I was complaining about something in The Avengers the day we saw it, and I made some kind of comment that I don’t really remember at the moment. That’s sort of interesting, that I don’t remember the comment, considering the rest of this story. It was a detail about the Capt. America movie, or the Thor movie, and Syd made a mention that she didn’t remember it. She then said something that has been on my mind ever since.

“I never remember things like that. I sort of trained myself not to remember details for that long.” The reasoning was that her trips to the library as a child were non-existent and her trips to the bookstore to get new books were few and far between. As a result, she would have to read the same books over and over again, spacing them out just long enough for the details to have faded from her memory.

That started a long line of things, that all started to click into place for me. Syd’s seen a lot of movies with me and she’s read a lot of books. She’s supposed to know as much about the music of storytelling as I do myself. And yet, she’s so very rarely annoyed by the clichéd, the obvious, and the things that have been done dozens of times and can only seem clever if you’re completely new to movies or books. Now, partly, I’d always put it down to a tolerance for bullshit that I do not posses.

I do not laugh at the joke that I can see coming from miles away. The “He’s adopted” joke just made me curl my lip in disgust. Not only because it shits on adopted kids, but because I could see that joke coming from several miles off. I never laugh at a joke I saw coming from a long way off. Syd claims that there is some enjoyment for some people to get to the punchline before the delivery, like they solved the mystery before anyone else, but I can’t do that and enjoy it.

The same with the “Why should we listen to you?” bit with Capt. America. I knew what the punchline to that sequence was going to be three words into him issuing orders to the cops. I then had to endure 45 years of waiting for the damn line to be delivered so that we could get on with the rest of the movie. I just assume that all the people who laughed at that scene were ignorant of the fact that they’d just seen one of the oldest clichés in the action movie book, and that it wasn’t even done very well. They’ve probably never watched many of the action movies I’ve watched, they just don’t know any better. The fact that they might not have remembered that scene from 3 dozen films and a million billion episodes of tough guy TV shows never actually occurred to me.

Ignorance was an easier answer to be honest. And it’s easy to see, on the surface, how ignorance is the easy answer. Geeks particularly are not well versed outside their comfort zones. Sci-Fi geeks tend to stick to their sci-fi ghettos, only occasionally working their way out to the fantasy realms for supplies and girls in chain mail bikinis. As a result, many geeks will say that The Caves of Steel is their favorite Mystery novel that they’ve ever read. Normally they will neglect to mention, until you persuade them with a car battery and some wet sponges that it is also they only mystery novel they’ve ever read. I know enough people like this, who almost never stray from their chosen section of the book store, to use this as a working hypothesis. It explains why people think a single red herring is an amazing literary device, or that having a detective that listens to opera is innovative, or having the whole fantasy realm actually take place in a future realm that has reverted is new and exciting. If you don’t know… you don’t know. That people might have read or watched, and then forgotten, strangely never occurred to me.

Possibly, it’s because I remember everything. I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday. Now I know what you’re going to say, “That’s no way to treat and expensive musical instrument.” and, you know I love you, but you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock n roll. Now, where was I?

I can remember fine details from a book I read when I was about 6. For example, I can easily remember who the monster at the end of the book was. No spoilers from me, I’m not that kind of guy. I can remember large swaths of history from one viewing of a documentary 15 years ago. I once recognized a movie from a thirty second scene nearly 20 years later. It wasn’t a particularly good movie, but I clearly remembered the scene, the day I watched the part of it I recognized, what I was wearing, what the situation was… I’ve got a lot of details stored up. I can remember the more or less, the plots of almost every book I’ve ever read. I might get a few Robert B. Parker books muddled here and there, but I can give you a beat by beat of a lot things I’ve read. In some cases can recite scenes, and I’ve annoyed people with my ability to rattle off a gestalt version of The Christmas Carol with a running commentary as to how different stage, film and audio versions have changed details. It’s only recently that anyone has ever mentioned that not everyone does some small version of this.

Not only that, but there is a constant comparison being run in my head. How did this movie do this kind of scene, how does it compare to what John Woo or Sam Peckinpah shot. What about Akira Kurosawa, or Sergio Leone. I can recognize visual references about as fast as I recognize audio references, which is more or less instantly. As I say though, it seems most people don’t do this, they just watch the movie. Sometimes, if something really sticks out, they may go “Hey wait a second” but usually it all sort of washes past them and it’s up to me to point out that it doesn’t work for a host of reasons I hand them as we leave the theater. Seriously, it took me less than five minutes to point out all the problems technical I had with Batman Begins. Does no one make pasta in Gotham? Or make tea, or take a bath? And how does an instant evaporation weapon go through metal pipes but not skin? I mean really!

Not only that, but I tend to ask a lot of questions while the film runs. I think about how this character is handling things and how another character might handle them and if the portrayal is being handled realistically. Hence my statement “You’re in Germany genius, maybe you want to tell them to kneel in German, which is what they speak in Germany.” during that scene. Also, my complaint about people with military training using pistols when there were perfectly good rifles sitting around. I have been reliably informed that other people don’t do this.

Going back to the bit with Capt. America telling people to go and what to do, when he got jumped by the expected baddies, I was less taken with his awesome actionness and more asking “Why did they get that close? Shouldn’t you have shaken them before putting the cops at risk? Where is their back up?” and so on. Granted, I was kind of bored during the 9 hours of CGI pixels banging into each other while some green screened actors pretended like they knew what was attacking them.

I’ve only had it brought home to me that even Syd and my father do something I cannot do. I hesitate to use the phrase “Turn off their brains” because neither of them actually disengages their thinking bits. However, I have pointed things out about movies I didn’t like and had my father come back later and explain that now he has trouble watching that movie. However, they are able to get lost into the movie in a way I just don’t find possible. I am always analyzing the book, movie, play, song, particularly when I’m sitting in a dark room doing nothing but watching (Or listening/reading/whatevering) and not being distracted in the slightest. Under that level of scrutiny, the failures magnify and get under my skin, particularly if I’m not enjoying the movie very much. Of course, when I’m enjoying the movie I tend to be able to calculate how much I enjoy the movie.

Part of my problem is that I’ve seen it all and as a result I can see it coming. Now! Genre movies that stick to genre rules, they never bother me like this. So long as their fun, and they follow the rules, I can enjoy them. It’s sort of like music, you know the basic set up of a song when you by an album from a certain band or section of the record store* and you expect to get certain things. You can take changes in the music, even drastic changes, if the song flows. It’s when some pretentious wiener decides he’s going to mess with the formula, but can’t commit that I get annoyed. Brick messed with the formula of a Film Noir, and they stuck to their conceit of having the whole story told with teenagers. As a result, I loved it. It was crispy in just the right way. It’s when someone can’t commit, tries to have it both ways. That gets me annoyed most the time.

Also, I just get annoyed seeing the same thing play out over and over. When a big movie is predictable, that makes me sad. That is possibly why I do actually like movies like Graffiti Bridge. You can’t say that you know where that movie is going when you watch it for the first time. Mostly, because it’s kind of incoherent, but it will surprise you at least once. Or flabbergast, I’ll take flabbergast in a pinch. If you’ve got all the money though, I would like to see something new once in a while, particularly if you’re doing superheroes. Don’t give me the superhero equivalent of Titanic or Avatar. Give me the superhero equivalent of Dr. Strangelove, or the The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (a highly underrated movie) which never bored me and gave me lots of things to see, and think about.


So yeah, my brain works differently, and I don’t stop considering every scene and the implications of it. This is also possibly why I have a problem with stupid characters, I can see their downfall coming two or three seasons away on some TV shows. I don’t feel clever, or superior when the downfall comes, just bored that I wasted so much time when I knew exactly what was going to happen.





*For those of you who are only zygotes. There used to be these places called record stores, where you would buy music on a sort of black disc. Remember mp3s? You know how sometimes you’d get them off a cd? Well a record is like a CD only there were grooves that you needed to decode the music. And you’d buy one or two records at a time at a store that was JUST for records. Sometimes there were tapes (but we won’t get started on tapes) and eventually CDs, but then the internet came and swept them all away. And good riddance too, the people who worked there were usually assholes who hated whatever it was you bought and wanted you to listen to The Doors.

OR How did you become more annoying than a sparkling vampire?

The guy who makes the Oatmeal made a comic extolling the virtues of Tesla. Like a lot of comics it was full of exaggerations. Like most things involving Tesla, it demonized Thomas Edison and regurgitated a bunch of things that have long since proven to be not true. Or, as we say in my business, lies. Forbes called him on it. The Oatmeal made a very weak response. And he goes on about that goddamn elephant. The one they were going to kill anyway… the one that had already killed three people… and they’d fed a bunch of cyanide to before hitting the switch. And Edison didn’t even flip the switch, or personally record the event.

And if Edison was a bastard (hint – he was actually) why is it never mentioned that Tesla was a nut?

In short, I get seriously irked when people tell me that Tesla invented everything that Leonardo DaVinci didn't invent. Mostly because, when you look into it... he didn't. He invented several things, a towering genius perhaps, but he didn't invent anything like the list his fanboys claim he did. Edison wasn't nearly as evil as Tesla fanboys (who need a villain for the story) claim he was. If you're lying to big your hero up, and put the other guy down YOU ARE STILL LYING! It does neither side any good when you lie. It makes people ignore everything you have to say. Even if this is just a comic, it’s a comic trying to tell people about how Tesla was awesome and Edison was a dick.





If you’re going to present facts, present facts. Otherwise, you will get called on it. Tesla was a great guy, a wonderful inventor, and a hell of a humanitarian that chose to save an entire company and all the people who worked for it instead of getting paid. The reason no one lauds Tesla like they’re supposed to is because once they start looking into claims people make, they find out most of they were told is lies and exaggeration. After they discover that the death ray and the communication with aliens is a lie, and the radar story is at best an exaggeration, they will decide that he probably didn’t really have anything to do with the electric motor. I’ve met a person that didn’t believe he had anything to do with perfecting Alternating Current because, “The death ray is a lie, the aliens thing is a lie, the transporter is a lie, everything anyone says about the guy is a lie.”

And that’s sad, because it’s the enthusiasm gone into overdrive for the thing they love that tends to push people who aren’t already fans away. It killed Firefly, it harmed Star Trek severely for decades, and now it’s ruining Tesla. And here we really come to my point, that fanboys have been slowly killing the things they love by driving people away. The internet has made this worse, because it focuses everyone into little bubbles where everyone agrees with them. That creates a slanted world view in which one side is the good guys and the other side is the bad guys and you are either on one side or the other. There is no middle ground between hating Twilight and being on Team Whoever… probably Abraham.

In fact, the guy writing the oatmeal makes the worst error possible. Near the end, he tells people they have to Pick a Side. NO! You don’t have to pick a goddamn side you stupid arrogant fuck. You can, in fact, straddle the mighty chasm you’ve artificially created and admire things about both men while deploring things about both men. You don’t have to drive away someone just because they admit there are things about Edison that they like. You can encourage learning about one man without having to tear the other down. In fact, it is that tear down that turns people off the most.

Again, allow us to talk about Twilight for a moment. On one side, you have people who pant after a sparkling vampire, on the other side you have these people who foam at the mouth and rant and rave about how horrible it is, how awful, how girls aren’t smart enough not to act like Bella unless we burn all those worthless books that this evil Mormon bitch (not that you’re a bigot mind) has wrought upon our world and smite the unbelievers.

…


The other side has a sparkling vampire. How did you become more annoying than a sparkling vampire? Seriously, take a good hard look at yourself and ask how you became more of an irritant to me than a vampire that… sparkles. That has to be one of the stupidest monster traits I have ever heard of, and you just got yourself pegged lower on the list than THAT! Come to think of it, the Jar-Jar haters become far more annoying than Jar-Jar ever was, because that movie only ran 2 hours where as the ranting goes on to this day.

We need to have a serious discussion about how the uber-fan and the anti-fan are hurting their own cause. So there should probably be a part two at some point.

If a person wants to put two sticks of cinnamon, a few cloves, some juniper berries and some allspice and put it in... say a cup's worth of vodka, and put that in a small mason jar (say one that hold s a cup of fluid) then one should remember that cinnamon is a powerful motherfucker (Samuel L. Jackson style) and that the resultant liquid will make you yearn for the day you mistook a scotchbonnet for a jalapeno (I just cutting and wasn't really looking) because GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKER!

HOWEVER! If one has two cups of gin, that one had previously infused some gin with apples, and put a small amount of the cinnamon vodka into the apple gin, one could make a rather nice cinnamon apple drink if you don't put too much cinnamon into the mixture. A little dab will do ya. I did a little too much and had to cut it with some of the apple vodka, which is delish.

The pear vodka still tastes like vodka however*. I'm thinking more apple stuff next time. Had the best luck with apples so far.


*Yes it motherfucking DOES TOO have a taste. Viciousness, evil and a country boy's ass (don't ask) are tastes and that's what vodka tastes like.

So we saw The Avengers...

- I lost count of the amount of times people stopped using rifles during firefights because Pistols Is Better!

- Every time the characters started fighting, I wanted someone to pick Ryu so that the Marvel Vs Capcom feeling would be complete. Every big scene felt empty and flaccid to me, it had all the impact of watching someone else play a video game.

- Am, I only person who said "Tell me about the lambs" during the big tell me about the lambs scene?

- What military sky boat (a supremely stupid idea in the comics and worse in the movie) would have less failsafe and fall back precautions than a modern airliner?

- Does no one in New York City have any kind of self preservation sense at all? 15 minutes into a full blown alien attack and people are still gaping by windows hoping to get glass shards in the face.

- Those sky serpent things, were they some kind of left over design that Michael Bay decided not to use for the Transformers movies?

- A lot of the lines in this movie make no sense when you think about them. "They'll come." "How can you know?" "We'll need them." That's no kind of answer!

- I have a nifty shield! I have a magic hammer! I have super strength! I have a full blow Deus Ex Machina suit! I have a... 9mm pistol... I'm just here for T&A aren't I?

- So many of the jokes and quips fell flat for me that I started to resent the idea of laughing when one actually amused me. By the time Hulk punched Thor, I just sighed and looked away from the screen.

- And the guy who got Jossed was totally Jossed. That was not story supported, it was a cheap trick performed by a bad writer with no other way to make people care.

- Over all Joss Whedon remains a rather cheap hack with a rather shallow bag of tricks. If you like his bag of tricks, it's probably fine. I hate his bag of tricks and the movie was chock full of the things I don't like about his work.

Otherwise it was okay. I didn't want to kill anyone, I didn't want to ram chopsticks into my eyes, but Joss Whedon is still a shitty writer and I don't like his works, but this is the closest I've ever come to not hating every minute of it. If we'd been watching at home though, I would have walked out less than halfway through and not finished it.

I had limoncello for the first time last night, quite liked it. Looks like it's dead easy to make, a simple infusion with some sugar added. I've already made apple gin and peach vodka, so this should be pretty easy.

yeah, some days I got nothing.

Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me.

Would you rub the lotion on your skin? Or would you get ht hose again?

No matter what you’re working conditions, at some point it will become necessary to remove a co-worker from the coffee pool and most likely deposit them in a bog of some variety. Method of elimination greatly depends on your individual work environment, but needless to say an actual knife in the back is no longer permissible. Knives tend to cause a lot of blood, which only causes the poor, underpaid cleaning staff to have to work harder. One must remember that the polite individual considers those with a lower social standing as well as those of equal or greater standing. While it may be true that no man is a hero to his valet, one might be a hero to the cleaning woman and her services can become invaluable when disposal of a body is needed.

In most office situations, a bludgeon is inadvisable as one needs room to swing, many hits may be needed, and heads do split open and cause the goo inside to splatter if one gets carried away. The grunts and repeated thunks of the object hitting the skull will also disturb your fellow workers. If one is considering removing a co-worker, that person has probably caused enough grief for the rest of the office and at least their departed should be quiet.

In these quiet situations, a length of phone wire with ballpoint pens at each end for leverage makes a serviceable device to garrote your troublesome desk pilot. Simply throw the wire over the head, wrap it around once and squeeze until life is extinguished. The eyes will bulge, the tongue will protrude from the mouth and swell, but life may remain. Dedication is needed for such a job as this and one must keep continual pressure even after the victim has passed out. Once struggling has ceased, tying a knot into the wire to keep it tight around the throat is often advisable to make certain that all life is squeezed out. If one needs to ensure that no struggling will take place what-so-ever, a single blow delivered to the back of the head with something like a paper weight will often render the donut thief unconscious long enough to wrap the wire around their neck and tie it tight.

When the troublesome ex-employee is dealt with, one may need to remove the body quickly. This is where disturbing your co-workers is acceptable, as you will need their help to remove the former seat warmer. It is considered bad form to abuse the corpse unduly, but leaving it in the dumpster is acceptable as practicality must sometimes rule the day.



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Each time I watch Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I find that it's actually sort of okay. It's still the least of the 4 Indy movies, but it's not quite that bad. I don't hate Mutt, the bike/car chase actually works, and it's always nice seeing Indy doing Indy stuff. It's just that too many things don't work, and that fridge thing nearly sinks the whole movie on its own.

Disney makes everything touch sensitive.

‘Virus-Tickling’ Device Creates Clean Energy

Just reviewed the 1991 classic Mobsters

And we just started Chapter 2 of Twins in Death this week.

You know, I watched 5 episodes of David Tennant's Dr. Who before I happened across an episode where he didn't flat out murder an entire race, or at least all the representatives of that race that the show was telling us about. One of the episodes even included an allusion to the idea that Tony Blair was right to help invade Iraq and that the invasion didn't go far enough because it left some Iraqis alive/didn’t nuke all of Iraq. Five episodes of murder and genocide before he didn't wipe out an entire race, and that was only because they were the most pathetic race in the whole Whoverse. And while they didn't kill the Ood, they did kill Everton, which you should never ever do. I kind of got tired of it and started asking if he kills eveyone he come across. Even when he doesn't flat out kill them, he sentences them to an eternal living death, which is supposed to be better in some way that I don't quite understand.

And I really hated Blink, didn't like any part of it.

Now Syd wants me to watch an episode that rips off The Poseidon Adventure, forgetting how much I loath rip off episodes and The Poseidon Adventure.

I think I might just be done with Dr. Who, at least any of the new stuff.

Today's XKCD is 100% Spot on

Once again, the right proves it has no interest in protecting rights, only removing them.

I'm loosing what little sympathy I have for the very, very few decent Christians in this country. Too much interference in people’s lives, too much insistence we all live in whatever stunted way a couple of bigots demand through they're misunderstanding of a Bronze Age document.

At this point, given the decent human to bigot ratio, asking all the Christians to leave the country would be throwing a homoeopathic amount of baby out with all that bathwater.

What the hell is going on in this photo?

You never see Moses and Jesus in the same room... just saying.

One a similar subject, felisdemens might be Superman and droewyn is very probably Sailor Moon.

The French Rule for dating claims that the youngest person you should date is someone who is half your age +7. I'm 35, so it would be 17.5 + 7 = 24.5 years old is the youngest person I should date.

So now you know what I'm talking about if I mention it.

\The biggest problem would be finding a girl who at the age of 24 would bother saying "And a half" after her age.

We can’t stop here Dave, this is Dalek Country.

I was thinking of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for a retroflix review, but I had a problem. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson dropped a seed into my brain, and I can’t think about the movie without dealing with that seed.

Allow me to quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Sci-Fi was basically mired in that self-same belief for decades. If you read all of the Space Odyssey books, you find that there are more Monoliths are more numerous than just the movie makes them seem. There are many monoliths and the reason for them is that a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings sent them to earth was to advance our evolution from one stage to another. Eventually they decide we’re cool and let us into their mouse club just like a Monty Python sketch!

Now, do me a favor and go read the bit about the acid culture again.

I can’t get this idea out of my head that Arthur C. Clarke fell into the same sort of trap along with a lot of other writers. Star Trek does it, B5 does it, Dr. Who does it. Asimov doesn’t do it as directly, but he does some. So many of the writers, names and stories I’ve mostly forgotten now, so many aliens and supercomputers playing as a stand in for God. There seems to be this need to reach out to a god, or a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, or possibly just a really smart robot. Star Wars doesn’t, and I’ve noticed that’s one of the reasons some sci-fi fans hold it in contempt. You could argue that The Force is appealing, but I argue that it’s just a sort of unfocused spiritualism. More of a way to define the walls of the tunnel than any sort of light tender.

I have noticed though, that it happens a lot more with older sci-fi than the newer stuff. By newer I mean the mid 90s or so, because… you know. I remember some of Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick being very down on the idea of religion as a whole. English movies and TV shows were much more apt to say either there was no God, or we were alone in the universe during the 80s. Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker’s Guide come to mind. Rationalism came to Sci-Fi in the way the genre always pretended it subscribed to. A wave of atheism rolled in after a while, and then rolled back as people who should have embraced the idea of humanity doing it for itself drifted back into their deeply conservative ways while nominally holding liberal views. Gods and super-advanced races of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings were once again all the rage, lending a helping hand or leaving us in our purgatories with that unexplained polar bear.

So now, you can stand near a closed down book store, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see that high-water mark. The place where the wave broke and rolled back. Or maybe there was no wave, maybe it was just a small ripple of rationalism in an otherwise over-godded pond.

So yeah, Hunter S. Thompson and Arthur C. Clarke referenced in the same post. Not everyone does that. Next time I’ll talk about what My Little Pony and the Russian Revolution have to do with each other.

While I own many ugly, but interesting, objects I also own several objects that are just beautiful to look at. While I've been compiling lists, I've discovered something interesting. Most the really ugly things, I bought myself or my father got for me. Almost all the truly beautiful things, other people gave to me. Or gave to Syd and I, whatever.

Today we'll look at a nice plair of Japanese Woodblock Prints.
( Read on… )

Those of you, who have been to my home, will remember that I have excellent tastes. I am a particularly good decorator, even if I tend to think minimalism is something that happens to other people. I have many lovely and interesting things scattered about my home, because I have a spectacular sense of design, color and arrangement. Everyone compliments Syd on the way she’s decorated the house, and then get sort of sheepish when she tells them that most the selection and placement was done by me.

NOW!

Here’s the thing. I don’t just have lovely things. I have a spectacular sense of style, it’s true, but I also have a perverse need to offend that style on occasion.

I also have some wonderfully hideous things. Things that no woman I’ve ever been with has been able to say that she really approves of. We’re going to investigate some of those items, beginning with these fucking things…

These are the hands.



( Read on… )

In 1922, Scientists at Cornell University conclusively proved that Honey Bees can’t fly without a Class C Pilot’s license.

Later that same year, at the New Brunswick College for advanced Research it was discovered that honey bees don’t actually make honey but gather it through daring nighttime raids of the nests of the Canadian Honey Wasp who manufacture it from the pollen they steal from Chinese Limpet Ants.



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I want to so some still life photography, mimicing Still Life paintings only I'd need to set up my lights to do it. Or I need to rearrange the furniture a bit.

I don't know why, but most the still life paintings I've seen have the light source to the left of the frame. This is so prevalent that when I see one that isn’t, I end up yelling “AH-HA!” which bugs the hell out of Syd.

What I want to do it recreate, as nearly as possible, the lighting and crowded nature of a Dutch Still Life.


Here is an attempt...



And here is Vienna "Helping"

My right hand has told me, in no uncertian terms, that it has had enough of my shit.

I wish I knew what triggers these little boughts of arthritis. There doesn't ever seem to be any rhyme or reason.

Sometimes it's my left hand, sometimes my right. Usually the fingers, but not always.