An understanding of history is vital. How it moves, how it flows, how one thing supplants another. And American schools do a shitty job of teaching it, especially with respect to that more than one thing is happening at any given time. For example: the Sassanids are contemporary to the Byzantians. And considered co-equal by them. But I certainly (and I'm going to bet you, too) hadn't ever heard of them.

Some wonderful tools toward fixing that:

Interactive timeline of the history of Britain
(Spend some time between 100AD and 400AD and you'll be pleased you did.)

YouTube: The Civil War in Four Minutes
(Nicely keeps the mil-porn aspect of it in check with the running body-count in the lower right. Who knew 1.3 million Americans died in the war? Not in keeping with the theme, nessecarily, but quite well done.)

YouTube: Geographical History of Religion
(Only covers the big four, and only in broad strokes, but not bad at all.)

YouTube: Who Controlled the Middle East, and When
(Linked here before.)

Wikipedia: Sassanid, Seljuk, Mongol, and Assyrian Empires. 

So, tomorrow I leave for Maine.

Or, more accurately, tomorrow I leave for Austin.

Thursday I leave for Rochester.

Friday I leave for Boston.

And Saturday I leave for Maine.

Then I get to rock it M.E. style all week long.

Posting will be sporadic 'til I get back.

(Though posting is already sporadic anyway.)

If you have further questions, leave them in the comments. 

YDA: Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham.

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Anil Dash links to I CAN HAS CORGAN?, a collection of lolcorgans.

My favorites: 1, 2, 3, 4.

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Sad, yes, but wasn't there a b-plot in House about this?
That just furthers my theory that the world would be a better place if everybody watched House.

Post-Grad Lifestyle: Your Bar Dream Team
Perhaps bullshit like this is why I don't go to bars.
Or hit on ladies...

The Cult of Ramsay (via Airbag)

By Ken Levine: My first directing assignment (and pt. 2)

YouTube: How to give the perfect man-hug. (via Airbag)

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Fametracker: Least Essential Movies of Summer 2003

On "American Wedding":

The Pitch: It's all the fun of Pie Fucker and Pie Fucker 2: The Fuckening, but with the added star-wattage of Nikki Schieler Ziering.

via the continually delicous Amy's Robot, who memorialzed Fametracker recently.

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BoingBoing: Mary Jane Watson, House-Ho

Old Ass Star Found

Techdirt: User Generated Content Is About Efficiency And Growth, Not Exploitation 

via Dethroner: Funny Story: The King of Speed
I want to excerpt part, but like any good joke/funny story, it all hangs upon itself. Good example of how to tell a story. In the hands of a crappy storyteller, this would devolve into a "I guess you had to be there" story.

// 

Twins Names, 2006

1: The combination of Hope and Faith has dipped since last we looked.

2: The names are way, way too similar. Similar I'm down with. Ashley & Amber, sure. Kevin and Kenneth, or whatever. But Emma and Ella? Tyler and Taylor? Landon and Logan? What's next, Cate and Kait?

MOM: Cate, get down here!
KAIT: Me, mom?
MOM: No; Cate! Can't you hear me saying the C?

or

KAIT: Me, mom?
MOM: No, Kait, can't you hear me saying the C?

via Kottke 

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Gizmodo: Pessimists Coffee Mug
I want two. For surely I will drop one and break it.

icanhascheezburger?: Plz no insert batreez. 

BoingBoing: Technological Synaesthesia
AWESOME.

Trying out a new look.

What do you think? More readable?

I need recomendations on "This American Life" episodes to listen to in my quickly-approaching travels.

If you've got a favorite "This American Life," leave it in the comments, even if it's only a vague recollection of an act or two that was awesome. (Better yet, search their archives and find the episode and leave a link.)

If not, spelunk through their episode archive and point out any that look particularly good or weird.

Any topic that I should know about? Leave a link to the search page as a not-so-subtle hint. 

Anchorman

Two things about Anchorman stand out in my head, in retrospect:

1) the ten minute potion of the movie, about an hour in where it devolves into violence. Newsteam on Newsteam violence, then Ferell on Applegate violence. Both are hilarious, but nothing is more hilarious than Steve Carell as Brick killing that guy with a trident. Oh, goodness, that's funny.

2) When Will Ferrell is imagining his future life with Christina Applegate, and she's been "polishing your Emmys and cooking dinner nude" all day. She's wearing a type of apron, though. But when she slaps Ferell, you get some side-boob. And it bounces.

I note these two things because these two things because 1) shows you what kind of humor you're getting, throughout, and 2) was awesome. No, really, though, 2) perfectly encapsulates the target audience for the movie. I can't imagine anyone that wasn't excited by bouncing Applegate side-boob would like this movie.

As for me, I give it a 6/10.

A 4 or 5 /10 if it weren't for Steve Carell, though.  

The Loop

The Loop is also not for everyone. The Loop is kind of dumb. But funny.

Sample plots: Sam needs to work on a presentation on his new low-cost airline, but instead participates in a tequila challenge. Sam wants to take a girl on a date that he previously abandoned, but has to fly to China for work. Yep, it's all about a young executive trying to balance work and play. A good time, so says I.

The Loop returns for season two on June 10th on Fox.

5/10.

Slate: Is Avril Lavigne a Heather?

Big Andy gets into Clarion. Starts blogging about it.
Very interesting stuff. Leave comments, ask questions. I can't do it all by myself.

Giz: Pimp new solar tech.

Dethroner: "Clips: Photochopping a big girl into a skinny one"
Even at the end, though, she's still got fat-girl elbow.
(Not that I'm for or against any aspect of this, but the above statement is true.)

Video Visualization of Flightpatterns over America

via Kottke: Ever notice that first-worlders do menial labor to unwind?

A detailed look at where Americans are moving from/to.
Very, very interesting, regardless of the politics painted on top of it.

Slate: Human Guinea Pig: The Secret... does it work?

BB describes the thing I want the very most of anything I've ever wanted.
(And no, it's not the ladies...)

Slate: Humans and Computers make e/o better at chess. (And life, too, I guess.) 

BB: Disney World as a Google map.

Slate: Partisan reactions in real time to Oliver Stone's new anti-war ad.
Truly awesome. And the statistics linked to at the bottom are choice, too.

Cool business card designs.

Dethroner: US Spouses' Rate of Cheating
Yep, 3.9 percent of spouses cheat, yet it occupies 60% of our short fiction.

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Hilarious Movie Review of ROTK

I tried to avoid it, I really did. But it kept getting links as 'the funniest thing I've ever read.'

And it's true, it's fucking funny. Some choice excerpts:

About the orcs, marching on Gondor:

"...while every puke-ugly bad-ass on the planet starts surrounding it, ready to open a Wal-Mart that only sells ball-stomp."

On the volume of the film:

"It’s also, thank fucking God, LOUD. Even if you bring an iPod so you can listen to VH during the Elf parts you’ll take it off because I swear to fucking Roth you do NOT know where the next big bang is going to come from, or when something big is going to crunch someone’s skull while you picture that person getting their skull crushed is really your neighbor upstairs that plays Dido all day or that dude at the Starbucks who’s always reading and looking all smart."

All in all, it's an ingeneous combination of nerd-jackass mockery and actual nerd-jackassery.

Oh, and there's an entire treatment, in the middle, about a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-esque movie featuring.... wait for it... Bruce Lee, Dirty Harry, Bluto and The Bandit from Smokey and the Bandit. Yeah, that's right. 

//

YDA: The Story Behind a Photograph

John August: iPhone Ad Residuals

Kottke: Best Headline of the Decade: Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo.

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BB: ET microbes so unusual that we might miss them. 

Music and Lyrics

Story of Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore being super-cute. No, seriously, though, Grant is a washed up half-a-pop-duo (think the other guy from Wham) who's trying to get back into the game. Barrymore is his substitute plant waterer who gets recruited to act as lyricist for Grant who has had a song commissioned by Cora Coleman (think... Hillary Duff + an early/middle Spears-ian amount of writhing).

As I'm sure many reviewers have noted, the film just as sugary, innocuous and fun as the music it's about. Worth buying? No. But if you're looking for something in this genre (oh, they fall in love? Did I forget to mention that?) that's: a) less cloying than classic, floppy-haired Grant (c.f. "Notting Hill," "Nine Months"), b) new, and c) cleverer than it has any right to be when dealing with both Grant's characters past and present, then this movie could be the romantic-comedy one-night-stand you've been looking for. But please, don't marry it.

What's interesting to me, though, is that Adam Schelsinger of Fountains of Wayne wrote the music in the film, which is weird, because for a film that's all about the transcendent unity of a writing duo, Schlesinger appears here without his FOW writing partner, Chris Collingwood, and, presumably the song lyrics in the film were written mostly either by the screenwriter or Schlesinger, sort of, you know, undermining that whole "transcendent connection between co-writers" trip. The music itself is solid classic pop, and, really, you can't go wrong asking Schlesinger to co-write that.

Overall: 5/10. Good for what it tries to do.

Little Children

...and now for something completely different, eh?

Little Children is adapted from the novel by Tom Perotta, the same guy who wrote "Election." That means, of course, you can expect it to be filled with the startling insights into people that "Election" had but in a far less cartoon-y manner.

But I've got to say this: what is the fucking deal with the narration? Like, ok, so, when Lucy (Kate Winslet) sees Brad (Patrick Wilson) go, the narrator chimes in with something like: "And Lucy suddenly felt a cold sadness well up within her." But, you know, it's film, and Kate Winslet is a good enough actress that I could see the cold sadness well up within her. Sometimes it introduces information which would've been hard to get through filmic exposition, and that's ok. But a lot of times it's just giving us stuff we could've easily surmised from the, oh, I don't know, moving pictures we're watching.

The other problem with the narration is the choice of narrator. I understand they wanted someone who sounded authoritative, and during one of the football sequences it snapped into focus for me who they got: the NFL films guy. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. Which, his narrative ability and the context makes the voice-over a lot less awkward (though no less unnecessary) during that football sequence, it's wholly inappropriate for the kind of delicate revelations that go on throughout the film inside Kate Winslet's head.

Ok, though, as the movie rolls on, the narration fades out, more or less, and the actual film is allowed to take over: and it's splendid. The film itself is splendid. From Kate Winslet's red one-piece, to the now-gaunt Noah Emerich playing tightly what could've been a scenery-chewing part, and the deep, creepy love of Ronnie's mother and the quiet, terrible blank self-hatred and unstoppable self-gratification of Ronnie himself (the sequence that ends his date... goodness).

It's a movie about people who do things they shouldn't do because they find themselves suddenly (or not so suddenly, sometimes) needing to. And they weave together in a way that sheds light on each of them, rather than just complicating them (as so many intersecting-narratives do these days). And, sure, this isn't intersecting narratives in the classic sense, but the b-characters are so well fleshed out and so fundamentally... important, and themselves, and illuminating they deserve more than relegation.

Anyway, 9/10. Excellence.

This American Life episodes:

Godless America

Simply tremendous. Amazing, startling. Recorded in 2005 (before the president's numbers began to tank and the religious right went seemingly into retreat), the first act of this episode asks the question: Why do people seem to believe that America is godless now... and didn't used to be? Examines the framers' intent along with historical precedent to find out whether or not this is a "Christian country" (and comes up with an interesting answer).

The second act is less frightening to me (some of the guys they speak with in act one, the evangelicals: they scare me) and far, far more moving. Julia Sweeney discusses what it was like to read the bible for the first time as a lapsed, but God-loving Catholic and what it did to her. She wants to believe so badly and simply cannot bring herself to, it is simply heartbreaking.

This is what all media should aspire to be. 10/10.

With Great Power

Never quite hit home with me. Act one, about a woman who may have the power to free a man, is the kind of act you get a lot: sad but true. It's not an inexorable engine of coincidence and heart-stopping dread like a novel about this kind of story would be and that makes it a delightful change of pace. Sadly, though, the story seems somewhat mis-tempered, and it never really got a hold of me. Maybe that's because after "Godless America," what could could, really?

Act two is good, act three, a story, is sub-par. It's conceit was too quickly used up, and though it had it's moments of surprise and humor, not enough for a recommend, like this episode as a whole.

5/10.

Americans in Paris

Ira hangs out with David Sedaris, who shows him around the Paris that no-one ever visits. And why would they: the French are mean, they mock him and the smallest human kindness becomes an occasion to be celebrated. Also: listening to Sedaris get geeked about seeing Judge Judy at a swap-meet is priceless.

Act two: Why do people move to Paris? An answer I hadn't expected to a question I hadn't thought to ask.

Act three: Race and racism in France. Very nice.

Overall: A good time. 7/10.

A Little Bit of Knowledge

...can be a very dangerous thing. Act one is good. Dan Savage and act two are great. Act three is painful and funny and well-done, though perhaps not as funny as it thinks it is. Act four is the same, but better.

Overall: another 7/10.

New Beginnings

A re-air of the very first This American Life, back when it was called "Your Radio Playhouse." It's rough, but it's nice to get some context. See how far the show has come. Hear Ira talk to and about his parents. Overall, though, nothing except act one is worth it for people who aren't devoted fans of the show itself. But that act one... man is it good.

Act one: 9/10, which you can also get in the episode Shoulda Been Dead.

Overall: 7/10, for the devoted.

20 Acts in 60 Minutes

A concept show: all the shorter stories that would work great but aren't long enough for regular air. Interesting if hit and miss. Some are, of course, better than others, but it's an interesting experience, but, again, mostly if you're invested in the way the show normally is to begin with.

Overall: 6/10, normally.

The Auto Show

A grab-bag of auto-related stories. A man spots and follows his stolen car. Superloud-stereo competitions (and, you know, what they say about America). A grandmother that's the leading salesman at a Chevy dealership in Chicago. Stirling Moss and the Mercedes 722. All solid, all entertain. And none of them made me cry, so an extra point for that.

Overall: 7/10.

The Lion in Winter
While, yes, I understand that it was a play first, and, yes, I understand that acting was different back then, and, yes, who the fuck am I to question Anthony Hopkins and Peter O'Toole, but, I mean, give me a fucking break. The beginning and ending were nice, but after a while it just all got to be a bit much. There's only so much Peter O'Toole running from one room to another yelling like a mad bastard that I can take. And the dialouge, I felt, was trying just a little bit too hard.

On the other hand: John Castle was great as Geoffery, even though the part is only one note, struck over and over. And the opening sequence, where Jane Merrow's breasts are trucked up into that U-gouge medival neckline? That's a good time.

Oh, and I've decided that I hate Katherine Hepburn.

Overall? 6/10 (Respecatable)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Based on the book of the same name, this movie reminded me a lot of Woody Allen's "Bananas." In so much as that it was trying very hard to be funny but really wasn't so much. The best sequence was the driest: The take off on "8 1/2" / every other Fellini movie was quite hilarious, to me. Also, I think it spun on Belle de Jour, which I just watched today. Will have to go back and check. If you've seen the films it plays on, this movie's worth it for this one sketch.

The others were forgettable, except the classic capper to the film: Woody Allen as a reluctant sperm as a man's body (run like a navy ship) tries to get it together to have sex. Also choice: an insanely young Regis Philbin during the "Guess My Perversion" sequence, though the sequence itself was pretty crappy.

Overall? 5/10 (Eh.)

Glengarry Glen Ross
Another opened-up play, and this one shows it, too. Never have I found David Mamet so annoying as when Ed Harris is delivering his lines. Watching Alan Arkin do his thing, though, will never get old. So many guys in this movie are perfectly cast: Alec Baldwin is the corporate higher-up, waiting for you to give him an excuse to shit on you. Kevin Spacey is the blank, careerist, seemingly incompetant boss. Jack Lemmon is old, funny and a little down on his luck--he does best with making the dialog sound natural, too. Alan Arkin is the prickly guy. Ed Harris is the dick who thinks he's smarter than everybody else, even when he's not. Jonathon Pryce (of Brazil) is the mark.

And Al Pacino. Al Pacino plays the same role that Al Pacino's played a thousand times since: complete asshole and smooth-talking hustler who could sell water to a well. Ricky Roma is the protoypical Pacino role, and he fucking eats it up.

The cast and the kinetic energy of the dialog keep the movie from getting too bottle up in it's tacked-on-feeling plot or it's general lack of craft in direction.

Overall? 7/10 (if you're a dude) or 3/10 (if you're a chick)

Secretary
A lot of pieces of film-making claim to be erotic, but few actually are. The first spanking sequence in Secretary is truly one of the most erotic things I've ever seen put on film. And subsequent sequences build on, complicate or subvert that first blush of eroticism wonderfully. It's the best filmic equivilent I've ever seen to the blossoming of erotic exploration. Very well-done.

It suffers, a little, from it's time-period and semi-indie aesthetic (the middle-time plot meanderings remind me a little of Garden State and like faire that is solid but has that middle-wander, where the film loses coherence for those five or ten minutes when focus matters most. I don't know if this indicates that filmmaking is harder than it looks, or that these directors/writers go through one too few rounds of polish to clean that out, but it's an important feature of the sub-genre, and I'd like to see someone take it apart).

And it also suffers from the fact that I find James Spader a bit disconcertingly walleyed.

But I stand by my initial assesment: very, very good. A mostly well-made film on a woefully under-addressed subject (Moral, as portrayed by the film: Most people are neither, but some people are doms and some people are subs. There is nothing wrong with this, and good for them when they find each other.) that addresses it's characters with warmth and depth.

Overall? 8/10. (Good, not great. Worth seeing.)

Belle de Jour
Catherine Deneuve is a stone fox. A stone fox's stone fox, if you will. The stone fox of a stone fox's ... well, you get the idea. The woman is attractive. The basic premise: Severine is psychologically unable to make love to her husband. She hears of another woman of her social-stratum who has become a prostitute, from time to time. So she does the same.

What is interesting to me is the ... ambiguity the movie leaves open. What really drove it home were the two trailers included on the DVD. The original, 1967 American trailer: A woman is tempted by the pleasures of the flesh! The 1992 re-release trailer: A woman departs on an erotic journey to find her inner being!
Neither of these one-lines really sum up what's going on in the film: a woman has a problem. She hears of something that strikes her as related to her problem and she undertakes it, she doesn't know why. She is doing what people do: trying something, even though they don't know why because perhaps it will fill a need or answer a question even they themselves can only vaguely define.

So far, it sounds much more like the 1992 trailer got it right, but it misses, too. Her journey is not 'erotic.' Sometimes it is erotic, other times it is horrifying. Some times it is magical and transporting, other times it is crass and harsh. Sometimes when it's crass and harsh it's transporting.

(Severine, here, like Maggie Gyllenhall's character in Secretary, seems to be a bit of a sub by nature... but putting the blonde, aristocratic Severine in the role of a sub rather than the cutter that is Gyllenhall's character in Secretary reeks of drastically different gender politics, which I can talk about at further length, should anyone care.)

So the 1992 trailer gets it wrong, too. Yes, she does become sexually 'enlightened,' but she's also narratively punished for doing so and wishes she hadn't done it, it seems. But would her life have been so much better in her chaste marriage to Pierre? Really the movie is about someone with problems she can't solve, but who tries to anyway. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and in the end, it comes crashing down on her.

But I guess that message is, to be fair, a little complicated for a two minute trailer.

Overall? 8/10.

Dethroner: Dapper or Crapper: Bikini Jeans

icanhascheezburger.com

Boing Boing: The Truth About 4/29
And the followup.

Andy gives good jazz.

Today also celebrates the one-month anniversary of this "Quick Hits" feature! It replaced the comically-infrequent "Daily Roundup." What do you think of these posts? Useful? Useless? Usetastic?