. Echo Chamber that's part of the problem doesn't mean that every idea they have about what makes a good president can be dismissed so casually. Maybe it takes a hundred of them to reach the stopped-clock success rate of twice a day, but that means sometimes they are onto something. For example, a president need not name every obscure capital in the world, but he or she should have some picture of what kind of world beyond its borders the United States wants to live in and what it should and shouldn't do to bring that world about. Advisers serve to bring reality to that vision and shape it in light of what's feasible -- not to educate a president about what's going on so that the vision can be crafted sometime before the term is up.

Barring complete insanity from the Republicans -- a Paul nomination, for example -- I could not in good conscience vote for a man who has not convinced me he is right for the job and has gone a long way in convincing me otherwise, no matter how good a person he might be. So there is next to no chance I could vote for President Obama. But I could not in good conscience vote for a man who possesses so many of the same flaws as well as some new ones of his own, even though more of his opinions may match mine, so Mr. Cain would be out should he win the GOP nod.

All of this, of course, is said with the caveat that our state has not given its electoral votes to a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson and so my presidential ballot selection is not likely to matter either way.

Almost Got It

2011-11-06T22:34:00.002-06:00

USA Network debuted its TV movie version of John Sandford's Certain Prey, one of his Lucas Davenport novels, this evening.

It starred (and was executive produced by) Mark Harmon, the mainstay of USA rerun stalwart NCIS. Harmon is a fan of the Prey series and finally got his chance to put one of the books on the screen. It's not all that bad even if it doesn't really quite click. Part of the problem could be the choice of books.

Certain Prey may have been attractive because it offers a ready-made sequel (Davenport and hitwoman Clara Rinker will match wits again in Mortal Prey) and because it comes during a hiatus in Davenport's relationship with eventual bride Weather Karkinnen. Not having the "home life" story simplifies the plot a great deal. But the story of Davenport investigating the murder of a wealthy woman and the twists that investigation takes when he starts to pursue Clara Rinker is not a high point in the series. It relies way too much on implausible coincidences and chance meetings that bring a roll to the reader's eyes.

And part of the problem is the lead. Harmon does OK as Davenport, but he's been Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS for too long to easily shed association with that character, especially since Davenport has some of the same characteristics. The similarities are enough that the differences jar the story like a needle skipping on a record. Harmon also carries too much laid-back southern California atmosphere with him to nail the colder, bleaker Davenport, and being a good 20 years older than the character in question doesn't help either.

USA probably has its eye on the success Tom Selleck had in creating the televised version of Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone, and may hope to run a similar string of TV movies using the Prey books. It's hard to say how likely that is -- choosing one of the better series entries will help some, but either Davenport needs to be recast with another actor or the stories need to come from later in the series, when the gap between Harmon's actual age and the character's is less.

Not Bad

2011-11-05T22:27:00.000-05:00

Within an 18-hour period, my television offered me the recent Rental Vault feature Silverado, the sublime Serenity, Disney classics Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and Sean Connery's U.S. Marshall in outer space, Outland.

It's almost like basic cable is trying to justify its existence. Weird.

Doesn't Even Rhyme

2011-11-05T18:55:00.001-05:00

No poetry. Just a plain and simple,

WELCOME TO THE BIG 10, 'HUSKERS!

From the Rental Vault: Dynamite Warrior

2011-11-04T23:09:00.000-05:00

Dynamite Warrior (in Thai, Khon Fai Bin) starts out with an interesting mix of potential stories, but its confused plot, gimmicky direction and reliance on slapstick means none of them can really shine.

As a boy, Siang witnessed a cattle thief kill his parents. He trained as a Muay Thai fighter and rocketry expert in order to find the murderer, who wore a distinctive tattoo. Now an adult, Siang roams the countryside in the Isan district of Thailand, taking cattle from wealthy owners to give to poor villagers. Masked so that no one knows his true identity, he searches every cattle worker he fights for the tattoo that will identify his parents' killer.

Lord Waeng, a wealthy representative of a Western company, is trying to introduce tractors to Thai farming, but they are too expensive compared with the cattle the farmers use. So he hires a bandit to raid cattle drives and villages to kill the cattlemen and sell their animals, leaving his tractors the only alternative. His henchmen are thwarted by the mystic cattle driver Nai Hoi Sing, whose magic powers defeat them as he defends his herd. But during the fight an observant Siang notices that Sing sports a familiar tattoo. Waeng tricks Sing into working for him and the Black Wizard to create a magic that, combined with his fighting skill and rockets, can defeat Sing. As he works with Waeng and the wizard, he falls in love with E'Sao, the wizard's daughter.

Director Chalerm Wongpim obviously wants to try to weave together both martial arts and Western movies, drawing on the way the cattle business was conducted in Thailand's distinctive culture. And nothing about those two genres prevents an engaging story that features cowboys, showdowns, Muay Thai brawls and magic spells from being made. But Dynamite Warrior isn't it. Too many slow-motion sequences, repetitive fight scenes and flat attempts at quirky humor mean the different elements never gel. Dan Chupong is fine as Sing and Kanyaphak Suwankut sweet as E'Sao, but Phutiphong Sriwat's Lord Waeng is far too much of a buffoon to menace and Panna Ritikrai as the Black Wizard just chews scenery and laughs evilly. Wongpim may have wrapped several different kinds of fuses together in hopes of a spectacular show, but they all fizzle out before going off.

Crazy, Man

2011-11-03T22:40:00.003-05:00

Len Deighton is best-known as a spy novelist who's also published several books of military history. In 1993, he tried his hand at a Spillane-ish noir concerning Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Murphy called Violent Ward.

During the closing days of the Rodney King trial, Murphy's law practice is sold to entrepreneur and sometime acquaintance Zach Petrovitch. Before the deal is finalized, Zach's wife Ingrid -- an old flame of Mickey's, naturally -- asks for his help because she says her life is in danger. Is it? Mickey can't be sure. He's also not sure about his client, fading leading man Budd Byron, who's asked him to get a gun but not through the official channels; about his law partner's dealings with a seedy evangelist; about his ex-wife who alternates between asking him for more money and threatening suicide; about some clients whose financial empire is looking a little shaky, and so on. Things will come to a head in the riots that follow the "not guilty" verdict given against the officers accused of beating King.

Mickey narrates in a kind of 1940s tough-guy-on-wry patter. Even though the book is set in sunny 1990s Los Angeles it's not hard to picture it in black-and-white and filled with men wearing fedoras. There's some serious threatening and a little mayhem going on even before the riots, but the overall tone is snappy with the same kind of dry wit Deighton used in his Bernard Samson novels. Mickey lacks Samson's glum pessimism, perhaps a feature of the Los Angeles setting compared with Samson's dreary London and Berlin stages. The plot sometimes twists back on itself a little too hard, leaving us wondering for a moment just what's going on, but overall it's a fun path to follow.

Deighton would follow Violent Ward with the concluding trilogy of Bernard Samson novels, and some speculated that he might continue to write about Mickey Murphy and his classic Cadillac as they wove through the bizarre mix of reality and unreality of southern California. But sequels never materialized and the author seems more or less retired at 82, so this book remains Mickey's only chronicle.

Well, Whattaya Know?

2011-11-02T21:35:00.000-05:00

There actually is something you can't say in Hollywood -- a performer's real birthdate.

What a Difference a Year Makes

2011-11-01T23:38:00.002-05:00

November is the month bloggers are encouraged to post every day; it has some squashed-together name but I can never remember it. I've done that the last couple of years, but last year, when December 1 came around, I thought I might try to continue the schedule and see how far I could take it. Today's post means I have posted at least one entry every day for a year. I haven't done that much continuous writing since I worked for the newspaper.

Some entries were pretty short, and there were days when the midnight hour drew near and naught inspirational could be found 'pon the wide, wide web. Some days when I knew I would be away from the internet were posted in advance, as Blogger has a neat feature that lets you schedule a time in the future when a post will appear. So when I was going to be at church camp, I could pre-write a few posts and set them up to show up one a day. Some may call that cheating, to which I have to reply, there's a rulebook for this? And, bite me.

Sticking to this schedule made me admire bloggers who post every day especially when they're not professional content providers but just folks who like to run at the mouth and have been waiting for the internet to arrive so they could do so without needing to be hired for it.

I imagine I'll try to keep posting more regularly than I did before entering on this little experiment, but I won't have to hit the panic button when 11:50 PM rolls around and I've got nothing, I tell you, nothing! It was more work than I imagined, but I had fun with it. Hope you did too.

Shark Mount Optional

2011-10-31T21:04:00.001-05:00

As if the Large Hadron Collider wasn't enough of a risk to life and the universe as we know it, scientists in Europe are planning on making a frickin' laser beam so powerful it can pull apart the vacuum of space.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility should be completed by the end of the decade. It will focus ten laser beams, each more powerful than any laser in use today, into a central point where they will produce energy-intense conditions that do not even exist at the center of the sun. Each laser pulse will require so much energy that in order to fire them the power will have to be built up in reserve rather than simply flow through an on-off switch.

Though the pulses will last only a trillionth of a second, scientists think they will allow measurement of what are called "ghost particles." Vacuum, it seems, is not exactly nothing, but is made up of pairs of these ghost particles that tend to annihilate each other almost as soon as they come into existence. If the energy of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility works as theorized, the pairs of particles will be split and they can be observed long enough to detect their electrical charges and learn more about what makes up the universe.

Now I'm torn about what joke to make next because I have three highly nerdish options that appeal to me equally: 1) I can say, "Destroying Alderan and keeping the star systems in line through fear will be a bonus." 2) I can stick with the Dr. Evil theme and say, "Rumors that the scientists will then hold the United Nations for ransom for one...million...dollars are as yet unfounded." 3) Or, since these are ghost particles, I can say, "Scientists were eager to get started on the project, since bustin' makes 'em feel good."

Or I guess I can use all three. Thanks for playing along.

From the Rental Vault: Silverado

2011-10-30T23:39:00.000-05:00

By 1985, the Western as a movie genre was mostly dead and well on its way to being completely dead, to borrow a phrase from Miracle Max. None had grabbed much box office attention or critical admiration since the mid-1970s; the mythos on which the movies were based had been discredited through historical research and frequent overuse. The Western was as gone as the adventure cliffhanger.

Enter Lawrence Kasdan. A co-writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back, baby-boomer Kasdan was one of several young moviemakers who had a real love for the genre pictures of their youth. Being around George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as those two helped revive the big-screen wonder of those 1940s and 1950s genre movies made him a good fit to try to breathe life into another bygone form, the Western. With his brother Mark, Kasdan wrote and then took on the job of directing and producing Silverado, a pure 1950s big-budget Western spectacle with a distinct 1980s baby-boomer flavor.

We open with one of the Western's strongest features; the amazing scenery of the western American states, and we quickly find ourselves in the action as some men try to ambush Emmit (Scott Glenn) while he sleeps. They're unsuccessful, and as Emmit continues his journey he finds a man -- robbed and left to die -- named Paden (Kevin Kline). The pair join up and ride into the town of Turley in search of Emmit's brother Jake but find Jake is scheduled to hang for murder. In confronting the men who robbed him, Paden runs afoul of the town sheriff John Langston (John Cleese) and all three men leave town just ahead of a posse, when they are aided by Mal, a sharpshooting cowboy played by Danny Glover.

Before reaching the town of Silverado, the quartet come to the aid of a wagon train of settlers (including Roseanna Arquette). Then once in town, they separate and their friendship is strained as they sort out their lives in the town run by Ethan McKendrick and his sheriff, a former riding buddy of Paden's named Cobb (Brian Dennehy).

The above synopsis only scratches the surface of the top-rate cast the Kasdans assembled and leaves out small but important parts played by Jeff Goldblum, Linda Hunt and James Gammon, among others. The modern touches help make the movie even more fun, such as Kline's Zen-like deadpan Paden and Cleese's dry-witted Langston. Listing all of the pitch-perfect grace notes from every cast member would make this a novel-length review, and I won't try your patience. I'll just suggest you rent the movie.

But Silverado succeeds first of all not because it's a great retro Western or a great revisionist Western (it's not really all that revisionist) but because it's a great Western, period, and a great movie. The Kasdans include all the familiar elements -- the ambush sneak attacks, the villains' lack of concern for anything but their own interests, the dusty street showdown, the gunfight through town, and so on. They do them all well, though, not figuring they could skimp on the quality of their dialogue just because Western fans would see anything with a hat and a gunbelt. And they cast the roles perfectly: the taciturn Glenn, the contemplative Kline, the menacing Dennehy, the wild-card Costner, the solid and dignified Glover, and so on. First-time composer Bruce Broughton earned an Academy Award nomination for the score (he lost out to five-time winner John Barry), another exceptionally strong feature of the movie.

Silverado ends with a character shouting, "We'll be back," thought by some to indicate Kasdan's plans for a sequel. It never materialized (probably for the best; double lightning strikes may be rare but they outnumber good sequels by a wide margin), nor did a wide-scale revival of the Western itself. The next notable works in the genre would be television's Lonesome Dove in 1989, Costner's own Dances With Wolves in 1990 and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven in 1992. Those entries and others repeat what Silverado made clear -- there's plenty of life left in the most American of movie genres when moviemakers, writers and actors at the top of their game put out the kind of effort that makes great films of any genre.

A Passing Lane or a Highway, Man?

2011-10-29T22:58:00.000-05:00

With apologies to Alfred Noyes:

The air was a torrent of pigskin 'cross the Bloomington plains,
The sun eclipsed by touchdowns tossed with nary a pain,
The field a wide-open lane giving yards ten or twenty or more,
And the Hoosiers and 'Cats came riding—
     Riding—riding—
The Hoosiers and 'Cats came riding, rolling up that score.

Persa threw like a madman, Colter not far behind,
Five TDs ties a record! And Dunsmore played out of his mind!
Four scores in seven catches, and a hundred and seventeen yards!
No 'Cat tight end is his equal,
     We'll likely not see a sequel,
For the Hoosier defense is abysmal, one of the league's worst by far.

Northwestern fared little better, giving up 38 points,
But the offense scored nigh to 60 while the D stunk up the joint
Blood-red the Bloomington jerseys but they could not the purple contain,
So the cold streak ends at five losses,
     Thanks to Dan and Kain's tosses,
Plus Jacob Schmidt's two rushing scores, and the deadeye foot of Budzien.

Change I Can Get Behind

2011-10-28T18:39:00.000-05:00

Last night at the gym, someone asked for one of the TVs to be turned to the World Series. The attendant obliged, and cut the Lord High Irrationalist himself, Ed Schultz, off in mid-ignorant, suet-stained rant. It was one of the most wonderful things I had ever seen. The only thing that would have been better would be if another TV had been changed to the Series also, removing the presence of the King of the Blowhards, Bill O'Reilly, from our sight as well.

But the attendants said they could only put one channel on the Series at a time.

Troubled Indeed

2011-10-27T22:20:00.000-05:00

Dewey Lambdin's Alan Lewrie novels sail some well-traveled seas -- naval adventures during the Napoleonic wars. And although his series protagonist displays more than the requisite amount of derring-do, dash and martial heroism, Lambdin seems to have looked less to Forester, Pope and O'Brian for his inspiration than to Fraser. The results aren't always the best.

The series began in 1989 with Lewrie as a reluctant midshipman in The King's Coat. Over the course of 17 novels, he has risen in rank and reputation, both fair and foul. Brave in battle, he's a scoundrel in his personal life. In 2008's Troubled Waters, he finally manages to convince his wife that the anonymous letters accusing him of an affair with his ward might be untrue (they are). But his actual affairs remain and she more or less turns him out anyway. Lewrie also has to deal with the fallout of his previous actions in freeing slaves in Jamaica -- their former owners have accused him of theft and are seeking to have him convicted and hanged. So he is relieved when he is sent to join the blockade of France in command of the frigate Savage. There, Lewrie is less than content to cruise up and down the coast and hatches a plan to wreck a French fort under construction.

Like his creation, Lambdin is best in action. Himself a sailor, he has a good knowledge of the sea and also knows how to keep the battle and combat scenes humming. He's less good ashore, and one of the problems Troubled Waters has is the time spent there instead of on deck. Another of the problems is that Lambdin writes in a chatty, gossipy tone that somehow manages to make the entire book one long snigger -- Fraser's Harry Flashman was a coward (Lewrie isn't) and was even more lecherous but Fraser avoided the adolescent tenor that Lambdin apparently relishes. Although less obvious at first, it increases throughout the series and had put me off of it until I found Troubled Waters cheap at a used bookstore and thought I'd give them another chance. I'll probably be skipping them again.

Among the cover blurbs praising the Alan Lewrie series are one by James Nelson, himself an author of historical nautical fiction, and Bernard Cornwell, author of the Richard Sharpe novels that cover the life of a British Army soldier during the same years as the Lewrie books. I'm almost certain these praises were written earlier in the series when Lambdin had more of a focus on Lewrie the fighter rather than Lewrie the lecher and the books were simply better overall. Cornwell's cover blurb ends with this sentence, describing how he felt about the series: "I wish I had written them."

I wish you'd written them too, Mr. Cornwell.

Why Did It Have to Be Teeth?

2011-10-26T17:37:00.002-05:00

So for some 60 years, we've been able to enjoy the presence of a wind-up set of mechanical teeth that chomp away to the delight of we easily amused types everywhere, thanks to a denture commercial.

Toy inventor Eddie Goldfarb, the article says, saw an ad for a holder for false teeth called a "tooth garage," and the idea of a rattletrap set of dentures pulling into a driveway cracked him up and gave him an idea. He pitched to manufacturers Marvin Glass and Irving Fishlove and lo! the Yakity-Yak Chattering Teeth were born. The clockwork motor that animates the jaws has also been at the heart of other toys like the chattering skull and walking hat (called Mr. Schmoo) pictured in the story. The teeth have been a source of fun or at least a small chuckle for people ever since.

Except, of course, for Pollyanna Jones.

(The author swears he remembers an early 1980s comedy show in which Raiders of the Lost Ark was parodied using Karen Allen as "Dr. Pollyanna Jones," in which she found herself needing to navigate a room full of her own personal phobia -- chattering teeth -- to get to the treasure. Her response: "Teeth! Why did it have to be teeth?" But searching the net produced no signs of the sketch, so you will just have to take his word for it.)

No CGI Required

2011-10-25T11:19:00.001-05:00

The above image was taken by the Cassini probe as it orbits Saturn, and I found this particular image here. The large moon in the background is Saturn's moon Titan, and the bright one that makes it resemble the Death Star is Dione. The bright dot that looks like it's at the outer edge of the rings is Pandora, and the small white speck in the gap on the left hand side is Pan. Rumors that George Lucas will release an "improved" version of this and other Cassini pictures are, so far, unfounded.

You can read more information about the Cassini probe and see more pictures here. Cassini is the orbital component of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that was launched jointly by NASA and the European Space Administration (ESA) to study Saturn; the Huygens probe focuses on studying Titan itself. The spacecraft was launched in 1997, back about the time someone tried to lie to us even though we all knew that Han shot first.