Thinking About It

As Jean Peal-Sartre learns when he encounters two modern dudes at Existential Comics, there is no high-minded school of philosophy, nor deep commentary on the meaning of life, that cannot be made meaningless by someone who's been gifted with a 21st century education.

Font of Unwisdom

If I told you that someone had written an academic paper about whether or not people perceive typefaces as "conservative" or "liberal," and I explained to you I used those terms ideologically, rather than to describe a style, you would probably say something along the lines of "you're kidding."

I wish you were right.

Opportunity Knockin'!

A sheriff's deputy in Waukesha County in Wisconsin received the chance of a lifetime today when he saw a vehicle disobey Wisconsin's law about yielding to emergency vehicles. The law, like those adopted in many states, requires drivers to move over and leave the entire lane free next to a stopped police car, fire engine or ambulance.

Sometimes drivers forget to do that and sometimes they may not believe they need to move over because the stopped cars are well away from the road and the danger of hitting someone standing beside them is slight. So law enforcement officers may not always stop a car that has not pulled over. But in this case the deputy realized that he literally had to pull over this offending driver and at least issue a warning (which, by the way, is what he did.) Why?

Because below is the offending vehicle in questions, shown stopped at roadside:

If you are a law enforcement officer and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile commits even a mild traffic infraction right in front of you, the chances that your fellow officers will ever let you forget not stopping it are just about zero. As they should be.

Supplementary Reading Suggested

Among the bells and whistles of the online game Words With Friends is an opportunity to complete against different computer "Word Masters" of various abilities. Beating them earns credits within the game and allows for new status, new levels, new looks for ones game pieces and so on.

Each solo challenger has a different skill level, which I think means that each of them is set to allow its algorithm -- which fully unchained could probably whup your meat-headed behind -- more and more freedom with which to work. The lowest-rated and first encountered is labeled "Very Easy," and the opponents get more and more challenging as you work your way through them. Each week or so a new set of Word Masters, either representing historical figures or fictional characters grouped by theme, are chosen. The current theme as I write this is military leaders from several different countries and periods of history.

The first opponent is King Leonidas I of Sparta, who is labeled "Very Easy" to beat; Xerxes I would probably disagree. Somebody at Zynga needs to take a history class or at least watch 300.

From the Rental Vault: 14 Blades (2010)

All too often, conspirators who lack their own senses of honor rely on others who retain theirs, knowing that they can plot and plan taking advantage of a range of options not available to their opponents -- or, in some cases, their pawns.

That's the situation faced by Ming Dynasty secret warrior Qinglong (Donnie Yen) in the 2010 tale of palace intrigue, 14 Blades. Qinglong is the commander of the emperor's super-secret corps of bodyguard/assassins called the Jinyiwei. Selected as orphans and trained since childhood for brutal combat, the Jinyiwei also guard the artifact known as the "14 Blades," a box of special bladed weapons they can call on in combat. The Jinyiwei, or "Embroidered Uniform Guard," actually existed and were used as both guards and fighters. Their real power came not from an arcane artifact, though, but from their imperial authority to overrule any legal proceedings in favor of their own arrests, investigations, trials and punishments.

During Qinglong's tenure as commander, the Emperor himself is weak and incompetent. A royal eunuch, Jia Jingzhong, plots with his exiled uncle Prince Qing (Sammo Hung, in what amounts to a cameo role) to overthrow the throne. A key feature of the plot is the theft of the Imperial Seal, supposed to be carried out by Qinglong, but Qinglong uncovers the treachery at the heart of his mission and swears to stop the conspirators and avenge the deaths of his comrades. Against him are the renegade Jianyiwei commander Xuanwei (Qi Yuwu) and Prince Qing's adoptive daughter Tuo Tuo (Kate Tsui), a deadly assassin herself. But he gains unlikely allies in a bandit known as the Judge of the Desert (Wu Chun) and the daughter of a band of bodyguards for hire, Qiao Hua (Zhao Wei).

By this time in his career Donnie Yen was a master at playing the stoic "Man With No Name"-style lead. He's not necessarily a hero -- he commands the secret police, after all -- but when confronted with plots that go against his honor he remembers a little of what kind of man he once wanted to be. Setting himself squarely against the treachery surrounding him, he resolves to be that man now, even if it will only be service in a losing cause. The rest of the cast hit their own marks with more or less success. Qi Yuwu conveys a little of his own ruefulness at fighting his former comrade and killing many others. Wu Chun's Judge of the Desert brings the chaos to his "chaotic good"-styled character, unwilling to set aside his own prickly sense of honor because of Qinglong's rank and position. Zhao Wei properly mixes steely and spunky as the only daughter of the bodyguard agency, but Qiao Hua is not much different from several other characters she's played and her arc rises above average only in the movie's epilogue. Kate Tsui plays Tuo Tuo as a deadly cipher, present mainly to hack and occasionally slash.

Wuxia movies like 14 Blades rise and fall on their action sequences, and here director Daniel Lee proves unable to fully carry its load across the finish line. Some fight scenes early on hang together and flow well, but the longer the movie moves the more disconnected and perfunctory they become. The wire-fighting and CGI don't mix smoothly and the protagonists switch around enough that just who's fighting who gets a little fuzzy. In the end 14 Blades feels like one of the lesser Clint Eastwood Man With No Namers -- centered on a well-matched actor and character type he's used to playing, but surrounded by a story and supporting cast more flung than stitched together.

Time Travel

Over at Bored Panda, a lady named Becca Saladin takes some portraits or sculptures of famous people of the past and transposes them into modern settings, clothing and hairstyles.

Some are more interesting that others, as not everyone from history who had a pristine and realistic portrait painted is all that well-known. Although it is kind of fascinating how a 21st-century Ben Franklin looks a little like Anthony Hopkins and a little like Ian McShane.

Most of the responses were positive, although there was a bit of wondering why Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, needed one of these kinds of updates considering that she was a modern figure already.

(PS -- As expected, Calvin's master plan to use his duplicates to trim his academic load has not gone well. Will his mother discover what he has done? Will he be punished five times over, for things he didn't even do?)

Two Dudes' Duds

Sebastian Maniscalco is pretty clear when he begins his latest special, Stay Hungry, that he doesn't have much use for more modern understandings of limits on comedy's subject matter or style. He doesn't leave very much off-limits as he questions what seem to him at best silly and at worst bizarre features of life at the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

The mode is middle-aged grump, and you could be forgiven your thought that this material would be right up my alley and aimed directly at me. Perhaps it is, but most of the stories are predictable and lack much punch. Why should an exercise bicycle class would have an impossibly energetic and cheery leader/trainer, he wonders? It's weird. It is weird, but mostly everyone knows that already and Maniscalco's take adds very little texture to either that weird situation or others he explores.

This kind of "Get off my lawn" schtick can be funny even when its familiar, but it comes best in a package that matches the material. Brad Upton's receding hairline, off-the rack suit and bug eyes make him a good teller of "What's wrong with the world these days?" stories, and Jeff Allen's gruff voice and hangdog look back up his riffs on the same subject, but Maniscalco's hipster outfit jars his attempts to make fun of the people who look a lot like he's trying to look even when he's talking about them. Stay Hungry probably feeds his fan base, but not many others.

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Given that Ken Jeong's breakout role was in a Jud Apatow movie, low expectations are built into any viewing of his first Netflix special, You Complete Me, Ho. He easily exceeds them with a brutally unfunny set that would be better categorized as a public appearance than a prepared show. The title comes from a quick riff on his wife's last name, "Ho," one of the few amusing pieces of the show.  The others stem from his interactions with the audience, who are obviously fans and glad to see him. Jeong does have a good rapport with the crowd at the Ice House Comedy Club, but no one who's not already a fan will be convinced by the string of barely amusing anecdotes from his experiences on movie sets and from his first career as a physician.