YACCS We've been using YACCS for comments for a long time now ... but all good things come to end and YACCS is going away at the end of the year. I'm currently unable to approve pending comments.
Baggage in the Bat Belt I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight. It's certainly a very good to great movie, as everyone else has said. Heath Ledger is a mortal lock for an Oscar here if they submit him as a supporting actor. I'd even argue he could possibly score a Best Actor win - considering Anthony Hopkins did it with 15 minutes of screen time as Hannibal Lector. Does Lector/Clarice being man and woman somehow change the equation? They were both considered leads. Why not the Joker? This is really his film.
I'd further argue - because, you know, I like to argue - that it is a fairly iffy film without him. There were two things I'd heard about before going in and unfortunately, they did taint the film a bit for me. Somewhere, I'd read a dig about Christian Bale's Batman voice being one-note. When you listen to the movie with this in mind ... Holy Cow. How did a director/actor combo as good as Nolan/Bale let this monotonous growling take over every line of Batman's? I kept hoping he would talk less. Bale is the anti-Maguire. I like him as Bruce Wayne, not so much in the costume. (I hated the choice of Maguire for Spider-Man, but I do give him credit as the voice of Spidey.) And I apologize if you haven't heard this complaint because I just ruined your next viewing of the movie.
The second bit of baggage going into the movie was the now popular idea that Batman = Bush. Or Cheney. Or some kind of right wing worldview. The vast majority of action movies have a bit of right wing aroma about them. Many of them rely on the idea that someone - Dirty Harry, Bruce Willis, Jack Bauer, whoever - has to break the rules in order to protect us. We can't protect ourselves and rules and regulations make for dull movies, just as villains who give up information without being tortured are kind of sissy villains. Usually I can write this stuff off. If your politics need to be expressed by someone in a costume, you need to re-examine your politics, not me.
Yet, in Dark Knight, the cell phone eavesdropping seemed plunked in solely to parallel Bush's illegal wire-tapping. I found myself muttering, "Well, at least Batman's eavesdropping was effective." Batman accepts the public's (rather sudden) hatred heroically. Bush's low approval rating is not a sign of his nobility, it's a sign of his suckiness. All of this made the sort of leaden speechifying at the end more grating than it needed to be. (There are other, more sensible, ways to interpret the movie if you really think it's worth taking the politics of Batman that seriously. Link via neilalien.)
One of my earliest memories of sheer youthful summertime joy is of July 4, 1976. My dad hosted a family cookout at the house on King St. My Uncles Rob and Jim were there and Jim's sons Matt, Adam, and P.J. My cousins were these semi-mythical (to me) best friends by blood who, by living in England, were the coolest and most exotic members of my family in my 5 year old mind. Running around and playing with them while burgers and hot dogs flew of the grill, corn on the cob from the farm next door (heavy with butter and salt) was in constant supply, and fireworks went off ... I was in heaven. That memory is hard-wired in a way not many others are. Billy Crystal has a bit in the movie "City Slickers" about his father taking him to see his first game at Yankee Stadium when was 7 years old where he describes walking up the dark tunnel under the bleachers, holding his father's hand, to emerge into the sun and see the green grass of field in person for the first time. You can just tell he's tapping into a real-life memory.
I mention these two things because I think they establish the time-frame in which you can give a kid one of those memories that they'll be old enough to keep with them their whole life but they'll still be young enough for the things remembered to be larger than life.
I'd like nothing more than for Blake and Amelia's first big league game to be at Fenway one summer between 2011 and 2013 when they're in that 5-7 year old range. Even if they don't turn out to be Red Sox (unthinkable) or even baseball fans, that first site of a ballpark in the sunshine after coming out of a dark tunnel, while holding their dad's hand -- that's a feeling I can't wait to give them.
With any luck we'll be living in NC, not in RI, by then and this experience will involve some planning to line up a flight, a stopover at Uncle Jeremy's, and a rental car because we might as well drive down to the Bronx and show them (the new) Yankee stadium, too.
I haven't been able to watch much baseball this summer but I hope to watch the All-Star game tonight. When I see those guys that haven't played in Yankee Stadium getting out there to soak it all in, I'm going to be thinking about where I want to be in 3 or 4 years with my family: a day game at Fenway, teaching them how to keep score and hoping to catch a foul ball.
A note about the baptist church picket George "the profane atheist" Carlin's funeral via the New Humanist.
A reminder that Angle Season 1 is now on Hulu.com.
A note about the Hartford Courant (America's oldest continuously published daily paper) cutting newsroom staff and number of pages devoted to news.
A clip about the guy from the underappreciated "New Amsterdam" moving on to a new show that is apparently going to be a series of something's-gone-wrong-on-the-holodeck episodes of TNG via Sci-Fi News.
And a nice little clip of one of Obama's advisors reducing Laura Ingraham to a demented harpy. Well, even more of a demented harpy than she normally is via News Hounds.
And on a personal note, I've got a bunch of pictures up at flickr of our day trip to Carver, MA where the littl'uns got to meet their favorite train.
Nutmeg News The All-Bad Edition So everyone has probably seen the video of the hit and run in Hartford of Angel Torres. If you type "Hartford" into YouTube search, about four of the suggestions lead you to it. Nothing else you'd want to see in Hartford, I guess. Or you probably saw it on your local news. (So no, I don't feel like linking to it.) What's shocking is after two cars race into the wrong lane and one of them hits the 78 year old nobody does much of anything for forty seconds or so. None of the bystanders reach him and not one of the ten passing cars stop. Of course it's the existence of video that turned Hartford into the latest example of man's inhumanity to man.
Colin McEnroe, as usual, has the thing worth reading about this. Sometimes, we want to believe the worst about ourselves. Or hey, not ourselves, we're good people. I'm talking the worst about people who live in cities. There's a reason the legend of Kitty Genovese (referenced by Colin) has lasted for so long. Ånd if you think none of this has anything to do with race, you're welcome to visit the Hartford Courant's reader forums, which have gotten pretty ugly, even by Internet standards. So ugly that Mayor Perez has complained to the Courant. Meanwhile, the police chief has complained about our "toxic relationship with ourselves." Okay guys, maybe you could do something better with your time, like catch a hit and run driver or something.
I won't excuse the people in the video who do nothing except to point out that four people called 911 within a minute, a fact being dropped from almost all reports.
Forgive me for thinking this is mostly an excuse to call blacks and Hispanics "sub-human" and "savages." I don't remember this rhetoric being quite this heated for the college students responsible for the fatal hit and run of a 19 year old. Heck, the parents chipped in after the fact to help cover it up so you have some man's inhumanity to man there too and for longer than 40 seconds.
Meanwhile, the Mark Twain House and Museum is in financial trouble, despite some recent state grant help. The Twain house is much more than just a house he happened to live in. Twain designed it and the house remains imbued with his personality and life story. It's a literary and architectural landmark. I've taken the tour three times now and each one was different (except for the "tainted money" line, which was included on all three). Most of the trouble comes from a visitor's center built a few years ago. It is impressive, but seems in size and design better suited to a convention center and it's probably a monster to heat, even in reasonable times.
There are also layoffs and news page reductions coming at the Hartford Courant, which does not currently exactly overflow with news coverage.
Also, what the Courant calls "possibly the state's single most recognizable product" (Hey, not an insurance form!), the United Technology spacesuit, will now be made in Texas by a deep sea company with no space experience. Thanks for forty years of problem-free performance, too bad you HQ in a blue state. At least the company that won the bid isn't named Halliburton Space & Sea.
Also making us sad around here is the news that UConn recruit and national player of the year Elena Delle Donne has left the summer program after two days to return home. I take the statements at face value that this has nothing to do with UConn or her teammates. I'd guess that if she plays basketball it will probably be for UConn. While it would be a shame for someone so talented to give up the sport, you just have to wish her the best and hope things work out for her.
Meanwhile, Dodd looked like he wouldn't be a VP candidate, now maybe he will be. I like Dodd and he certainly didn't get a chance to shaw what a good campaigner he can be during his bid, still I'm not sure what he adds politically to the Obama ticket. Connecticut is certainly in Obama's column and Dodd is nothing if not a Beltway insider. Still, I think he'd be a far better campaigner than the miserable performance turned in by our other senator in 2000. I was rooting for Webb, but that's not to be.
I will be posting even less than usual around here because I'm going on vacation for the week. Any wonder why?
There Is Sir, the Small Matter of the Bill ... It's that time again. The triptychcryptic domain name is up for renewal in August. It's $15/year to renew. I think Primetime covered some or all the expense last time around. Any cryptonauts feeling flush and willing to shuffle a few clams my way to cover?
I'm rooting for Stephanie, interviewed here, and I can't see how anyone would do otherwise. If Lisa wins, there will be riots in the streets, or at least on message boards. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you have healthier habits than me.
Following c-dog's advice, I've been keeping track of my books this year on LibraryThing. I like seeing the covers collected together on my page. It also shatters any idea I may have had about having a highbrow reading list this year. This year I've been trying to concentrate on poker, pulp, crime, books written over 25 years ago and books I've been avoiding, which makes Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards the near-perfect book for early 2008. ("He could handle cards like a master, but could he handle her?")
I recommend LibraryThing if you're getting to the age where maybe you can't remember the name, author or plot of a book you read two months ago but know that maybe it was good. For the second half of 2008, I'm thinking about reading some history, memoirs, and books about movies and would love to hear any suggestions.
