Because I've been busy "having" a "life" recently.

via Dethroner: Orwell on Politics, English and Thinking
(This helped me wail on some academic re-writes I was doing. Orwell, as always, is clear and concise and explains here both why and how to do the same.)

Via BoingBoing: Artists and Designers Photograph and Explain their Workspaces

Via Kottke: A wonderful post about Wes Anderson's "Rushmore."

From the same Kottke-linked blog, The Criteron Contraption:
Review of "M" (One of my 10 best-ever films)
Review of "Brazil" (Which I agree and disagree with)
Review of "Armageddon" (which also answers the question: "Why is Armageddon in the Criteron Collection?")

All of The Criteron Contraption's reviews that I've read so far have been tremendous. If only I was able to talk about film with this depth and clarity. 

italisizy:So remember when I theorized that I was marked as only being enrolled for Summer II, which was why I couldn't register for this fall?

Sir Turley: yeah

italisizy: So I contact the office of admissions, they tell me I need to talk to my major / college advisor so they can 'release' me for fall.
So I call them.
And they don't call me back.
So I them again today, and they don't call back, so I call my major advisor, who's in his office for the first time this week today.
He gives me the email address of my SBS advisor.
She forwards my query to my actual SBS advisor, who tries to do exactly what should work to sign me up and finds that I am not admitted for Fall.
And I need to talk to the admissions office.
I would like to say that I knew exactly what was wrong At 3,05PM Central time last saturday, almost one week ago.
But it's taken all week to get the U of A to figure it out.

// 

Addendum: problem solved and one additional issue later, I'm finally registered for PHIL 441 - "Theory of Knowledge" and PHIL 470 - "Ancient Philosophy."

So, I abandoned that post about "Blade Runner." You didn't care. It's ok. We can just move on.

Kottke: Rare, Semi-Identical Twins Born

Kottke: Map shows Portuguese First to Australia

Your Daily Awesome: Animaris Rhinosceris
(A giant, steel and polyester, ten-legged, wind-powered walking machine. Bad ass.)

Brazil by Terry Gilliam. Just as wierd as you thought, but not as good as you were told.

via Kottke: A tremendous "post on the extreme recency of recorded human history."

BB: Parental selection and why we aren't hairy like other apes.
(Hint: it may have helped distinguish us from animals.)

BB: "East German Stasi Chief was an Orwell Fan, Bent Reality to get Room 101"

Slate: Zombie Brands

Because no one's mentioned it in the past two weeks, I think it's my duty to point out that Alberto Gonzales has always been a fuckup.

Remember now?

How about now?

Maybe now?

Before my power gets knocked out by the rain-a-thon going on here, I thought I'd post this:

World's 10 Most Gorgeous Trees (with pictures!) 

So, I've been busting my balls to get a new review out the door, this time of "Blade Runner." However, it's 1200 words long already and only about half done, so...

To tide you over, the new links from "What to Watch" in the side bar:

Extended (Dirty) scene from How I Met Your Mother.

The Origin and Use of the "Amen!" Break. 

While I feel like I could kind of cost on the glory of my post about "Heathers" from yesterday, I'm not going to, and I'll tell you why: "Andy Barker, P.I." comes on again tomorrow and you should watch it.

Starring Andy Richter and produced by Conan O'Brien, the tag-line for the show pretty much explains it all: "Andy Barker: accountant by day. P.I. by accident." The setup is that Andy is finally opening his own CPA business, but his office was formerly occupied by a P.I., so he gets a woman in asking him to help locate her husband. And it rolls from there.

The interesting thing about this show is that it's not laugh-a-minute. The jokes--the absurd, Conan-style ones--are thrown in here and there, but a lot of the show is structually dramatic. For example, in the first episode, I wasn't sure if I was missing part of the funnyness because I've never seen "Chinatown," which provided at the very least some of the episode's plot points. It seems entirely possible that each episode could center around a different classic detective movie. But if this is the case, there's no chance for the show to survive, despite the great cast, terrifically absurd moments in the writing and general quality of the program.

Anyway, you should watch tomorrow. On NBC. At 8,30. And report back with what you think. 

Why the numbers on infant mortality can be misleading.
(Hint: the US's number of 6 does not mean we're spending too little money on baby-care.)

Stacy London gets her own talk show.
You guys shut up, Stacy London is great.

Slate's legal scholar examines Bong Hits 4 Jesus.

The real reason the US Attorney firings were heinous.
(Hint: prosecutorial discretion.)

And finally: The website (with trailer) for this summer's greatest/most ridiculous movie: Ninja Cheerleaders.

Veronica Sawyer hates her friends, her bitchy, rich and popular friends: Heather Duke, Heather McNamara, and Heather Chandler. The Heathers, with Veronica's help, make life at Westerburgh high a pain for anyone unfortunate enough to go there. After Veronica meets J.D., though, things begin to change.

"Heathers" is a dark, dark comedy. Dark. Very dark. But funny and worth your time. Seminal, even. If you've ever heard the line "I love my dead gay son!" or "Fuck me gently with a chain-saw," or the phrase "Diet-Cokeheads" or if you've ever heard the word "very" used as an adjective rather than an adverb, "Heathers" is the font from which those things spring.

If you've ever planned on watching "Heathers" but for some reason haven't gotten around to it, rent it right now and stop reading until after you do, because I'm going to spoil it to talk about some aspects of the plot and, frankly, they're better if they take you by surprise. If you don't plan on watching, then read on. An analysis follows the jump.

Continue reading "Heathers" »

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time centers around an autistic boy who investigating a curious incident, involving a dog. In the night-time.

It's entirely in first person from the boy's perspective and contains no metaphors (he hates metaphors. He feels like they are lies), though it does contain a smattering of similes, because similes are not lies, as long as they are accurate. This, and a host of other related quirks make the read ... interesting, from a comparative perspective. Because when was the last time you read a book where all the chapters were numbered with prime numbers? And when was the last time you read a book where the point-of-view character included for you maps drawn to scale of more than a few locations?

On the whole, the book, I think, is meant to be a look inside autism as well as a mystery novel. I'll say this right now: the mystery did not work for me. I did not care whether or not he found out who killed the dog but it is interesting that the character forced the book into the form of a mystery novel--the only type of fiction he can stand. That, however, doesn't absolve the mystery aspects of the book from being kind of boring.

And then there's the problem of motivation. Given that he's autistic, and self-aware, we very rarely see him act in ways that surprise himself (except for one section in the middle, where he goes into shock, but even that's understandable) or us. Or, perhaps, all the things that seem initially inexplicable (though usually the author prepares us for them in advance) are quickly explained away by the autism, which robs the main character of any interestingness he had outside his disorder.

One thing that really worked for me, however, were some of the descriptions of what autistics are going through, in particular how he talks about the fact that most people get through life every day because they don't see everything they look at but for an autistic (or, at least, this particular autistic, which is always the trouble in writing a book on a spectrum disorder) they can't help but see everything. The kid gives an example of standing in a field. Most people would say that they see the field, the farmhouse, the horizon and some cows. The main character could tell you precisely how many cows and how their spots were shaped, even much later (though his supposedly perfect recall does seem to be at odds with his occasional, noted paraphrasing throughout the book, though I may be fishing too deeply there). And that this overwhelming surplus comes part-and-parcel with many related problems.

It hit other autism-related high-points. Love of routine (he make train-like timetables for himself), dislike of being touched, dislike of looking people in the face, inability to decode the emotions of others, et cetera, and while it all worked coherently and reasonably together, it didn't deliver like I had hoped. And maybe that's the big problem, for me: after hearing people talk about this book and it selling one bajillion copies last summer (or two summers ago, was it?) I expected more out of it. In the end, it's medium to medium-good at best. Not a recommend unless you're interested in the specific field.

And also, for some reason, it really bothered me that the book was British. Couldn't tell you why. Wasn't expecting it and it really through me off.

Those of you that have experience and/or training with/about autism and have read the book, tell us where the book went wrong, or what it got right that you were surprised it got right. 

Alright, folks, as first reported here: I am returning to the University of Arizona to shore up my philosophical credentials before making a run at graduate school in philosophy.

My first class ("History of Early Modern Philosophy") is Summer II of this year and I'm hoping to be moved in my July 1st. Then this fall, I'll take more Phil. courses, including, hopefully, an independent study as well as busting my hump at applying to graduate schools (early front runners include University of Chicago, Maryland, Columbia and Wisconsin) to study Philosophy of History (not historiography, mind you).

I might not get much work with the Review while I'm in Tucson, as the Tucson office isn't full time and is run by the Tempe office (boo, Tempe), but I'll still be teaching.

Spring will bring some more Phil courses to finally and completely shore up my resume (and I will have completed a full Philosophy major by then, to boot).

After that, well, it depends. But that's the plan for now. If you're going to be in Tucson, we'll hang out.

End transmission.

The future of mass-aviation surfaces again at Gizmodo.

What if the KT-boundary asteroid had missed? BBC by way of Kottke.

Diet Coke + Vitamins and drinking the last Coke at Dethroner. 

Web Typography Sucks.
(I've tried to implement at least a little of this. Very helpful. From SXSWi last week.)

I've adjusted some of the line-heights and margins to try to increase readibility. Let me know if it helps (or hurts) and feel free to use this posts' comments to bitch about the layout (or say it rocks, if you want).

So now that the NCAA tournament has begun, posting here, like everywhere on the internet, has slowed to a crawl. I, myself, have just developed the ability to watch basketball and not be confused/bored the entire time, so, in my further watching of the tournament, tell me:

What should I look for?

What exactly does "low post" play entail?

Is Kansas winning by 40 points today as impressive as it sounds, even though they were playing against Testicle State University?

Apparently is a "touch" is as simple as it sounds, but then why do some players get so few? Is it a sign their team is bad at passing or has a ball-hog?

How many rebounds and blocks are impressive in a high-level college game?

How stupid is naming your school "Winthrop?"

How many of you are watching the tournament more than in passing, particularly now that Arizona is out?

Why are people always so confused when I tell them I like sports? Is it because I also like Gilbert and Sullivan?

Also: my bracket is currently in the 87th percentile of all the brackets at Yahoo's Fantasy Sports bracket thinger. And only one team that I picked to win more than one game lost in the opening round, so that's something. 

In a comment on my "30 Rock" post, Susan asked my opinion on "The Knights of Prosperity." I meant to review the show after it debuted (or, at the very least before it got cancelled). But have put it off because despite the fact that I like elements of the show and that every show has had a solid laugh or two in it (a very low percentile for an easy-laugher like me), something about it just simply ... simply made me hate it.

Hate it.

With the white hot passion of the nuclear furnace of a million brightly burning suns.

And I've been putting off doing a review until I could figure out what exactly it was that made me so angry with it, because, given its pedigree and style, I should like it. But I couldn't bring myself to watch more than two and a half episodes.

I certainly didn't hate all of it, though much of it could've been better. I liked the fact that this gang had an intern. He serves very much the same function, I felt, as Kenneth on "30 Rock" but without the delightfully blank aplomb Jack McBrayer brings to Kenneth. And I like Maz Jobrani (whose set was excellent, if second best, in the recent Axis-of-Evil Comedy Tour on Comedy Central), but his role as the sex-obsessed Pakistani is really only one note. Same for Rockafeller and Carmen and the relationship between Esperanza and Eugene. And I don't like Lenny Venito, either. And I don't love Donal Logue.

Simply too much between me and the few good things about this show to keep with it. I'm sorry, but apparently I'm part of the problem. The thing that still cracks me up from the series, though? They meet in a Jewish-supplies warehouse.

// 

[Addendum]

italisizy: You ever watch The Knights of Prosperity?

Sir Turley: not even once

italisizy: Don't bother.
I was just hoping to get another opinion before I pan it.

Sir Turley: you can pan according to Jim

italisizy: Yeah, but isn't that like panning racism?
Everybody knows it's not good and you're wrong if you like it.

So, I've gotten past the stage in my life where when they're showing a swimming event on TV and someone says "breast stroke" I giggle.

But seriously, when they start calling people "breast-strokers" and talking about "breast-stroking?" There's no avoiding it, then.

Techdirt: Who Will Protect Teens From This New Obsession With Book Reading?

You know, I do reviews of the pilots of all these TV shows, and I usually append, at the end, "Of course, this is only the pilot. It could go up or down from here." At least, I try to. I didn't so much with my review of "30 Rock" way back in October of last year, declaring "But once they get over the novelty-phase, this show is DOA." (Even my grudging follow up fails to give the show enough credit.)

So, in my time honored tradition, I'm going to man up and say it straight out: I called it wrong.

The show, soon after, picked up steam and by January was delivering funny on par with--but of a different flavor from--"The Office" and "How I Met Your Mother." And this difference, I think, is one of the reasons the show works so well.

Lately, sit-coms have been divided, somewhat artificially, into two camps: traditional and single camera. Traditional sitcoms being shot with three cameras on two or three sets and single camera shows being shot on film on locations more like a drama. The only traditional sitcoms to get numbers are on CBS' Monday night and the traditional sitcom is considered by many to be a moribund form.

And that's fine, whatever. I grew up watching traditional sitcoms and so I'd be sad to see it die out completely, but it'd grown stagnant, so, it needed shaking up. The 'traditional' sitcoms that succeed today aren't throughly traditional (with the exception of "Two and a Half Men" whose extreme popularity baffles me, even in light of it's very-funniness).

So, my contention is this: the 'traditional' vs. 'single camera' dichotomy is a false one. I think that there's something more subtle at work here: comedies are become more sophisticated and branching out in what kind of humor they employ.

Much has been made of the fact that "The Office" employs the humor of embarrassment. That is, you laugh less because what Michael Scott says is funny but because what he says is so ridiculous and he has so little idea that it's ridiculous that it makes you uncomfortable both for him and everyone around him. "How I Met Your Mother" plays very heavily with dramatic structure in order to build and diffuse dramatic irony far differently than sitcoms of the past could. What matters not is that "The Office" is single camera or that "How I Met Your Mother" is shot with three cameras is the sensibility that each brings is fresh.

Traditional and single camera shows fail all the time because they're not fresh. "Out of Practice," a traditional sitcom, if you'll recall, got canned because its tone and sensibility were "Frasier" up and down and left and right. And after 11 (mostly excellent) years of "Frasier," we were a little "Frasier"-ed out. And shows like "Emily's Reasons Why Not," "Help Me Help You" and "Big Day" were all single camera and all derivative (or innovative in the wrong direction) and all very, very canceled as well.

My point is this: 30 Rock brings something new to the table. An unhinged quality not reached even by the most unhinged (and successful) work-place comedy of recent years: "NewsRadio." Where Dave was "the last sane man" dealing with a workplace full of crazies, "30 Rock" abandons the straight-man. Everyone is wrong, everyone is crazy, even those--but, importantly, not particularly those--that seem like they've got it together. Liz Lemon knows that everyone around her is nuts and she's got to hold it together, but how can she do that when she knows that she's not right either? (Her declaration in a recent episode: "Jack gave me free reign! I'm the decider!" crystalizes the tone and wonder of this show).

Anyway, "30 Rock" is tops. It comes back from hiatus Thursday April 5th at 8,00 central on NBC.

Also: "Scrubs" has grown stale. So very stale. So very traditional-sitcom-y even though it's single camera. It's lost what used to make it unique. What carried it through its subpar fifth season: its wackiness. On paper, it's the perfect match for "30 Rock" but as been far weaker than the new show all season. Given that NBC is flip-flopping their time-slots, it would seem they agree.

(FX, Monday, 9,00 or 10,00 depending)

Starring Eddie Izzard as Wayne, "The Riches" tells the story of a family of Irish Travellers--what you might call gypsies--from the American South. Wayne refuses to let his daughter be arranged to marry a fellow he describes as a "chromosomal retard" as she's be set up to do by the new boss, and so he singlehandedly plots the family's break with the larger Traveller community.

This is... a shitty description on my part, I grant you, but I hope you will check out one of the rebroadcasts this week--it's nearly impossible to do justice to this show's fantastic pilot in review-form. Which is good.  

James O. Collins' stirring definition of art ("Art results not when there is nothing that can be added, but when there is nothing that can be taken away.") applies: "The Riches" builds its textured and interdependent house upon itself, creating a hermetic and intensely interesting world out of nothing.

Plus, watching con-men work on TV is always fun.

The texture and tone of the series, too, reminds me of nothing so much as Showtime's "Weeds." Dark, beautifully shot, deliberate but not slow. It's not going for laughs as much as Weeds is, but it also seems to have a more focused vision than that show ever had.

"The Riches" is, to undersell, fantastic, heartfelt, daring, smart, brutal, wonderful and funny TV.

It's the best I've seen in years.

Grade: A+

I realized something recently: my hatred of Blockbuster had for too long crippled my ability to see movies. It also meant that I rarely every took movie recommendations as the only way for me to see movies was to buy them or to catch them on TV (which I hated more than Blockbuster). And since I am not a man that is made of money, this has made my non-theater movie intake relatively low.

It was time to change that. You want to know why? I'll tell you why: Raging Bull. I saw "The Departed" last fall, and realized that before that, I'd seen only one Scorcese movie, "Taxi Driver." Now, since both were awesome, and since "Raging Bull" got constantly referenced in my Italian cinema class, I decided it might be worth looking into. But I certainly didn't want to buy it. (Now, if I had known it had Nicholas Colasanto was in it, it might've been a different story.)

Around this time I got a lot of positive word of mouth about NetFlix and so now NetFlix gets 15 of my dollars every month and in exchange they sent me movies.

On the right hand side of the main page, below "What to Watch" and "What to Read," is my NetFlix queue. Feel free to send me recommendations for movies that seem to match my taste--maybe they'll show up in the queue soon after that--and warnings or encouragement about any film already in it.

So, let me know what I should be watching. They're sending me movies in the mail!

A week's worth of links from BoingBoing.
(I promise not to do big roundups like this all the time now, it's just I was coding the site all week, so I'm kinda backed up.)

USC fines Free Culture club for protesting "Free Speech Zone"

Frozen bust of Lenin presides over the South Pole.
(Reminds me of the Simpsons where Lenin smashes out of his vacuum-sealed glass coffin in Red Square.)

Box office numbers decoupled from piracy.

Attorneys learn they're under NSA surveillance, sue for $2M

Chandelier made from gummi-bears

So I've been known to play an RPG or two. As Matt described it: "It's like reading a book. There's as much reading as a book. I get just as involved with the story as if it were a book. And I get to fight things."

One of the best RPGs I've played was Fable for the original xBox. The world isn't as immersive as some other worlds, and you don't have to/get to choose between one of a dozen races like in something like Morrowind, but it had a compelling story; accessable and well thought out fight/leveling up mechanics, and was well polished over-all.

Fable 2 is scheduled for the first half of 2008, and it should be even better. Aside for the drastically improved graphics and (I assume) gameplay, they are introducing a number of new elements, including, as recently revealed by Peter Molyneux, the project lead for both Fable and Fable 2, a dog that you'll own who will change and grow with you as you move through the game.

Read the best article I've seen on Molyneux's talk for more on how they plan to make the environment even more immersive and get you emotionally connected to the game, like through your wife/husband and kid.

Anyway, a book where you own a dog and fight things, set in a fictionalized old England? Sounds right up Susan's alley to me.

Bonus: The Penny Arcade cartoon where they tackle the Fable 2 Pregnancy capability. 

If your car gets hit by lightening, you're safe because of the rubber tires, right? Right?!

A British TV show finds out.

My favorite part, though, is a bit of banter: 

There are only a few locations in the world where they have the technology to blast a car with lightening. Two of those places are in Holland and Germany. And only one of those nations is laidback, liberal and fun loving enough to let me sit in the car whilst they hit it with 800,000 volts. Yep, it's those zany Germans.

And the German's mustache.

Oh, and the fact that the guy gets hit by lightening. 

Sir Turley: In India, a woman dies every seven minutes in childbirth.

italisizy: Well, sure. But you make any population large enough you get all kinds of gaudy statistics.

Sir Turley: yep

italisizy: The real meat is that 301 in every 100,000 dies from pregnancy related complications.
That's a reasonable statistic.
Where reasonable = useful.

Sir Turley: I think so

italisizy: Here's what's stupid about the AP. There is no context in the artice. We get told about the different provinces, but not how that compares to the west.
Wikipedia on Maternal Mortality Ratio
See, AP, how hard was that?
It's the third result in google for: deaths per 100000 births.

I know I link to Kottke a lot, but you MFers don't seem to be reading him any more (near as I can tell), so I'm just gonna throw down with a week's worth of the best Kottke-links. Each of these leads to the Kottke page where he links to a story. The descriptions... they're so good. Sometimes I've read the linked-to thing, sometimes I've not. Sometimes the description is all I need, so I'm gonna give you that respect too.

Tarantino on the studios vs. the artist.

Aging in bursts through family-event photographs.

Why do we feel suspense re-watching a movie?

Richard Gerrig, the psychologist who gave anomalous suspense its name, offers a different solution. He posits that in general, when we reread a novel or rewatch a film, our cognitive system doesn't apply its prior knowledge of what will happen. Why? Because our minds evolved to deal with the real world, and there you never know exactly what will happen next. Every situation is unique, and no course of events is literally identical to an earlier one. "Our moment-by-moment processes evolved in response to the brute fact of nonrepetition" (Experiencing Narrative Worlds, 171). Somehow, this assumption that every act is unique became our default for understanding events, even fictional ones we've encountered before.

Apple Store prototyping.

Maps of world-civ at 2000BC, 1000BC, 500BC, etc.
(Most interesting to me is the collapse of the Indus River Valley state-societies between 2000 and 1000 BCE. What gives? And why does nobody talk about it?)

Out of the suburbs into a life.
(I, like many, have long suspected this to be the case about cars. It's nice to see that intuition verified.)

From BB: People are excellent at picking out faces in pictures just 10 by 12 pixels.
(You are a machine designed to recognize faces.)

BB: Wikipedia entry trumps other Libby Verdict coverage.
Kottke: Nope, more people have died that are alive today, you gullible bastard.

Brackets can solve every cultural argument: The Enlightened Bracketologist on Amazon. Some samples here. Probably via Kottke.

Kottke links to tremendous (and short) sci-fi story about the discovery of an intelligent race made of meat.

Ira Glass explains storytelling on video.

I mock This American Life from time to time, but that simply because I can't listen to an entire episode without losing my emotional shit.

For example, act four of this episode ("Kid Logic") is just... the saddest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I sat in my car, in the parking lot of the grocery store and just bawled over it.

Stupid This American Life.

Also: the Michael Chabon story that is act three of that episode ("Werewolves in their Youth" from his book of the same name) ain't half bad, either.

McSweeney's: Yesterday's Book Reports from Today's Notables:

A Separate Peace

MATT DAMON, FEBRUARY 8, 1986

I really related to this book. It's about two best friends who go to a respected New England school: an earnest, responsible student named Gene and a carefree, inexplicably successful student named Finny. Even though it didn't make any sense to me that a guy like Finny could go to a respected New England school, I still liked this book. Especially the part where Gene pushes Finny out of a tree and Finny breaks his leg.

Finny is too busy having fun to notice that there's evil in the world. He doesn't even believe Gene when Gene confesses to pushing Finny out of the tree on purpose. That actually works out great, because Finny runs away and breaks his leg again. But this time marrow enters his bloodstream and kills him. I think this means that people who are too lazy and irresponsible to know what's going on deserve to die, even if they're your friend. And that people who study hard and go to good schools will be successful even if they're friends with an idiot they wish were dead.

via Junkiness

italisizy: Hey, what the fuck is RPI?
Motherfuckers talk about it all the time w/r/t college basketball and I'm fucking lost.

Sir Turley: Runs Per Inning Pitched

italisizy: ...but about basketball.

Sir Turley: Ratings Percentage Index

italisizy: Now THAT's funny.

Sir Turley: it's three things
[types furiously]

italisizy: The Index is comprised of: that team's winning percentage (25%); its opponents' winning percentage (50%); and, the winning percentage of those opponents' opponents.

Sir Turley: right

italisizy: I know, I know, I could've googled it to begin with, but I was hoping it would be simple.
When I got the name "Rating Percentage Index" back, there was no way a wikipedia-less explanation was going to help me.

The wikipedia article on bracketology.