A Special Treat

On Saturday night, Rachel found a special treat waiting on our DVR.

ABC has started running the final three episodes of Pushing Daisies!

The final two will air on the next two Saturdays at 10PM. Of course, they don't seem to be advertising it so if you didn't have your DVR set, you likely missed this week's episode.

The second season will be released on DVD next month, so we would have seen it then anyway. Still, it's great to see the show on actual broadcast TV again.

UP

We saw Pixar's tenth film, UP, today. Brilliant.

When a movie has you misty-eyed within the first ten minutes, after a moving and touching montage of the life of a husband and wife, you know you're in good hands. As with every other Pixar film, they eschew the cheap pop culture references and fart jokes of most other modern animated movies. Instead they deliver developed characters in complex, mature stories. UP deals with themes such as death, loneliness, and childhood dreams versus reality. It's closer to a film by Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki than anything else.

It's a wonderful film.


EDITED TO ADD: The Pixar short before the film, Partly Cloudy, was as excellent as we've come to expect. Pixar has mastered the art of the short, funny and touching film.

Suzanne Somers is apparently a huge woo woo (and so is Oprah)

Here's a good article from Newsweek that's actually critical of some typical alternative health nutjobbery. First up is Suzanne Somers awesome regimen for living a long life.

Next come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and other preparations every day. "I take about 40 supplements in the morning," she told Oprah, "and then, before I go to bed, I try to remember … to start taking the last 20." She didn't go into it on the show, but in her books she says that she also starts each day by giving herself injections of human growth hormone, vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex. In addition, she wears "nanotechnology patches" to help her sleep, lose weight and promote "overall detoxification." If she drinks wine, she goes to her doctor to rejuvenate her liver with an intravenous drip of vitamin C. If she's exposed to cigarette smoke, she has her blood chemically cleaned with chelation therapy. In the time that's left over, she eats right and exercises, and relieves stress by standing on her head. Somers makes astounding claims about the ability of hormones to treat almost anything that ails the female body. She believes they block disease and will double her life span. "I know I look like some kind of freak and fanatic," she said. "But I want to be there until I'm 110, and I'm going to do what I have to do to get there."

Wow. Who would want to live to 110 if you had to do that every day?!?

Of course, all the doctors who say this is a stupid, unhealthy regimen are in the pockets of . . . BIG PHARMA. Duhn, duhn, duh!!

Somers says it's mainstream doctors who need to get their facts straight. "The problem is that our medical schools do not teach this," she said in a February interview with NEWSWEEK. She believes doctors, scientists and the media are all in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. "Billions are spent on marketing drugs, and these companies also support academic research." Free from these entanglements, Somers can see things clearly. "I have spent thousands of hours on this. I've written 18 books on health. I know my stuff."

Shockingly, the article takes Oprah to task for supporting this sort of nonsense.

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

The article deals with Jenny McCarthy's dangerous nonsense and the stupidity that is The Secret. Oprah is using her huge influence to dispense dangerous medical advice. Wonderful.

Nice job Newsweek.

Final Flight

Due to some quick action at O'Hare, I'm on an earlier flight. Two hours earlier. Hooray!

Re-planing

Here I am again, aboard the regional jet from South Bend to Chicago. The graduation and assorted festivities went very well.
This is an incredibly short flight of 18 minutes. Within 5 minutes of take-off, they start the descent.  The sad part is once I'm in Chicago, I have a two hour layover.

Arrival

Hooray. I'm in Indiana.

I'm one in a million

There's a small baby in the row behind me and I'm sad because it's not in my row and I won't be able to play with it.  How many people on a plane can say that?

Note to self (travel edition)

A bottle of water counts as a liquid over 3 ounces and will be confiscated.  Duh.
Stupid terrorists.

That LAST post

Believe me, I am fully aware of the melancholy aspect of that last blog post if I am actually killed in a plane crash. Some would call it ironic, but it's not really irony. It would just be kind of a sad eulogy for my life.

And of course this post would be a post-modern spin on that last post which, ironically, wouldn't be my last post because of this post. So deal with that!

No rest for me

Here it is just a few days after our massive party, and I'm flying to Indiana to attend my niece's graduation from high school. My plane leaves Baltimore in the morning, I get to Indiana in the afternoon, and then on Saturday night I head back, arriving in Baltimore around Midnight. Whew!

I only travel by air once a year or so. I enjoy it but I'm never 100% comfortable; it's too easy to imagine what it would be like if something bad happened. This is, of course, an irrational fear since the odds of it happening are very small. But I'm sure those odds have never comforted anyone caught in an accident.

Once I'm back on the ground, I thoroughly enjoy the fact that I've flown.

Movies in 2008

In 2008 I kept track of every movie I saw in a theatre or on DVD in the blog sidebar. I've never kept such a list before and I found it really interesting. 32 new movies is pretty good. Since it's nearly June and the topic is nearly irrelevant, here's my list for all posterity!

• Kung Fu Panda
• Quantum of Solace
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Daredevil
• Burn After Reading
• Donnie Darko
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars
• In Bruges
• The Bank Job
• The Dark Knight
• Alvin and the Chipmunks
• National Treasure: Book of Secrets
• WALL-E
• Get Smart
• Sin City
• There Will Be Blood
• Serenity
• Eastern Promises
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Speed Racer
• Iron Man
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
• 3:10 to Yuma
• Lord of War
• Vantage Point
• Lucky Number Slevin
• Ocean's Thirteen
• Sunshine
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• Cloverfield
• Ocean's Twelve
• Juno

It was a pretty decent year for movies. Nothing earth-shattering, but good. Iron Man, the Dark Knight, Donnie Darko and Wall-E were real standouts for me. There's nothing on this list that I really hated.

Great Weekend

Today is my annual day off after our Memorial Day get together. Every year we host 20-30 of our friends to stay at our house to play games all weekend. It's a lot of work to put together and requires a supreme effort by Carol who keeps everyone fed.

I went to bed at around 4:45AM for three days running and played a total of 32 games, including memorable bouts of Amun Re, Rails of Europe and my favorite game, Taj Mahal. I had a heck of a lot of fun.

On this day every year, I sleep in and try to get myself back together to return to work tomorrow. It feels good.

California, at least some of our people are free!

Last November, California's Proposition 8 put the established rights of a minority to a popular vote. As outrageous as that was, it pales against the hypocrisy of religious groups, those who are supposed to "love thy neighbor", to mobilize enough votes to strip away the rights of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Supreme Court of California today cemented the bigotry by finding the proposition constitutional; in California it is constitutional to negate the rights of your fellow citizens. They generously allowed those couples already wed to stay married.

How this works out to equal protection under the laws is beyond me.

Be Back Soon

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been preparing for our annual Memorial Day (Weekend) game-a-thon. I'll post again soon.

What's the harm?

The next time someone tells you that superstitions are harmless, show them this article.

"I beat him severely with canes until they broke, yet he never shed a tear," said Eshiett Nelson Eshiett, 76. "One day, I took a broom to hit him and he started crying. Then I knew he was possessed by demons. ... Nigerian witches are terrified of brooms."
...
"Children accused of witchcraft are often incarcerated in churches for weeks on end and beaten, starved and tortured in order to extract a confession," said Gary Foxcroft, program director of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a nonprofit that helps alleged witch children in the region.

Many of those targeted have traits that make them stand out, including learning disabilities, stubbornness and ailments such as epilepsy, he added.

It's sickening that this is still happening. It's a reminder that in some parts of the world, people still live in the 17th century.

We scoff at that, of course, because here in the United States, some of us are all the way up to the mid-nineteenth century!

The moral? If your new Nigerian husband wants to burn your two kids for witchcraft, now that's a dealbreaker, ladies!

NBC's "Chuck" has been renewed!

Huzzah. Chuck is fun and I didn't want to see it go.

Read the good news here.

All right, let's get this out of the way right now

It looks like GAY MARRIAGE is going to be the big political flashpoint in the upcoming nomination battle for a Supreme Court Justice to replace David Souter. So, let's get our definitions straight right now so we can move forward.

Activist Judge: A Judge who legislates from the bench, not reaching conclusions because of the "orginal intent" of those who wrote the law and Constitution, but because of his personal liberal biases. May be identified as someone who has the temerity to believe that TEH GAYS have human rights and should be awarded the same liberties as everyone else in America, thus infringing on the sacred rights of those who don't want gays to be married.

Legitimate i.e. "Good" Judge: A Judge who rules the way the Right Wing of the Republican Party wants them to rule. May be identified by their motto: "The Founding Fathers/God didn't believe that gays should marry so this argument is over."

Everyone clear?

Onward Christian Soldier

During the lead up to and during the invasion of Iraq, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, prepared a daily intelligence security briefing for the President. No surprise there. What should be surprising, but really isn't, was the format of the cover of these briefings.

Each day they would picture highlights of the previous day's action and a huge, bold, quote from the Bible. Here's GQ's slide show.

Let alone the ridiculous comingling of church and state by endorsing a particular religion on government documents, how rock stupid is this when we were invading a Muslim country? Had these covers been exposed a few years ago, how much damage would this suggestion of a "Christian Crusade in the Middle East" have caused us in the world?

Read the whole sordid story of Rumsfeld in GQ. The stupidity boggles the mind.

Collaborative Music

Want to make some beautiful music? Try this.

Very, cool.

Grim Reality

When I started working in downtown DC in the early nineties, there was clearly a significant homeless problem.  Homeless folk were living all over this area.  For a long time, an old couple lived on a couple of benches in the courtyard behind my building.

Then, sometime in the mid to late nineties, most of the homeless disappeared.  I don’t know exactly what happened, but there just wasn’t as many of them around.

I noticed yesterday that they’re back in a big way.  Near the Metro stops, all along 7^th Street, the homeless are camped out with all their stuff.  It’s certainly a sad and clear reminder of how bad things are with the economy.

Objects in movie may be bigger than they appear

This makes no sense at all to me. Apparently, the new Enterprise in Star Trek is supposed to be bigger than the Galactica. There must be some starship envy going on here.

Click to embiggen.

I was wondering how Kirk's father could have saved 800 people from the Kelvin. The scale of the ship must have been much larger than I thought it was. That still doesn't answer how the 800 escaped in a half dozen shuttles, but it's helpful.

A Task Made Easier

For a long time now, I've wanted to blog a series of reviews of Star Trek episodes -- Original Series, Next Generation, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise. I thought it would be fun to compare the best episodes of each series and get down my thoughts. I have, after all, been a Trek fan my whole life.

Fortunately, the new Star Trek movie which rebooted the Trek universe has made my job much easier. So, here are my long-planned reviews of some of the best Trek episodes of all time.

The City on the Edge of Forever (OS) - Unlikely to happen.
Journey to Babel (OS) - Never happened.
The Best of Both Worlds (TNG) - Never happened.
The Inner Light (TNG) - Never happened.
The Visitor (DS9) - Never happened.
Uh . . . (Voy) - Couldn't think of a good episode.

Unfortunately, all the Enterprise episodes will have happened as the events of the movie occurred after them. I'll review those later, although I may wait to see if the next Trek movie erases those episodes too.

Trek Sounds

I honestly didn't notice much of the music soundtrack to Star Trek. At one point I noticed but I thought the music was overly melodramatic. I think I'm having a change of heart.

The score was by Michael Giacchino who composes the music for Lost and did the awesome jazzy, Bond-ish score for The Incredibles. Now that I've been listening to some of the tracks, I realize that a lot of the score uses elements from the some of the other great movie and TV Trek scores. (In the case of Trek V, the score was the only thing that was good.)

I may have to buy this soundtrack.

Plus, you can't beat these track titles for sheer awesomeness. (Click to embiggen)

Seems familiar

The U.S. Postal Service is coming out with a new line of Simpsons stamps. That's way cool. Bizarrely, though, the Homer Simpson image looks a little odd yet familiar, as if it's done in a different style.
Hmm. I wonder where I've seen that before?
Oh yeah.

Sometimes you shouldn't even try to go home again

One of the more useful things about the Internet is its ability to make tracking down old friends and acquaintances relatively easy. Carol joined Facebook a couple of months ago and the rate at which she was able to reconnect with old friends from elementary, jr. high and high school was astounding. Unfortunately, stepping through the time machine and finding out how someone you haven't seen in thirty years grew up isn't always pleasant.

When you're one of the "smart kids" in school it's usually pretty easy to discover who the other smart kids are. You share a common bond of usually being ahead of everyone else in the room and receiving the unwanted attention that sometimes brings. Friendship comes naturally and it's very heady to discover other kids who are inquisitive and interested in learning. Years later, when you think of those long-lost peers, you think you might still share some common bonds.

Carol reconnected with one such guy recently, someone we had both known back in jr. high and high school. He was smart and a pretty good guy. I had nothing but good memories of him.

And then there's Facebook.

The other day he decided to have a go at one of the social problems we're grappling with in America. Something was bothering him and he wanted to share his views. He knew it would probably cost him some friends, but he couldn't hold his tongue any longer. He decided to come out of the closet to set forth his views on gay marriage.

Now it almost needs no saying that he has lots of gay friends and he would tell them his opinion to their face. He's not bigoted, he just knows what's right and won't be hushed by the forces of political correctness. He doesn't want to harm the gays, he just doesn't want any official recognition that they're human beings and have rights equal to him.

See, here in America, we are one nation under God, made that way by the Founding Fathers, and that means that God's rules, er, rule. Our rights come from God (obligatory cite to the Declaration of Independence), not from "We the People" as it states in the Constitution. And God doesn't like this gay marriage thing one bit. Why, if we allow gays to marry, we have to allow all other perverts (slippery slope argument goes here) to marry whoever or whatever they want!

He goes on . . .

Marriage in the U.S. is a covenant between people and God and in the U.S. that's a sacred covenant that only God can bless. He doesn't explain why atheists, buddhists and Muslims are allowed to marry, but that's a minor point, I'm sure. By extending marriage to gay couples, we're degrading the whole concept of marriage. Those perverts chose to be that way, in case you didn't know, and so shouldn't be rewarded with actual rights. He very cleverly suggests that he didn't choose to be gay because he's not that attractive and isn't very style-conscious. Wow, the boys down at the gay bar are so disappointed!

It was really a quite remarkable essay in that in four paragraphs he managed to cram in every half-witted, ill-conceived, stupid argument thrown out by the bigots. He then argued against himself by declaring that marriage was necessary to stabilize society without saying why that means we shouldn't encourage gay marriage. He ends by completely contradicting everything he wrote by insisting that government shouldn't sanction any marriage, gay or straight, because it's a religious thing.

The remarkable irony is that this paragon of right, this defender of straight marriage, is once-divorced and now married to a black woman, something very unusual even thirty years ago when we knew him, and illegal in many states not long before that. The very same arguments he used this week were used against inter-racial marriage before it became legal everywhere in the United States in 1967. He won't extend to others the very same consideration of human rights that made his current marriage possible.

So basically there's this guy we used to know thirty years ago. He was bright, funny, personable and a good person to know.

In the space of two minutes, he became a total asshole. The Internet is really remarkable.

Star Trek

Star Trek opened huge for previews on Thursday night and Friday's opening. It's made $32 million so far and on track for $72 million this weekend.

Totally minor spoilers below.

I would like to do a full blown review but don't have time right now. I enjoyed the movie, thought it was well made, well-acted and fun to watch. I was bothered by many of the plot points, not because they didn't jibe with Trek continuity but because they didn't make sense in any continuity. I mean, there are apparently a bunch of uncrewed Starfleet ships just sitting in orbit around Earth waiting for Academy Cadets to crew them. And the ending was just ridiculous. Flat out stupid.

There was a lot to like. When they first showed Vulcan, you see the famous Vasquez Rocks in the background; a nice homage to the location of many Trek location shoots. Then, when they show Vulcan again later, you see dozens of rock formations that look just like Vasquez Rocks. I thought that was hilarious, an intentional spoof of the overuse of the location.

Feel free to discuss in the comments. The comment section will be a SPOILER ZONE, so beware.

How's your brain doing?

Check out the link below for a pretty interesting test showing how your brain works.

http://www.humorsphere.com/fun/8787/colortest.swf

I got 75% on my first try.  I suspect that’s a pretty good score.

Snack Haiku

Three Musketeers, yay!

Chocolate, nougat, gone too fast.

Sadness falls, want more.

Congressman Mike Pence is a dishonest anti-science moron

Just answer the question! It's a yes-no question. Very simple, even for you.



Kudos to Chris Matthews.

Please stop covering this guy

I can't decide if I never want to see "Joe the Plumber" again or if I'd like this bigoted half-wit to continue to be a "spokesman" for the Republican party.

Christianity Today: In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

Wurzelbacher: At a state level, it's up to them. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary--it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do--what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing. Link

Really? You've had "homosexual friends" and they're okay with you "not letting them anywhere near" your children? They're okay with you acting like they have leprosy? Wow, those must be some good imaginary friends you have there because in most places of reality, if someone is so uptight about you that they won't let you near their kids, they usually don't consider you a friend. Typically, they'd think you were a total asshole douchebag.

And can you believe he gets away with that kind of language? He has the sheer nerve to call a white person a honky? Wow, "Joe", you've opened a can of worms there. That type of slander just really angers me. I am literally angry with rage over being called a honky. Why isn't the FCC looking into this?

What the Frak is wrong with us?

Gun shops across the country are reporting a run on ammunition, a phenomenon apparently driven by fear that the Obama administration will increase taxes on bullets or enact new gun-control measures.
...
"The increase in demand for firearms and ammunition is largely attributable to gun owner concerns regarding the current political climate," says Novin, referring to the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress.

"Many of the lawmakers in power have a long history of supporting legislation that violates the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans," Novin adds. "Gun owners recognize this and are reacting accordingly." CNN Article

Are we that fearful and violent? We're so afraid to live without the ability to easily kill other humans that we'll stockpile ammunition in case the government tries to strengthen gun laws?

The fact that the majority of these people are undoubtedly Christians, you know the "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek" crowd, who don't see a contradiction between their so-called peaceful and loving beliefs and the idea of shooting holes into other people is just surreal. When I was a Christian, I would never have even contemplated owning a gun much less using it on someone. I guess I was naive because I actually believed that it was better to die than to take another life. You know, "thou shalt not kill?"

The cognitive dissonance of all this is seriously overloading my irony circuits.

This should fix the problem

Afraid of not controlling all aspects of the United States government for even a few months, Republicans are taking their "crazy and stupid" show on the road to reconnect with average Americans!

"Certainly our party has taken its licks the last few cycles, but that's why we're here," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor said Saturday. "The reality is, the prescriptions coming out of Washington right now are not reflective of the mainstream of this country."

You mean the mainstream of America who elected President Obama who is doing pretty much what he told us he would do? Hmm, and I stupidly thought an election was indicative of the people's will.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney compared the GOP to Americans fighting the British during the Revolutionary War. "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists," he told the overwhelmingly Republican crowd, saying the Republicans needed to "once again lead the American Revolution."

Ah, that explains it. The Republicans, who support constant tax breaks for the wealthy, huge tax and legal benefits to corporations, are against minimum wage hikes and universal healthcare, are *not* the Monarchists. You see, Monarchists favor a system where the wealthy get all the privileges and benefits of the system while maintaining total control of the lower classes and -- uh -- what was my point?

Perhaps William Bennett, a CNN contributor and Republican strategist, has the right idea.

"Look, you have to face reality. Barack Obama owns Washington. The Democrats own Washington. So a good place to be is out in the country.

Now there's a Republican position I can get behind.

Another Opening, Another Show

I met my wife on the first day of school in our Sophomore year when we both tried out for the fall musical, Girl Crazy. Since that time, I’ve been in thirteen high school, college and community theatre productions. My last show was West Side Story, somewhere around 20 years ago. I really miss the fun, the camaraderie and the singing and dancing. Someday I’d like to do some local community theatre.

To my delight, last fall Rachel tried out for her high school’s fall musical, A Chorus Line, and got a small (but incredibly crucial) part. She impressed the Drama Teacher so much that she understudied one of the other girls and served as dance captain when the choreographer was out. It was a great experience for her. I was amazed that they’d do such a mature-themed show (as there’s no way we could have done it during my high school years), but times have certainly changed; they toned down only a few words of dialogue.

After winter break, Rachel was invited to play the role of Yvette, the French Maid, in their charity production of Clue, based on the Tim Curry movie. She did a great job and the show was a lot of fun.

Which brings us to tonight, the premier of the spring musical, Bye, Bye, Birdie. Rachel is one of the girls of the town, Margie. We’re really looking forward to it.

Rachel has done all of these shows in her Freshman year, so if she keeps up with it, she could blow past the total number of shows I’ve been in by her first year of college. I’m looking forward to that.