A person's a person, no matter how small

Lesson learned the hard way #1763: hyperventilation is a scary, scary thing, especially when your hands and face go stiff and numb, and even if you can hear the fire department medics' sirens coming five blocks away from the very popular neighborhood farmers' market where you are having a very public anxiety attack.

Now heavily sedated after a trip to the ER, I am left with nothing to do but sleep and watch DVDs, get through a stack of books, and be a human jungle gym for the neffy.

Outpassage was very, very, very bad sci-fi. The only reason I finished reading it was because I held out hope it would get better. It didn't. It was so bad, I don't want to grant it any legitimacy by summarizing it. The idiot plot involving aliens as humans' religious salvation and a social revolution with no defined goals. Arrrgh. Anyways....

After much hype, The Queen was a bit of a disappointment. It was certainly good, and Helen Mirren was brilliant in her portrayal of the Queen in the week immediately following the death of Princess Diana. Michael Sheen was equally as good as the newly-elected Tony Blair (though I couldn't stop thinking of The Daily Show interview where Jon Stewart slammed the real Blair for supporting Bush in the Iraq war). James Cromwell was also a natural double for Prince Philip.

The film focused more on the role of the monarchy in modern Britain and the interplay between Blair and the Queen. Whether or not any of the conversations or relationships depicted in the film were real or accurate is left to the imagination and possibly state secrecy. As with many movies made about events during its audience's lifetime, I kept thinking "I remember that!" and it was a little weird having cinematic liberties intrude into my own memories. And the metaphor of the stag the Queen keeps encountering in the Highlands is a tad obvious. But overall, the movie is good.

From one royal family to another, Curse of the Golden Flower was a fictitious story about a scandalous coup inside the Royal Palace, involving a bizzare, almost Hamlet-esque, uh, fall of the house of Usher. If I may mix my literary references. It is kind of a disturbing tale of glorified domestic violence: Emperor and Empress plot against each other, three princes are rivals for the throne, and there are all kinds of unknown incestuous situations happening behind the veiled rooms of the Forbidden City.

The storyline isn't all that compelling. But like other Zhang Yimou films, this one had all the wonderfully vivid colors and visual contrasts, as well as the neat martial arts choreography and battle sequences. The golds, reds, blacks, greens, and blues were magnificent.

There was also a lot of cleavage in the ladies' costumes (I do not remember this from Hero or House of Flying Daggers... but it made the scenes at court somehow more distracting and reminiscent more of 18th-century France.)

Happier fare was very much needed after that bloodbath.

Horton Hears a Who used to be one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books.
Obviously, the 80-minute cartoon added greatly to a twenty-page book (there was also a weird anime breakdown midway through the film). I don't recall many of the specific details, but some of the subplots didn't ring a bell, though they fit in with the theme that "Everybody counts." Horton, our favorite elephant jungle resident, hears the small village of Who on a tiny clover plant, and goes to great lengths to get the rest of the jungle to believe him and not destroy the ecosystem -- I mean, the tiny world that exists.

Also, all of Whoville crying "We're here" to get Horton's cohorts to realize they exist couldn't help but be completed with "We're queer!" I had to do it, it was irresistible.

Qualifying exams? What qualifying exams?

My, my, how can I resist you?

Why did nobody tell me Colin Firth was in Mamma Mia!???!!! I had a great shock finding it in La Madre's pile of DVDs, right next to Passion of the Christ and Babe: Pig in the City.

(Come to think of it, when I mentioned karaoke last summer, she might have mentioned going to see the movie with some coworkers.... And the storyline involves mothers and daughters and is full of song and dance numbers about children growing up, so it's something La Madre would buy.)

It was pure ABBA cheese, with a corny plot, but it was awesome. (I'm on vacation, everything is awesome.) I was only vaguely familiar with the plot of the play: bride-to-be invites three of her mother's ex-lovers to her wedding, hoping one of them's her father and can walk her down the aisle. Everybody breaks into ABBA songs every few minutes. The story takes place on a paradisical Greek island, and the locals are the (haha) Greek chorus/backup vocals. The ending credits are disco numbers. It is, indeed, one of the gayest things ever.

Amanda Seyfried, who plays the bride, looks 12 years old, which was really kind of disturbing and jarring, especially since her childhood friends are clearly decades older. But Meryl Streep was absolutely brilliant and clearly had fun in her role. Pierce Brosnan singing was, frankly, hilarious.

And it had Colin Firth! Happiness in a DVD box.

We seek him here, we seek him there...

Unexpectedly hungover on Valentine's Day due to unexpected drinking with a classmate on Friday the 13th, I thought reading the book she lent me was appropriate.

Having seen several film versions, the story of The Scarlet Pimpernel is all too familiar: mysterious Englishman rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. I didn't know the books were a series, so the movies I've seen must combine several plotlines. Otherwise, the Jane Seymour version (which I've seen the most, and really love) was pretty faithful to most of the book.

The part it wasn't faithful to was actually a relief. Something about having the "cleverest woman in Europe" "humbled" by walking miles, being captured and gagged by French spies, and sitting helpless in a useless attempt to try and save the man she loves (he's so clever, he doesn't need her help) from the harm she put him in in the first place just didn't sit well with me. I know, I know, it was written as a play in 1905 and takes place in 1792, not exactly eras strong on female autonomy and empowerment. (There's a lot of over-the-top, overly romantic pining and swooning going on, too.) Also, I guessed the "trick" of the daring escape at the end of the book, which is very different from the movies. That detracted a bit from the excitement of it all.

Other than that, it was a good adventure story.

What dreams may come

I think I'm almost done reading all of Connie Willis' books, an obsession going back a year and a half that kick-started the newfound appreciation for science fiction. There's one more novel that's hard to track down, but other than that, I've read most of her stories.

Note to self: do not read anything that might even tangentially address the death of loved ones in a hospital, the week before the anniversary of one.

Oops.

The plot of Passage: hospital-based medical researchers interview patients who have had near-death experiences (NDEs), and then test drugs that replicate them and map brainwave patterns, in an effort to explain what neurological function NDEs serve. Their lab observations and hypotheses compete directly with a resident celebrity author who believes NDEs are communications with angels and dead loved ones, conveying messages and even conferring psychic powers from the Other Side. It taking place in a hospital, there are many, many references to death and dying. Two other main characters are an ER nurse surrounded by an increasingly dangerous and violent patient pattern and a little girl waiting for a heart transplant who is obsessed with learning about high-casualty historical disasters. Foreshadowing, anyone?

Though not as despairing as Doomsday Book, Passage is still one of Willis' more depressing novels. I finished it today, since Intellectual Property class was cancelled, and ending up tearing up through the last half of the book. Geez. It's well-written, of course, and in Willis' quirky but cool way is full of odd trivia -- famous people's last words, random facts about the Titanic, Hindenburg, and Hatfield Circus tragedies.

In a way, this one book of Willis' combined ideas from a lot of her others: the sham spiritualists of Inside Job, the factoids and laboratory setting of Bellwether, the examination of the subconscious from Lincoln's Dreams... Part of me is still not willing to classify her as a sci-fi writer, though she's won a ton of Nebula and Hugo awards in the field. I guess it's because the themes of her most of her books are "normal" enough to be set in everyday and anyday scenarios . . . and also because I'm still clinging to my own stereotypes about what constitutes science fiction. It is also cute that most of her stories are somehow tied to the Denver area, even the ones that take place in alternate histories. Kind of like how Michael Moore always, somehow, manages to connect his documentaries back to Flint. (I, for one, am always partial to the hometown tip-o'-the-hat.)

Good book, just wasn't expecting the heavy subject matter.

Makes trademark law seem so lighthearted!

Form and function

It sucks to have both the grad student version of senioritis and the busiest semester ever. The result is a sort of binge-and-purge of late nights reading exhausting case studies and afternoons goofing off online. Throughout the week, it's a mad scramble to read and write assignments, and review material for exam study group sessions. Also, it does not help that two classes are heavy on Supreme Court decisions, which can be unnecessarily verbose.

Gods and Monsters somehow ended up in my Netflix queue. I'm not the biggest horror film junkie or early-film buff, so I'd never heard of James Whale. Apparently the story was loosely based on the life of the early Frankenstein films' director, who was also openly gay.

The movie takes place in the '50s, with Ian McKellen as the aging legendary director and Brendan Fraser as his gardener who reluctantly agrees to pose for one of Whale's personal projects.

The beauty of the film lies in its patchwork of scenes -- there are flashbacks to Whale's childhood, his wartime experiences, the heights of his early career. Then there are the nightmarish scenes of shadowy figures, appropriate both for conveying the imaginative capabilities of a horror film director and for a film about confronting the horrors of the one's history, existence, and future. It's a beautiful, if depressing, tribute to the hazy mirror that films in general hold to the human experience.

To counter that heavy blow (and to avoid homework), I finally watched Wedding Crashers. The premise is well known: two commitment-phobic buddies crash weddings to pick up chicks; one of them eventually falls for a girl. Most of the movie had promise -- it was funny and had quirky, bizarre characters and situations. I was disappointed in the ending, though: it was too quickly wrapped up with the predictable dramatic scene of every romantic comedy. (One of the many, many reasons I hate romantic comedies, incidentally. Why does there always have to be a very public rejection and a very public reunion, one or both of which is frequently at a wedding? It's a little annoying.) At any rate, the movie is hilarious overall.

Finally, to pretend I was sort of getting work done, I read The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters, which came to my attention while browsing the local indy bookstore's sale table.

I didn't love it. Didn't hate it either, it just didn't captivate me. I know Chip Kidd is supposed to be some kind of graphics design genius, but I wasn't impressed by his writing. There were sentences here and there that struck me as funny or unique, but ultimately not memorable.

The story itself is kind of crap, and fairly unoriginal: boy goes off to college, meets hot but disturbed alternative artist chick, and together they wisecrack their way through class with a professor intent on crushing their souls. But two things save the book: first, the tangents about the nature and role of graphics design in American culture. Those were succinctly but artistically-phrased insights into art as mediator, art as power, art as product. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them, and there's way too much pontificating by the characters on artistic conventions and misplaceed fame. (How hip, to be un-hip. But I get bored with and easily annoyed by that kind of pretention....) I was also not a fan of the anachronisms; the story takes place in 1958, but there are product references that are out of place.

Lastly (and appropriately), the book cover itself is fun. The front cover is a rhebus; the title pages are chopped off at various points. And the sides of the book have phrases written on them that aren't readable until the book is opened. At first, I thought someone had written illegibly on the book, until I started reading and then happened to look at the sides; there are two different phrases superimposed, one read while holding the book properly and the other holding it upside down, which was why it looked like some stoned student had scribbled on the side.

It was pretty cool.

I can pretend I was doing homework by figuring out which parts of it are copyrightable, and where exactly the idea/expression dichotomony can be determined by statute....

Stuck in lab

Hmmm, not a good weekend for the new-found sci-fi appreciation.

Though I am normally a fan of good cheesy fun, Spider-Man 3 did not qualify. The CG work was great, but the conquer-your-evil-nature theme was way overdone (Spider-Man's final internal struggle is inside a church, for crying out loud), and definitely did not need to last over two hours. The movie seemed more concerned with wrapping up loose ends from parts 1 and 2. If I thought it was worth over-analysis, I'd rant more about how I suspect the Spider-Man series depicts unhealthy messages about how mutant "science" destroys "traditional family values", but I don't think it is.

Also, I've never been the biggest fan of Tobey Maguire; I dunno, his supposed "boy next door" image has always come across to me as creepy and clingy. But Topher Grace was great as Peter Parker's rival photographer.

Rather than starting a paper, I finally finished the last in the Hitchhiker series, from the large volume that Xtina lent me. The fifth installment, a short story entitled "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe", is more of a prequel. Technically the story can stand alone, apart from the rest of the series. It was short and had some insightful lines. But it didn't really grab me. Also, wikipedia tells me there's a highly political inference to the story (which I approve but didn't catch).

Finally, because an old friend raved about it, I watched the pilot for the new FOX series Fringe. I don't mind bad TV (witness CSI: New York), but this one didn't quite grab me either. It seemed like a fairly unoriginal combination of Eleventh Hour, House, 24, and Alias . . . starring Pacey from Dawson's Creek. It even takes place in Boston!

Sigh. No choice but to start writing that paper now...

Costs and benefits

I intended to finish The Audacity of Hope over winter break, but never got around to it. What the hell, finishing it on MLK Day, and the day before the Obama inauguration works as symbolically as any other day, I suppose.

A few years ago, I read Dreams from My Father and still think it's one of the best memoirs of the evolving journey that is multiracial identity. This second book is obviously more politics-oriented: each chapter is a different large issue, explored through Obama's Senate experience and personal anecdotes.

The last four chapters are the ones most worth reading, I think: "Faith", "Race", "The World Beyond Our Borders", and "Family".

The general theme for each issue is that Democrats approach policies in this area one way, Republicans another, and that people are bitterly divided. It's the speech he gave at the 2004 DNC in Boston, revised and amplified and repeated again and again. The call for cooperation and mutual is hammered home pretty hard: Obama even goes out of his way on each issue to point out where he sees understands where conservatives are coming from, and where he thinks liberals need to back off. And then he lays out broad solutions that are undoubtedly Democractic and incredibly articulated. Bernie Horn mentioned in his book that Obama gets framing -- and that's absolutely clear here.

There's nothing very specific, though, in terms of actual policies. But I know that crafting intricate legislative strategies wasn't the point of the book. And though I do have a few minor quibbles with a few of the positions and statements mentioned in the book, overall it's a great general introduction to the biggest issues in contemporary American public policy.

The one chapter I had a hard time getting through was "Opportunity", which was basically my Econ class (which I also have a hard time staying awake for). So to make up for zonking out on the econ-heavy chapter, I watched Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price.

The slightly creepy thing was that Greenwald had no narrator -- I counted once where a disjointed voice tossed out statistics. The bulk of the documentary were the voices of former employees, current employees, union organizers, community activists, and snippets from CEO speeches and Wal-Mart commercials.

I'd heard the allegations of gender and racial discrimination, environmental irresponsibility, and union-busting; those have been highlighted pretty well in the mainstream media. But Greenwald brought up two new charges that struck me as particularly awful, if true: that Wal-Mart underpays and underbenefits its employees so much that they encourage them to seek public assistance, potentially straining local resources; and that Wal-Mart does little to keep its parking lots safe, encouraging crime. I have no idea if other large retail conglomerates have similar practices or problems (I do know that parking lots in general, not just Wal-Mart's, are where many crimes occur), so maybe Greenwald is blowing both out of proportion. But at least he raises the issues of corporate responsibility, and that Wal-Mart as the wealthiest company in the world has the duty to set the example in its community relations and employment practices.

A key missing piece was community complicity in the success of Wal-Mart and the reasons for it. After starting with a barrage of interviews of small business owners in small towns driven out of business by the arrival of Wal-Mart. But there was no explanation for why people flock (or are forced to flock out of economic necessity) to the newer, larger chain store, other than the low prices themselves. The film ends with the inspiring tale of community coalitions organizing and successfully stopping Wal-Mart from building in their communities.

Another issue I found fascinating that Greenwald touched on only tangentially was in the area of municapal zoning: that downtown business areas in small towns are dying as giant retail lots are built on the outskirts of towns and in suburbs, thus redirecting traffic routes and contributing to urban sprawl.

At any rate, the documentary definitely hammered home its points. I think it intended largely to preach to the choir.

Aaaaaand, now I have to go read for Econ*.



*Technically it's a Public Policy class on current affairs, but the course is entitled Economic Growth with Equity, and the guest lecturers and discussion leaders are all economists, including one Nobel winner. I forced myself not to drop the class partly because it's highly relevant right now, and partly to save face for not knowing the exact focus of the course before blabbing to both my department director and the dean of policy affairs (who are co-teaching) about how excited I was to take it. In my defense, the registrar's office had only a vague description, and last semester the course focused on Policy Advice to the Next President. Ahem. We live, we learn..

La vie, elle continue

There's a point in your busiest-ever semester (of grad school, at least) where you just crack. Patent laws, copyright infringement, the rights of journalists, and color-coded charts of last quarter's unemployment figures inexplicably blur. Procrastinating on Facebook doesn't make it all go away, but a three-day weekend with almost-arctic temps certainly helps to cloud those pending deadlines!

For some odd, out-of-touch reason, I didn't know Clerks was a Kevin Smith film. I was expecting a bad popular slapstick comedy (and honestly wanted one) when I put it to the head of my Netflix queue before Winter Break. Yes, it's taken that long to get around to watching it.

It was not the brain candy I craved. The existential agonies of a convenience store clerk and his video store clerk buddy were out of the blue. It was great stuff (I'm a sucker for indy flicks with characters who rant and ramble about the meanings of life), just unexpected.

The film gives a little too much weight, I think, to agency alone -- the main character's "Why me?" (or rather, "I'm not even supposed to be here!") is repeatedly answered by pointing solely to his own life choices, even though the parade of customers remind him of how his destiny, for lack of a better word (what else can counter free will?), is unfortunately wrapped up in others' life choices. There was an overt preachiness that didn't sit well with me once applied outside the microcosm of the convenience store itself. Of course, I liked it for exactly that reason! More procrastination material for snowy weekends.

On a side note ... Good Lord, did we all really dress like in 1992? And I'd forgotten that lisping was a brief fad then ... the character of the cheating ex-girlfriend reminded me of that, and it annoyed the hell out of me.

At Torgo's suggestion, I watched Man on Wire. As promised, it was brilliant.

A story of a French highwire artist's attempt to walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, the structure of the documentary itself was captivating. There are the interviews with Philippe Petit himself, his accomplices, and others; the re-enactments of the "heist"; a theatre, stand-up style monologue with Petit; and then there is actual footage from personal home videos. It's a great tale, skillfully presented. The story itself is what it is, and Petit and his helpers clearly love retelling it, recounting how the combination of the beauty and the danger of it made it so breathtaking.

Petit is clearly slightly crazy as well as a bit full of himself. But that doesn't detract from his achievement. It does, however, make the last few minutes of the film bittersweet and heartbreaking, as the viewer realizes how the pivotal act itself changes him so much. It's the quintessential dilemma in art: art for art's sake fundamentally changes when it collides with fame, and the casualties are usually very human and very tangible. As a portrait of art and a commentary on beauty and life, the film is strikingly poignant.

When I looked up the year Petit's book was published I found several references to the fact that 9/11 was deliberately kept out of the film so as not to detract from Petit's daredevil and artistic accomplishment. But realistically, all viewers were watching it with 9/11 in mind; and the fact that Petit's book about the feat came out post-9/11 also points to some retrospective attempt to inscribe meaning to the endeavor. (I, for one, also couldn't get the recent plane landing out of my mind every time I glimpsed the Hudson from Petit's vantage point atop the WTC... but that's a different rambling about the lives of cities themselves.)

The very absence of a world-changing event, of course, is still the essence of art and continual renegotiating of its meaning to different audiences. It's still art and still beautiful, but for different reasons.

Lastly, an overdue veg-out ... The Mummy films are decent, cheesy fun. (When the first one came out, I watched it for Brendan Fraser; now, I shake my head in embarrassment at my youthful folly. Why -- why??? But we live, we learn....)

Anyways, Part Three was equally as cheesy, and easily the dorkiest of the series. I chose to ignore all the various cultural stereotypes and characters (from the eccentric English nobles to the exotified Chinese sorceress), because there'd be no end. I will also admit that I was playing word games online while El Otro Cuñado watched it on Christmas Day.

Yetis help fight the evil Chinese general who wants to resurrect the powers of an ancient mummy. Yetis! That sort of puts everything in perspective.

(And Foremost)

Borrowing, as so often, from the FG (and also because I'm buried under coursework for a journalism class on the First Amendment in a Digital Age and a law class on Intellectual Property), here's a wordle to inspire both art and procrastination:

Source: http://www.wordle.net/

A cup of kindness yet

Every year I steal this from -- er, "am inspired by"-- a friend, who likes to reflect on all the "firsts" from the past year.

New experiences from 2008 include:

• A nephew -- He arrived in February, and I met him when he was two weeks old, making him the smallest baby I've ever held. Currently at 10 months, he is crawling around, can happily punch me on the nose, and has been hiding items in my suitcase. In June he got to meet his cousin, which was a cute family reunion.
  
  
• An internship -- Believe it or not, I'd never had one, in high school or college. Spent May through August at home in Seattle interning for a great state PAC and learning a lot about local campaigns. Which brings to mind...
  
  
• Doorbelling -- Tons of work experience in legislative affairs and political advocacy, but none on electoral campaigns and strategy. I went doorbelling for candidates for the first time, something I was absolutely terrified to do for a candidate (the only other time I'd done it was in '01 for an environmental nonprofit, with bad experiences.)
  
  
• Picking a winner in the presidential primary (and the general!) Let's just say the people I voted for in the '00 and '04 primaries didn't make it past Super Tuesday, and I had no luck in the general elections in those years either.
  
  
• A white Christmas! A real one, with about 8" of snow! Turns out the mere dusting of snow about 18 years ago pales in comparison to Seattle's recent "Snowpocalypse."
  

Overall, 2008 was a good year. It definitely had its share of drama, but hopefully I can learn and grow from all that. And, as always, every New Year's reflection, I'm humbled by the fact that I'm surrounded by so many wonderful friends and family who continue to inspire me.

Life is boundless, bittersweet, beautiful. Here's to 2009!

'Ere he drove out of sight

Ad infinitum, perhaps ad nauseum for some folks, it's time for my annual Christmas posting. My two favorite Christmas stories have been a tad overly-mythologized and romanticized, but are rooted nonetheless in actual events.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, the 1897 editorial in the New York Sun remains one of my favorite essays. It's a succinctly and beautifully written note about cynicism and faith, and I've re-posted it here.

The other favorite is the Christmas Truce of 1914. There's one good first-person account here that's taken from various seminal books on the Great War. (Also, there's a song called "Christmas in the Trenches" that I used to listen to in middle school. Yeah, I was a weird teenager.)

Happy holidays!

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Against a pearl-gray sky

As 8" of snow piled up outside and the neffy crawled happily around the Christmas tree, I settled down to read The Oxford Murders. I love a good mystery, and this one was good. Because it involved mathematics and symbols and mentioned a secret society, I feared that it might be some weird Da Vinci Code rip-off; luckily, it wasn't.

An Argentinian graduate student at Oxford (we never learn the narrator's name) becomes involved in solving a series of mathematics-related murders: the murderer leaves a note and a symbol before every death, in a cat-and-mouse game with a math professor.

Sadly, if I can figure out the explanation for a mysterious series of symbols tied to murders, the symbols aren't that difficult. Just sayin'. What was more interesting were the tangential monologues about cause and effect and alternate possibilities in both ethics and mathematics. I guessed half of it, so it's obvious the answers themselves weren't the key -- the proofs were. Ho, ho, little math joke there...

In the end, without giving anything away, the plot and its resolution were just one big mind game. Definitely enjoyable!

Yipes

Frightening tale. At least no one was seriously hurt:

Students were screaming as bus crashed through barrier (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
(Photo: Seattle P-I)

A couple of charter buses with dozens of people aboard slid down ... snow-covered cobblestones ... and crashed into each other Friday morning, crashing through a guardrail... 20 to 30 feet above Interstate 5.

(Rainster's note: Basically, to the left of the photo is a very, very steep hill. I used to live a few blocks away. Meanwhile, a similarly steep hill near La Madre's house has been blocked off by police since the day before it snowed.)

Last Sunday, I was on a bus (public transportation, unlike these ones) that did the same thing, though in a different part of the city. (And the county has since put chains on all the buses.) We slid backwards, though, and hit the guardrail but didn't go through it. I walked two miles before my bro-in-law picked me up.

Still, safety concerns aside, I lovelovelove snow.

No matter how far away you roam

Ah, vacation! Leaving your winter gear in Boston, safe in the belief that the weather at home will be in the typical December 40s, with gray skies and drizzle.

One again, the universe reveals its sense of irony. Seattle is currently bracing for Round 3 of a mega-snowstorm. And the mere threat of snow is enough to paralyze the city...

But so far it's been jolly, filled with family and friends.

For starters, the Jeopardy Champ went and got herself formally and very publicly engaged at the karaoke bar where she met her fiance. She suspected it was coming, but the devil was in the details: an unusually packed karaoke night (word had spread), champagne, and cake. It's on youtube, actually ... while The Agent is proposing, I was up at the bar with the bride's roommate, Ms. Tungsten, another friend, and the bar staff, preparing the champagne and cake. The Scot managed to get a good view up front.

Then, a few days ago I met up with an old friend from middle school. We recognized each other at a Get-Out-the-Vote Halloween event, even in our costumes (I was Zorro, complete with mask, and she was a chicken, complete with beak. Bizarre.) At any rate, it's always good to catch up over whisky and rum.

Good times.

And, appropriately, I read Book 2 in the Artemis Fowl series: Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. After trying to play in the snow like I haven't done since I was a kid and catching a slightly cold, I figured reading a children's series was entirely apropos. In this one, the teenage evil mastermind tries to rescue his father from Russian kidnappers, and the fairy and elf world agrees to help him in exchange for his help in stopping a goblin coup.

Fun, especially on a snowy day!

Feline fix

This is a friend's cat:

Edgar the Cat's Face Reattached After Accident

Razzle dazzle 'em

While not writing my last policy paper of the semester, Ms. Tungsten posted this on the FB:



I stand amazed.

Still the same old story

Just when I started the Intellectual Property law class, my procrastination reading material turns out to be all about intellectual property. (I interpret this as The Goddess telling me it's okay not to do the readings for tomorrow's class just yet...)

Continuing my Connie Willis vein, Remake was a typical and short Willis story. The premise: Hollywood has stopped making movies and just recycles and remakes all of its old ones, using the digital (and copyrighted) images of actors and props and sets. The main character is a guy who remakes movies for studio bosses. There's a girl who wants to dance like Fred Astaire and be in the movies. There's also a fascinating subplot about censorship: part of remaking the old movies is scrubbing them clean of alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs. Bottles of booze are replaced by teacups or glasses of lemonade, and entire plots have to be rewritten if they involve drunkenness or addictive substances.
Casablanca is the film our hero, who struggles with his own drug and alcohol addictions, struggles to remake. Hint, hint.

In all, it was a quick read. Not one of Willis' best, and honestly, not that engaging. But I was really drawn to the concepts of the nature of escapism, the illusion of the movies, and revising past cultural products to fit changing realities. Also, the book reminded me a bit of Lincoln's Dreams, a Willis book I read earlier this year, in that the male main characters are tragically obsessed with kind but afflicted women, and the endings to both sort of fade to black sans resolution. Like many of Willis' other stories, this one also mentioned time travel, but didn't completely explore that possibility, much like Lincoln's Dreams strongly hinted at dream travel but didn't take the full plunge.

And now, I think I'll avoid having to read up on trade secret laws by reorganizing my Thanksgiving photos of La Pingüinita.

The more things change, the more they . . .

Toil and trouble

Xtina lent me Wicked. She warned me it was completely different from the play, which I've never seen, and that it was also a very dark tale.

It was actually fairly gripping and well-written; but as predicted, it was also really, really depressing. The nature of good and evil, the role of religion, political dissent (yeeaww), animal rights, and complications inherently wrapped up in sex are all at the heart of the "other side" of the story of Wizard of Oz. Wicked is the biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Maguire does a brilliant job of painting a portrait of Oz as a land of magic and mystery and barbarism and political intrigue. The reader sees green-skinned, outcast Elphaba the future Witch, born into a missionary family; raised in near isolation, she sees soldiers from the Emerald City pillage and plunder natural resources; off at university, she becomes a radical animal rights activist. It's a disturbing and violent biography.

I didn't expect religion to be so central to the storyline, but one of the main themes is Elphaba's struggle to fit her atheism into her own life's melding of free will and destiny: her minister father's proselytizing; the spiritual devotion of her deformed sister, the Wicked Witch of the East; the vanity of her college friend Glinda the sorceress; the comforting pagan beliefs of the rural folk; the magic she teaches herself; the struggle of animals to make humans understand their sentience.

"A person who doesn't believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can't believe in a soul.

If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move -- if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems -- could you even stand? ... The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn't an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself -- that tired and ironic phrase -- the necessary evil?"

There's also a conversation in one scene, a discourse on the nature of evil -- is it the absence of morality, or its (therefore structured and explicable) opposite? Is it an act, or an idea? Or is it, as Elphaba says at one point, defined by the fact that it's secret and unknowable?

Theological implications aside, the story of Elphaba (like life, as Maguire probably intended) seemed incomplete. I was left wondering who murdered a few characters, if the revolution ever comes, if there's an afterlife in the land of Oz and magic, if justice prevails.

There's a sequel, but I'm not sure I have the heart to read it in a gray Seattle winter or a cold New England one.

The campaign to save the humans

I didn't intend to stay up and read So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish nonstop, but that's what I ended up doing.

Like Book Three, Book Four in the Hitchhiker's Guide series lacked a certain connection to the first two, even if the plot directly addressed the most crucial event from Book One (the destruction of Planet Earth). The series kind of mellowed out. Sure, there are still the spaceships and the existential agonies, but Book Four kind of got all weird. For starters, it wasn't as ADHD; it stuck to only one moment in the space/time continuum. The flying was a little out of place (just like Mary Poppins!), as was the quasi-spiritual sentiment (it's a little more sympathetic in this book, in marked contrast to the first two). But on the other hand, Arthur Dent finally scores with a girl! Woo hoo. The Universe, and all its readers, cheered for him.

In a way, I guess, the series grew up in Book Four?

Taken alone, though, the book was good -- as evidence by the fact that I couldn't put it down.

Also, I found it funny that the character known as the Rain God has the same name as Washington State's Attorney General. Hehe. Still cracks me up.

A truth universally acknowledged

Because the shortest Bollywood movie I borrowed from Ms. Tungsten is just under three hours, I watched the shortest online movie in my Netflix queue.

I was not the biggest fan of The Jane Austen Book Club. I didn't read the book (hahaha!), where the characters are possibly more well-rounded and three-dimensional. But in the movie they really weren't. Sure, some of them were interesting. But none were very exceptional, and since it was also really obvious which couples/characters were supposed to parallel which Austen ones, the contrast was pretty striking. There was a certain lack of depth in the film's people and plots.

The idea is that six people, wit' all they drama, start a book club to discuss Austen's six books. One woman is going through a divorce after her husband of 20 years leaves her, another is a teacher lusting after a student and dealing with her own failed marriage, etc, etc. There wasn't anything new about any of the situations, actually. If I had to choose, the best one was the pair that paralleled Emma, but I'm admittedly more drawn to that particular subplot because it involves books and a newly discovered interest in science fiction.

Other than that, I was bored. Except for the times I was yelling at the screen because there wasn't enough yelling on the screen. Then again, I do have issues....

Anyways, the movie gets automatic brownie points because Hugh Dancy and Jimmy Smits are in it. Even if Jimmy Smits plays the smarmy cheating husband whose wife should've never taken him back. IMHO, that is. I yelled at her, too.

If I had watched the Bollywood movie, there would have been appropriately dramatic emotive reactions ... set to song and dance, of course.

Hi-ho, ho-hum

My pre-Christmas goal is to finish the Douglas Adams volume that Xtina lent me. Another goal for the same time frame is to avoid writing both a research paper and a policy memo....

The third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide series, Life, the Universe, and Everything, wasn't as good as the first two. It was decent, it just didn't have the same. In fact, it seemed disjointed, as if Adams hurried to write it. The characters were left isolated on several planets and at several points in the space/time continuum, so perhaps the desolate feel to the storyline is what makes me think the book as a whole didn't patch together as well as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The third installment just seemed . . . anticlimactic.

Then, because I neglected my Netflix queue in the pre-election madness, I ended up with The Naked Gun. It ended up being exactly the zany, slapstick goofball fest I needed to avoid doing research. I saw it once, a long time ago, and forgot that I'd already seen it.

The Seattle Mariners in the baseball game where Leslie Nielsen has to thwart an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth II is what made me remember... I think we watched this one day in band class in middle school when the instructor didn't feel like teaching. (He did that a lot. We also watched Police Academy and Labrynth and probably a bunch of other movies I won't remember ever having seen until I accidentally watch them again.)

Too hot or too cold, too young or too old

Continuing the much-needed escapist trend, I finally finished The Fourth Bear, the second book in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series. (Admittedly, I started reading it because I thought I would have to lend it to someone else, but that situation, for various reasons, did not end up materializing.)

I liked it better than the first. Fforde has a knack for making storylines zany and zanier with each page, and he's brilliant once again in this sequel to The Big Over Easy. Detective Jack Spratt and Inspector Mary Mary are back, to try and hunt down an escaped mass murderer (The Gingerbreadman), and figure out why investigative journalist Goldilocks went into the forest if she was writing a story on giant explosive cucumbers. Meanwhile, Punch and Judy move next door to Spratt, and bears and aliens walk the human world and have to have bills in Parliament grant them equal rights.

Good stuff! Full of Fforde's notorious and delightful puns, of course!

Recovery mode

Movies are always a good escape from reality, and I very much needed that my last week at home post-election.

Ms. Tungsten's collection of Bollywood films continues to grow, and I have since absconded to Boston with several. But not before we watched Jab We Met. Karina Kapoor isn't my favorite Indian actress, but I really liked her here; she was just quirky and outgoing, as opposed to ditzy and outgoing. The plot was kind of cute: strangers on a train meet and through a series of slightly funny mishaps keep having to spend more and more time together, and the obvious love triangle appears. It was cute, though. And the color contrasts on the sets were amazing.

Then, a friend from Idaho was in town and wanted to see Bill Maher's Religulous. The friend is an avowed atheist, and I am not (I usually label myself agnostic if asked). The film was funny at times, and Maher the stand-up-comic-turned-talk-show-host cracks a lot of good jokes. But the documentary had problems deciding between advocating for religion as ridiculous (creationist museums, Holy Land theme parks in the American South) and religion as dangerous (the Second Coming brought on deliberately with nuclear war). My biggest problem with the film was that Maher found some of the most bizarre and fringe freaks out there (a rabbi who denies the Holocaust and a man who believes he is Jesus Christ reincarnated, for instance), and held them up as examples of what religious culture and belief can be. There was no middle ground, no moderation, no balance. Just nonstop fundamentalism as the be-all and end-all for people of faith all around the world. Kudos to Maher for travelling all around the world, though, and having the balls to talk to people about potentially volatile topics like suicide bombers and hate crimes. In all, though, I think 100 minutes was way too short a timespan to delve deeper into all the theological issues and geo-political controversies (which Maher rather annoyingly refused to separate from religion). The film is all over the board and only scratches the surface of debates that have been going on for millennia. With humor, admittedly. But also, ironically, with an apocalyptic vision.

The morning after

The day after the 2000 election, I stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee. CNN had called Florida for Gore the previous night, and my roommates and I all went to bed content. The next morning, The Common Man, one of said roomies, was camped out in front of the TV in the living room, but I didn't think anything was amiss until he yelled "B! B, you gotta see this! This is history!" Two months later, I attended my first political protest, on the gray, rainy streets of DC.

The day after the 2004 election, I was extremely hungover. After work, the FG and I parted ways in the downtown shopping area. I acquired a Nordstrom card and bought these shoes, along with many other depression-induced purchases. I don't know why I kept this pair of Ponies all these years, even after holes in the soles made them impossible to wear in the Northwest rain. Now, finally, I'm tossing them in the trash.

Today, I can't wipe the grin off my face as I'm looking at election coverage from around the world. And it just occurred to me that people I've spent Election Nights with in the past decade are all people with whom I'm still in touch.

Stuff that's moved me to tears in the past 18 hours:

• Trivial Kate's Facebook post, saying she sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" with 4000 other people in the streets of her old neighborhood last night.
  
  
• President-elect Obama's victory speech. Twice, three hours apart.
  
  
• The nonstop car horns, cheers, and impromptu street partying in my hometown last night (as well as across the country).
  
  
• This BBC video.
  
  
• Torgo's wife's Facebook post saying maybe their little boys can be President one day.
  
  
• This photo from The Stranger.
  
  
• Another friend's Facebook status, saying he voted for change, hope, and his son's future.
  
  
• And lastly... the fact that, for the first time ever, everyone in my immediate family voted for the same presidential candidate. La Madre and La Otra Hermana, to my delight and shock, voted the same way as me and Mi Hermana.

Hey Mikey! This is history...

Yippee ki yi yay

This cracked me up. Although if it had happened on my flight (tomorrow), I would have been irritated...

Poodle escapes, delays 8 flights at Logan
Boston.com
Cramped after a Saturday night flight from Detroit, Choochy the poodle broke free after her plane landed at Logan and for the next 17 hours, the tiny white fugitive managed to elude nearly a dozen Massport employees and State Police, holding up runway traffic as she cavorted on the tarmac. . . .