Books coming to life

I only wish I could embed this in the book I'm writing. Since I can't, I'll put it here.


via boingboing

Decline and Fall of Western Civilization

Let's play a little game. I'm calling it "Decline and Fall." The goal is to list ever-declining versions of the same work of art, generally movies and plays and the like. The goal is to start with the best version and work your way down. For instance:

Taming of the Shrew (the play),
Taming of the Shrew (Elizabeth Taylor version),
10 Things I Hate About You,
10 Things I Hate About You (the TV show)
(Note: A shining beacon that all it not lost: Taming of the Shrew in the BBC remake Shakespeare Retold.)

My Fair Lady,
Pygmalion (the myth),
Pygmalion (the play),
She's All That

Freaky Friday (2003),
Wish Upon A Star,
Vice Versa,
Freaky Friday (1976),
Freaky Friday (1995),
It's a Boy Girl Thing

Apparently I'm called a NaNo?

In an effort to be more proactive about having slightly masochistic hobbies, I am attempting to write a novel this month as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). 50,000 words in 30 days. Wish me luck.

On forced smiling and severed feet

Smiling, language stereotypes, and a Ren & Stimpy reference:
Random discussion about whether languages that make you smile more also make you happier and a
hat that stabs you when you don't smile

Meanwhile, this sounds like something out of a TV crime drama or a mystery novel (via boingboing, obv):
Seventh Severed Foot Found in BC

Halloween with Wishbone

It's October, and I'm feeling nostalgic, so have some Legend of Sleepy Hollows, Wishbone style: Link.

Boy I wish there were more Wishbone on DVD.

Quick Round Up

I've seen some movies recently. (Please refrain from expressing your shock.) Here are one (or so) sentence reviews for a few of them:

Blindsight: Documentary about blind Nepali kids climbing up part of Mt. Everest, in which I found the editing strange, the German blind teacher annoying as hell, but the story nonetheless compelling. 2 stars.

Julie and Julia: One movie trying to tell two foodie stories but failing to tell either one completely and vaguely disappointing because of it. Worth watching once, though, because Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are awesome as Julia Child and her husband. 2 stars.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: The "twist" in this movie is utterly ruined if you've heard anything about this movie, or even seen the trailer, so I guess it's not really a twist, but nonetheless it's still stupefyingly predictable. It is fun to see Audrey Tatou as crazy and obsessed, at least. 2 stars.

Criminal: Poor man's Matchstick Men (and probably poor man's Nine Queens, on which Criminal is based, but which I have not seen). Worth it only if you absolutely must watch everything with John C. Reilly or Maggie Gyllenhaal. 1.5 stars

Emma (the 1972 BBC version): Couldn't even get through the first episode. I really don't like Jane Austen as much as I think I should. 1 star.

Norma Rae: Classic unionization story, which deserves its reputation as a classic. Sally Field is great, and frankly I loved the costuming, too -- poor factory workers during a hot summer actually look like it (sweat stains and all). 4 stars.

Seducing Dr. Lewis: Kind of silly but charming Quebecois movie about a small town that needs to convince a doctor to move to town in order to get a factory agree to build there. They decide to trick a doctor into thinking their town is more cosmopolitan than it is, and hilarity ensues. Though it's definitely hilarity of the Quebecois variety. 3 stars.

XKCD goodness

The only change I would make to this xkcd comic: the percentage has got to be higher, at least if you count Punnett squares they make silently in their heads. At least if my friends and I are any indication.

Seven Deadly Sins

Someone at Kansas State just mapped the seven deadly sins in the US (measured by statistics like STD rates for lust and thefts for envy). Apparently my new home in Washington DC has got them all covered.
Link to wired.com

Cadillac Records

Verbatim from my short Netflix review (except for a change from a 5 star scale to my 4 star one here):

The history of Chicago blues deserves an amazing movie -- Muddy Waters, Etta James, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Howling Wolf, and many others who aren't even mentioned in this movie led the dramatic lives that only bluesmen seem to live, and at the same time changed music, Chicago, and race relations forever.

Unfortunately this movie isn't amazing. It's entertaining enough, and the star-studded cast all have incredible talent, both in acting and in making music (which all the actors do on screen rather than dubbing it in). But the script tries to cram too much in at a time and ends up failing to do justice to these men and women's lives. This movie is too scattershot, with too many characters in the ensemble given too little screen time to explain their presence. If you don't already know who Howling Wolf is, for example, this movie won't really tell you. If you don't already know of him, his character is like an inside reference that you just don't get. At the same time, the movie is too generalized and too historically inaccurate to satisfy real blues fans. And if you know the songs being sung, they are off by just enough to drive you crazy (especially, for me, the Etta James songs, no matter how talented Beyonce is).

I was so ready to adore this movie, because I adore Chicago Blues. Instead, all I can say is that it inspired me to listen to my old CDs with Etta James, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, and all the rest, and made me want to read a real biography of the Chess family. That's enough to warrant a very solid two stars, but I'm so sad I can't give it more.

Prayer for my professor

Over the past few weeks, I had forgotten to check some of the blogs I used to frequent. Not many blog posts can make me cry, but this one did. But not for the obvious reason (at least, not solely for that reason). It's just that Professor Stuntz's wisdom and strength are just so overwhelming to me that I have no other response. His amazing faith is such a reflection of God's work in him that, even with all the pain Professor Stuntz has had to endure, I find myself admiring him more than pitying him. In some (I feel somewhat perverse) way, just witnessing a tiny, infinitesimal part of Professor Stuntz's experience has blessed and humbled me. I pray for his family's peace and comfort in all of this, and that his journey (wherever it leads) will bring him even closer to the Lord.

Yes! I wasn't hallucinating this

You know how you have vague memories, vague enough that you can't remember identifying information such that your friends don't think you're crazy, but vivid enough that you're absolutely sure your memory is real? I get that a lot with things I watched as a kid. For about a dozen years I was haunted by a memory of a terrifying movie (at least to my 4 year old self) with flashing lights and a cartoon kid who was lost and trying to get home but didn't get help from the things that were giving him grammar lessons when he asked questions. Then finally I realized what it was, thanks to a high school friend unwittingly recommending to me the original source material: The Phantom Tollbooth. Then my sister and I both swore we saw a version of Alice in Wonderland that no one had ever heard of, until I was finally able to find it on eBay.

Tonight I got to fill in another puzzle piece of my childhood movie experience. I was browsing allposters.com, which I do relatively frequently, actually. And found this, the first evidence that the strange Russian Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn mix with no subtitles that we accidentally rented from the neighborhood video store (it was in the wrong box, so we were never 100% positive that it was Huck Finn, but my dad was pretty sure) actually exists.


That boy looks familiar, so I'm pretty sure it's the one. Mystery (partially) solved. Still not sure if it's this version or not, but I'm guessing it is.

Dexter: Just Blood

Showtime’s dark drama Dexter (don’t blame me for the alliteration – after all, the show is based on a book called “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”) is about a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer. But wait! He’s a moral serial killer who only kills bad guys, so he still qualifies to be the center of a whole television show.

I had heard this line explaining Dexter so many times from people saying the show was excellent over the last couple years, and frankly I was a bit turned off by this summary of the premise. A serial killer anti-hero seems like such a gimmick: we’ve seen anti-heroes abound in critically acclaimed television recently – think Dr. House, Tony Soprano, Malcolm Reynolds (from Firefly), and even Jack Bauer breaking all those laws. A gimmicky serial killer show doesn’t interest me much as a concept. Who needs another crime drama? And serial killers are so Other that they’re not that psychologically interesting to me, unlike those other anti-heroes.

But I finally caved – partly because Dexter is on Instant Watch on Netflix and mostly because my sister started watching it. My sister being intrigued by a show is a good indicator that I will be, too, whether I initially like to admit it or not (see, e.g., Firefly & Doctor Who). So I watched the first episode, and then the whole first season.

Dexter, as both a show and a character, troubles me. They trouble me so much that this is a snapshot from my computer camera as I watched the second episode:


This show certainly trades in its share of blood and gore, and those who like that part of crime shows (or, say, liked the Angel of Death scene in Silence of the Lambs) will be satiated. I, on the other hand, don’t particularly like it. I’m either creeped out, or – more likely – disappointingly unmoved by fake gore because I keep thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what the techs used to mix that blood.” The sneer of disgust in the above snapshot isn’t me being grossed out by a murder scene, actually. It’s me watching the credits and thinking about the show in general. And yet I watched it, because I kept clinging to the theory that this show is more than it seems. I still think so, even though I’m not totally convinced.

(By the way, I also don’t find the show that funny, as many people on Netflix say. Yes, the sister has her moments and Dexter has some pretty dry jokes, but this isn’t a dramedy or a macabre black comedy about a serial killer (which has been done to perfection in Keeping Mum, a delightful movie I highly recommend). It’s a cruel little show that keeps your attention with a weird twist on the anti-hero trope and a bunch of blood.)

On the one hand, Dexter as a main character seems like a clever ruse by an inept writer who was tired of hearing that his characters weren’t lifelike or human enough. Creating a “loveable monster,” which is how Dexter is billed on the books and the DVD blurb, seems an easy out. A guy who has no human emotion is supposed to be an unconvincing character, right? This is no offense to the author Jeff Linsday. I haven’t actually read the books so I don’t know if they’re any good. But it certainly seems like a cop out.

The show also seems to cop out with respect to the larger themes it engages. Other shows about unlikable characters grapple with mortality, morality, and religion by creating equally articulate but oppositely opinioned supporting characters (one of the reasons I like House so much). Dexter, on the other hand, just starts from the premise that some people deserve to die; the only grappling comes with the question, “Yeah, but does that mean it’s OK for a serial killer to kill them?”

By creating a non-human main character – less human even than anthropomorphized animals and aliens in other shows – Dexter is no longer a human we have to condone or condemn. Instead he becomes a symbol of rightful anger and bloody justice. He is an outlet for viewers, who believe in the death penalty in overwhelming numbers, who hear about killers going free on legal technicalities (and who may remember O.J. Simpson), who live vicariously through the righteous vengeance of television characters. But vengeance isn’t ours, even in made-up books and television, and I find myself extremely reluctant to relate to Dexter or “root” for him as so many fans claim to do. The show ultimately rests the likeability of its main characters in an assumption about the inner cruelty of the viewers, and this conceit is what disturbs me the most about the series. That the show is popular seems to indicate that many people agree with this conceit, which is what disturbs me the most about the viewers of this show.

On the other hand, maybe the show and its viewers are more nuanced than that. The plots and overall arc of the first season are compelling and downright good storytelling. The multi-episode arc involving another mysterious serial killer is good (and I don't want to spoil it), even if parts of it are pretty predictable (as in, I figured out who it was the first scene he/she was in, even though there was no positive identification for several more episodes.) The actors are good, too, and some of the side stories of intra-office politics are delightfully raw and nuanced. Many of the side characters inspire empathy as well, such as a painfully honest cop who is separated from his wife because he told her about the one time he cheated on her.

Better still, even though the show revolves around a character who describes himself as neither human nor monster, Dexter does become slightly more human throughout the first series, once the premise is firmly established that he’s not. This might be because it’s impossible to create an interesting character with no emotions, but I like to think that the show is trying to break down what we think it means to be human.

If you look at it this way, the show raises questions it never discusses. In a way, this is more skillful than the shows I love (like House) that hit you with a Big Issue 2x4 whenever an interesting ethical or philosophical tension arises. And the questions raised by Dexter are both important and complex: If we fake intimacy, is it still intimate? What are the limits of anti-Kantian ethics in terms of preventing harm to others? Do we feel more compassion for Dexter because he’s a foster child with hints at a horrible past, and if we do, why? Can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you had a bad childhood”? And that raises the question of the whole premise: can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you killed the bad guys, at least”? Why is Dexter the serial killer our hero, but Ice Truck Killer the serial killer our villain, when they are so clearly linked? Ultimately, how can we say someone is irreversibly good or bad? And what do we do about it if we can make such a determination?

That a television show can raise so many questions, especially about what it reveals about the people who watch and like the show and the main character, reveals some hidden mastery. I’d like to think so, at least. And so who am I to judge my fellow viewers who may be thinking on this level, too, rather than simply using Dexter as an outlet for bloody justice or merely blood?

So, even though I started with that grimace, I did end up entertained by some good storytelling and intrigued by some interesting questions. All in all, 3 stars.

Some M&Ms are better for you

You may have thought that M&Ms were all the same -- reds are really no different from greens or blues or whatever. Just a silly artificial coating that most certainly does NOT prevent them from melting in your mouth instead of your hand. But science tells us otherwise: the dye from blue M&Ms (and blue gatorade) can reduce spinal injury in mice (and turn them blue). Pretty cool, huh?

Summer break is over

Since I start work again in a week, I'm going to write off the last two months as summer vacation from my blog (and, frankly, facebook, and most other forms of communication). And now I'm back. With this non-media posting. Oh well -- I guess it takes a while to get back in the swing of things:

Someone is suing Denny's to force them to label the sodium contents of their food. While I'm generally all for information, I think a lawsuit is the wrong way to get it. Over at The Atlantic website, Marion Nestle says that this is about consumer choice -- you can add salt at the table to low-sodium food, but you get no choice if the food is high sodium. Umm... no. Consumer choice is deciding whether to go to Denny's at all. If you can't tell that fast food is salty without being given sodium mg information, you've got health problems a lawsuit isn't going to fix. So go to Denny's, or not. Ask them to publish ingredient information on the threat of not buying their food otherwise. But don't sue, man. It's just going aggravate the lives of my fellow law clerks.

PHD is a brilliant comic strip

(click on image for larger version)
For real. And it applies to pretty much any real research.

Sherlock Holmes

It's been a long time since I read any Arthur Conan Doyle, I know, but I don't remember Sherlock Holmes being quite so much of an action hero (though I am glad that it looks like they've kept him a bit crazy and possibly even kept the drug addiction)

Big numbers visualization

Check out this video's visualization of what President Obama's pledge to cut $100 million dollars meant in relation to the rest of the budget. (Yes, he's now pledging 17 billion. There's another video about that on this guy's Youtube page, but it's not as visually helpful to me.)

More Unusually Smart David Mitchell

For your procrastinating pleasure:
Peep Show is now on Hulu. More David Mitchell greatness. Plus that other guy who hangs around him. :)

Unusually Smart David Mitchell

I absolutely love David Mitchell -- something about smart British funny guys I guess. Anyway, I found this to be particularly topical given the number of end-of-year black tie events I've had to go to recently. Geez, guys have it easy. The dress code is even named after how easy it is for them.

If only labs were really like this . . .

What do you get when you mix The Village People with a bio and chem research supplier?
A very weird music video:

(thanks, L. you made my evening.)

Pseudo-Science drives me nuts

Hilarious commentary by Sarah Haskins on stupid skin care commercials using "sciency" words and pictures to sell things:


(yes, it's from February, but I just started going through archives)

Japan reminding me of France, for the first and only time

This story about young urban Japanese men and women getting jobs in agriculture reminds me of an excellent French film about a young woman who does the same: The Girl from Paris (more meaningfully called "Une hirondelle a fait le printemps" in French, which means "A swallow [the bird] made the spring"). Definitely worth a watch

Brilliant Frivolity

Sometimes silly, delightful little cream puffs of fiction are so silly and delightful as to be brilliant. For some reason, this genre has been my focus of the last week, starting with reading Something New (aka Something Fresh), the first Blandings Castle book by P.G. Wodehouse, the absolute master of all things silly and delightful.

Then I found Rings on her Fingers, which is quite like The Lady Eve -- Henry Fonda getting duped by a beautiful con artist who ends up falling in love with him. This got me thinking of Preston Sturges (as Lady Eve is one of his), so I rented Easy Living, an early Preston Sturges movie that somehow I had missed until now even though Jean Arthur stars. Perhaps in another mood I would not have thought it so wonderful, but I have decided I am quite fond of it. Screwball comedy is film's answer to P.G. Wodehouse and humorists of his ilk.

And now I am back to P.G. Wodehouse. Damn you Google Books and your full pdf texts of books out of copyright. I shall now go start reading A Damsel in Distress, forsaking much needed sleep.

Ghost Town

Most of the time, if I say the first twenty minutes of a film were the best, and it all went downhill from there, I mean that the movie was bad. Not so here. Ghost Town started at such a high point that downhill is still pretty good. The first twenty minutes are some of the funniest I have ever seen – somehow even the opening credits of dental equipment were funny to me. (Why are plaster teeth molds funny? Not sure, but they are.) Those first twenty minutes confirm for me that Ricky Gervais may be the funniest man alive. His plays a misanthropic dentist, who seems to like his profession because it means he can stuff people’s mouths with cotton when he’s tired of listening to them. Any introvert will cringe with recognition at his desire to avoid human contact to the point of being rude. (Really, who hasn’t let those elevator doors close so you don’t have to ride with someone?)

Basically, Gervais’s character, Bertram Pincus, can see dead people because he “dies” for seven minutes during a routine colonoscopy. His discovery of this ability, and the reason for it, are truly brilliant, and Kristen Wiig (of SNL) has never been as hilarious as she is playing the surgeon who operated on him. Greg Kinnear plays Frank Herlihy, one of these ghosts, and he somehow hits a perfect note of charming and sleazy. Frank claims to have unfinished business that consists of breaking up his widow’s impending marriage, and annoys Bertram until he agrees to help. Of course, in so doing, Bertram ends up falling in love with the wife (Tea Leoni).

Thus begins the second part of the story, which is slightly less funny than the first part. Pincus cracks jokes with the widow, and Gervais is a genuinely good joke teller. He’s funny, but it’s no longer as heartbreakingly hilarious. Misanthropic avoidance of people was better than cracking jokes about how funny Chinese names are.

The third and last part of the movie is the weakest, but it’s still satisfactory. In the end, you have to get rid of some of these ghosts, which means Bertram Pincus must eventually crack and be a passably good guy. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I actually did want his character to grow, unlike Roger Ebert – the movie just folds and ties up loose ends. This leads to some saccharin moments, and the main “revelation” of the movie about the nature of ghosts isn’t actually that spectacular. But since we do hope for a happy ending, which is a hard note to hit in a story about dead people and misanthropes, the fact that it didn’t come off as totally unpalatable is pretty impressive.

But if you don’t like the sugary ending, and find yourself missing the brilliant acidity of Bertram Pincus before he had a change of heart, I suggest you do what I did: after watching, just go back and watch those first twenty minutes again.

His Girl Friday

Best movie not under an original copyright. Plus, it's Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and one of best fast-talking dames in the history of film. And now it's available for free online. Thank you, Hulu.

I Read Books! Bartleby the Scrivener

This semester I'm taking a class called Law and Literature. Our first assignment was Billy Budd and Bartleby the Scrivener, both written by Herman Melville. Somehow I've never become a Melville fan, even though I love nautical stories and maritime history (and have read most of David Cordingly's books on the subject, which I highly recommend). Maybe it's the fact that the stories move so slowly, or that they are so allegorical as to become uninteresting to me. Anyway, here are the thoughts I wrote for our first assignment:

When I read these stories, I was home for vacation. My father asked me what “Bartleby the Scrivener” was about. “Well, it’s about a copy clerk in a law office who does nothing, but his boss feels awkward and doesn’t fire him, and then the clerk dies,” I replied.

Perhaps I was being too harsh in describing the story so simplistically, but I found the story quite dull and Bartleby unsympathetic. The narrator went out of his way to say that Bartleby was irreproachably honest and decent, but I was unconvinced. The narrator claimed to be irritated and repulsed by Bartleby because he was a lost soul and pity was no longer helpful, but I think my dislike of Bartleby came from a different source – what, though, was hard to determine.

Perhaps I am just not as curious about Bartleby as the Lawyer was. I did not wonder where Bartleby came from or what his story was – I just wondered what was the point. And a paragraph at the end did not serve to satisfy or even whet my appetite. So . . . Bartleby was a dead letter personified? He was dead inside? He was just extremely dissatisfied with his job? Perhaps I’m not smart enough to get it, but that still doesn’t make me care about a character so impassive and unchangeable.

The Lawyer attempted to be charitable towards his employee, and refused to fire him. Me, I felt no such charity: Bartleby didn’t seem infirm or so aged that he required compassion. Rather, he seemed to require a good shaking to get him to do something – anything! – for his own good. I felt like calling the police to remove him from the office might serve the same purpose as slapping someone who is being hysterical (Do people really do this? It make sense to me, but I’ve only seen it in the movies.).

Perhaps it is my youth that makes me so unfeeling towards copyist, while the Lawyer’s age gives him wisdom to see Bartleby as “the victim of innate and incurable disorder.” Or perhaps it is my all too American urge (encouraged by Harvard Law School) to value productivity above all else that gives me no pity for Bartleby, no inclination to cry out about the man and his symbolism for all humanity. The Lawyer himself is unambitious and has created “the cool tranquility of a snug retreat.” Even in my envy for that sort of life, I feel slight aversion to the Lawyer in his own complacency. How much further beyond aversion, then, do Bartleby and his inaction inspire? (And how much does it prove my point about American compulsion to productivity when Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word “unambitious?”)

My hope is that I would not be so unfeeling towards a real person – that I would feel some sort of compassion towards and interest in a real-life Bartleby. I hope that my disdain for Bartleby is for him as a character in a story. My movie-trained sensibilities were frustrated by a story that revolves around an immovable person. The other clerks were no exemplars of Puritan work ethic, but they interested and amused me because they did things. The Lawyer was unambitious, but I still respected him for his introspection and desire to do something, even if he decided on something so ridiculous as moving his offices in order to avoid his own clerk. Bartleby, on the other hand, was like a passive rock, and I felt that, like a rock, he didn’t warrant twenty pages of narration.

The Band's Visit

The Band's Visit begins with intertitles that say: "An Egyptian Police Band got lost in Israel overnight. . . . It was not very important." I'm not sure if this was an attempt to lower expectations, but it certainly did explain what this movie is about. It's a small movie. A microcosm that doesn't concern itself with the outside world. It's not about international politics, even though it could be given the mixture of Arabic and Hebrew and English that the movie contends with. It's not a grand love story or an action-packed spy story. And therein lies its beauty -- by not trying to do too much, the movie excels in what it does do.

There's not much more to the plot than that first sentence. It's about a group of Eygyptian policemen who end up in the middle of nowhere in Israel and have to spend the night because they can't get the next train until the morning. And there are no hotels, so they spend the night with a restaurant owner and her friends. Their lives change because of the night, but not too much, and they affect the lives of the Israeli townspeople they meet, but not too much.

This setup allows for some lovely character exploration, and the actors here are quite frankly amazing: normal, nuanced, full of pathos but not pathetic, and funny. In other words, they'd never make it in Hollywood (also, they're just not good looking enough). Basically all I want to do in this review is related different scenes -- how the very conservative, reserved leader of the police band spends the evening "out on the town" with a free-spirited and direct Israeli woman. Neither of them changes, and they don't become friends, but by the end of the movie he poignantly sees the other person as an opportunity missed -- someone who might have changed his life if only he had been a different person. Then there's the group of men who spend the night at the house of a young married man, and the men end up singing American jazz songs together. The youngest band member decides to hang out with a young Israeli man and helps him pick up a girl in what is my new favorite scene in any movie ever. It's just so funny without using any words. Trust me, it's worth seeing the whole movie just for that moment.

I'm at a loss to sum up the movie. I feel I can't really do it justice by describing it, so I will end with a paraphrase of a bit of dialogue that I think the writers meant to sum up the movie for themselves. One of the band members plays the clarinet, and starting composing a concerto but only has a few melancholic bars written. He plays them several times in the movie, but he says he never finished it because he didn't know how it ended and he got sidetracked by life. In this scene, he is sitting next to the crib of his host's baby. The band member sings the melody to the baby, and the host says, "Maybe this is how you concerto ends. Not with a symphonic crash and triumphant finish, but with with a baby in a crib in a simple room with no decorations on the walls." Sometimes the small bare film is more beautiful than the most ornate and complex movie one could come up with.

3.5 stars