CV Rick

Montana Jones and the World Series

Remember when Boston played the Yankees in the 2003 AL Championship?  I do and I'm not even a baseball fan.  In the third game of that series, Roger Clemens

faced Pedro Martinez and Montana Jones decided he needed to watch the game in a bar.  Montana hates the Red Sox - a minority position in Gloucester, Massachussetts.

He drank a full bottle of Grey Goose at his apartment and then he got into his Cadillac and drove down the road.  There isn't anyone in town who doesn't know Montana's car.  For one, it's pink - a long, low smooth pink ride, like a Mary Kay reward car.  He likes driving a pink Caddy because it gets attention.  Besides, no one's fool enough to make fun of Montana Jones.

He scraped the right side on some parked cars out on Middle and he overcorrected on Washington and scraped up the left on the other side of the street.  I must be really drunk, he thought. 

All the way up the highway he swerved from the right to the left.  Cars honked their horns and moved out of the way and he made his way to the bar where he knew there was going to be trouble.  He'd make sure of it.

He ripped into the parking lot still doing over forty.  He took off a rearview mirror and ruined two paint jobs going in and then put the Caddy into a spot too small for it, scraping up one of those little pickups; a Ranger, he thought.  He had to scoot over to the passenger side since he couldn't open his door far enough to squeeze out.

Great Art - An American Self-Potrait

Cherise emailed me a link to this artist.

Chris Jordan is an artist who uses statistics and representational art to make political statements.  From his artist statement:

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Here's an example:

Cans Seurat, 2007
60x92"

Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Click on these images for the close-ups.

more after the jump

Saturday Meme – Greatest Last Lines

I've talked about the First Lines of stories and how important they are, but what about the conclusion – the finale, which leaves you wanting more.  It can finish a book, making you smile and be contented or it can frustrate you with the desire for more.  It's the icing on the cake, especially of a great novel – or it's the hard-earned release from a bad story. 

Sometimes a great concluding line is beautiful, flowing, long and engaging:

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. –Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Sometimes it's short and to the point:

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One! –Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Here's one I love because it wraps up the intent of a book in which that intent gets cast aside so often that the reader forgets what the hell the writer was doing:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. –Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

And here's on that contributed to the growing up of generations of children:

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. –Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

But after the jump are my favorites.

Science Friday - Stonehenge Explained?

This guy thinks he's figured out how large Rocks might have been moved and set up.  I think he's right.

- rick, thinking about building something with big rocks

Delayed

I must've been tired.  I fell asleep on the couch.  As a result, today's Growing Up Mormon post is not done yet.

Instead:  Human Tetris

Mormonism and Redefining the Language

Mormons are claiming that one of the bits of evidence that proves the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is that it incorporates the literary device, chiasmus.  What they point to is that chiasmi existed in ancient Hebrew and since it exists in the Book of Mormon then the relationship between Hebrew and the "reformed Egyptian" (that's a Joseph Smith term, not mine) is evident. 

Lesson time:  From the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

chiasmus [ky-AZ-mus] (plural -mi), a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" —Byron) or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas … . The figure is especially common in 18th century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all periods. It is named after the Greek letter chi (x), indicating a "criss-cross" arrangement of terms. Adjective: chiastic.

This comes from the Greek, khiasmos which means To Mark With an X.  The X is the Greek letter chi and what it describes is two phrases crossed.  Like this (Mae West's famous line).

It's not the men in my life

X

it's the life in my men.

Some examples of Chiasmi:

 

"You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy."

Popular saying.

"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
- - Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog."
- - Dwight D. Eisenhower January 1958 speech to the Republican National Committee   

"...ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
- - John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

"...Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.."
- - John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."
- - John F. Kennedy

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America."
- - Jimmy Carter Farewell Address

"Let's make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, and this president does not choose the next Supreme Court."
- - Albert Gore Jr. at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

It's a very cool literary device - it has rhythm and power.  It's sweet sounding and makes you fall right into the speech.

But it doesn't exist in the Book of Mormon.

The Decline of Science Fiction?

This past weekend while I was attending MiniCon, a Science Fiction convention, I sat in on a panel called, “Why Does Fantasy Continue to Outsell Science Fiction?”

That panel troubled me because I've often wondered about the decline of Science Fiction sales while at the same time some of the most thought provoking speculative fiction I've read is being sold outside the Science Fiction section of the bookstores.  Is Science Fiction really dying, I wondered, or is it being co-opted by the mainstream?

To that end I did some comparisons on the New York Times Bestsellers list.  I picked out everything I readily identified as Science Fiction and everything I readily identified as Fantasy irrespective the publishing houses involved.

What I discovered is that according to the New York Times, Fantasy is indeed more successful than Science fiction.  Over the last 15 months there have been 22 Fantasies and only 12 Science Fictions.  But the struggle isn't between those two genres.  94 books on the Bestseller list over that period have been Crime and Courtroom Fiction – Three times as many as Sci-Fi and Fantasy combined.

The real question is what can Science Fiction or Fantasy do to appeal to readers the way they appeal to video gamers and movie goers? 

Unfortunately I don't have an answer. Thoughts?

- rick, writer, reader, fan.

Montana Jones' Missing Finger

Montana Jones tells the guys at the bar that he lost the tip of his left ring finger in Vietnam; tells them that he got the purple heart and then laughs that they give out purple hearts for the smallest injuries. “But if its enemy fire, it's enemy fire, right?” he asks them. 

More often than not someone will buy him a drink and toast to his service.   

“Here here,” Montana will say.

But we know better, don't we?  Montana never went to Vietnam.  The extent of his service was a quick stint in the Coast Guard aboard a Cutter followed by an arrest for smuggling ganja in from the Caribbean.  Who ever heard of a bullet taking off the tip of a finger? 

Here's what really happened.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I was really in debt.  It looked like I was ready to lose the boat and I couldn't sink it in the harbor for the insurance money on account of the fact that I'd already done that one time just a year earlier.  I was desperate.

So I walk into my attorney's office.  I got this Jew lawyer, see.  They're the best kind so that's what I got.  I says to him, “Bennie, what's a finger worth?”

“Excuse me?” he says like he didn't hear the question. 

“For the insurance, if I was to lose my finger in a fishing accident,” I says to him. 

“Montana Jones, don't you dare do what I think you're going to do.”

At a Convention

(psssss, there's a special video treat at the end of this post).

I've been at This Convention this weekend.  There have been some pretty good panels about writing, specifically Science Fiction and Fantasy.  There have also been some pretty bad panels about the same.  I'll tell you more about the details later on.

I met this guy:

He wrote these books:

and others.

Saturday Meme - Life In Six Words or Less

This is one I got from several places.

JulieAnn tagged me.

I made inappropriate comments on Sideon's entry.

Cele did it before both of the above.

Here’s how this one works:

1. Write your own six-word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag five more blogs with links.
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play. (This last step is optional.)

My 6 Word Memoir:

Disillusioned patriot redefined his American dream.

I don't tag people.  Play if you like.

- rick

Science Friday: Telepathy by Technology

This is absolutely phenomenal.  They've come up with a way to transmit the thoughts that remain unspoken via phone technology.  With this you can send your ideas and words to the ears of another person without uttering a sound.  It's still preliminary and can only do a hundred words or so, but it's a whole new realm of possibility.  Science Fiction can't keep up with Science Fact.

- rick, thinking these words, and not uttering a sound.

Obama and the Politics of Racism

I'm putting my Apartheid Billy conclusion on hold for a week.  Right now I really want to talk about Obama's Religion Speech.  If you haven't watched it or read it, please do so. 

What I've encountered on a discussion board saddens me, because the slander and the onslaught against Barack Obama is really getting into full swing.  It's based on mischaracterizations and lazy talking points. 

Here's my part of this exchange, what's in quotes is what I'm responding to:

 

Quote:

I think that Rev. Wright preaches hate, and that Obama should not have taken his children to listen to that. I think Obama should have denounced Wright completely, not excused his more recent actions because he "grew up during segregation."

I don't think anyone should ever take their children to the Mormon church. I think it's child abuse to subject children to a doctrine that has never disavowed its earliest teachings that dark-skinned people were not brave and honorable during the heavenly "pre-existence" war. However, when I brought this up on Conservative websites before Romney dropped out of the race I was universally derided for being a bigot. Where Obama explained that he did not accept these inflammatory preachings of Rev. Wright, Romney never addressed this uncomfortable but still doctrinal precept of his own religion. Romney's speech on religion was a poor shadow to Obama's in what it revealed about character, truth, and integrity.

I think you should disavow everyone in your life who believes such racist rubbish. I think you should tell them they are racists and I think you should never speak to them again. I think you should put a sign in your front yard saying that your Mormon friends and relatives are not welcome in your lives until they specifically disavow every racist word Brigham Young, Joe Smith Jr, et al ever said from the pulpit or during doctrinal lessons/writings.

How far do you want me to go with this?  How prominent does the double standard have to be before you recognize it? 

Whatever happened to the maxim "condemn the sin but love the sinner." That's what we do for our family, our friends, our associates. None of us accept every belief of all the people in our lives, but that doesn't mean we reject those people for political expediency.

Obsessing About Obama

Post titles from the main blog page of the most highly trafficked Conservative Blog:

The new Barack Obama logo: Agent of left-wing same old; Update: Let’s change…the subject

Say goodbye to the Glowbama mystique

Jeremiah Wright to be honored

Hate-filled sermons were just “snippets;”

Now you see it, now you don’t, now you do! : Glowbama to recapture the glow with a “major speech” on race

Jeremiah Wright’s Greatest Hits

Jeremiah-gate: Glowbama’s losing his glow

Report: Obama nodded in agreement last summer

Obamessiah: Signs And Wonders

The audacity of earmarks

Now we know where Michelle Obama’s resentment of America comes from

From a Conservative Blog I look at, seven of the first 20 Headlines are about Obama:

‘Obama Is A Mac Daddy’

Obama The Poser

Barack Obama To Be Keynote Speaker At North Dakota Democrat Convention  (Yawn)

Obama: Declaration of Independence was “was stained by the nation’s original sin of slavery.”

Barack Obama’s Campaign Website Sends Black Panther Endorsement Down The Memory Hole

Obama A Nappy-Headed Hypocrite?

Obama’s Social Security Plan

Think they're worried?

Arthur C. Clarke Died. He'll Be Missed.

He was the standard bearer for the space age.  His scientific knowledge blended with his perfect prose to give us the rarest of writers: one whose fiction led fact. 

Allow me a non-scientific metaphor.  The greatest sheep dogs don't nip the sheep, they run ahead to show the herd where to go and then they push them along from behind. 

Arthur C. Clarke was science's sheepdog, he showed them what was possible, then he herded them along until they got there. He dreamed the possible and combined it with an intimate knowledge of physics.  This combination made him our modern version of a prophet.  He forecasted telecommunication satellites and the geosynchronous orbit that allows them to relay signals to wide swaths of the earth.  The International Astronomical Union named those 22,240 mile high equatorial orbits The Clarke Orbit. 

What he was best known for was his writing.  He was the master of the big idea and his novels reflected a hopeful promise of the realized virtue of mankind.  He tried to show that we could transcend war, hunger and poverty if we just worked toward common goals like solar system exploration and universal prosperity.  He caused you to think about that big idea, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and sometimes for the rest of your life, such as with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End, and Rendezvous with Rama.  The big idea was his domain more than any other science fiction writer, it was his playground. 

The theme that really stuck out for me was his fascination with a higher power.  He explored God from all perspectives, even looking within his characters to find that the higher power resided within.  When reading his work I sometimes find myself holding my breath as my imagination synchronized with Clarke's - it's that magic moment where you know that you just experienced through reading what the author experienced through creating.  Pure, Magic.

One thing not many people know about me (until now, when I'm publishing this on the internet) is that I really like Mike Oldfield's 1970's music, like Songs from a Distant Earth and Tubular Bells.  Oldfield named many parts of his work after Arthur C. Clarke stories and it's perfect mood music for reading Clarke's work.

I'm going to leave y'all with what I think is Clarke's best short story, The Nine Billion Names of God.  It's available at that link.  Read it if you haven't already.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

- rick, fan

Clinton Compromises

The other day I was in Costco buying paper towels and bottled water when I overheard two women talking about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  The taller woman was in her fifties and wore a green Safari coat plastered with pro-Hillary pins.  The other wore a smock and was handing out free samples of toaster pastries.  She was much older and nodded in agreement with the talking points:

"We need a president who is a leader, not someone who just gives speeches.  This isn't a pep rally, it's the most important election of our time.  We need someone with experience."

I approached and picked up the free sample.

"He has no chance of winning because he's never done anything," she continued.  "This country needs someone who knows what she's doing."

Not being able to keep quiet, I said, "Exactly what experience does Senator Clinton have?"

Both women turned to me.  The campaigner started her assault, "She's got foreign policy experience all over the . .. "

I interrupted, "Not experience her husband has.  What experience does she have?  What has she done?"

She stopped.  I got the glare.  So, I continued.

"The person I like isn't Hillary.  I prefer someone with a lot of legislative experience, like in the state house of Illinois.  I like the fact that he's been a lawyer who's practiced and taught extensively.  I'm also confident that he understands the Constitution.  Even though he only served in Congress a couple years, he's a leader and a motivator, a great orator and a reasonable, thoughtful man."

"Barack Obama doesn't have the experience," she said.

"I wasn't talking about Obama.  I just described Abraham Lincoln."

I took my tasty sample and walked away.

Montana Jones and the Korean's Fishing Net

“What we're talking about here is a net that's two miles long and costs around twenty-thousand bucks.  It reels out for thirty minutes to sometimes an hour,” Montana said.

“And you lost it?” Jimmy asked.

“I think I'll start at the beginning, thank you.”

*****

These Korean fishermen were looking for an engine man to go with them out to the Grand Banks for a few days while they fished cod.  I was in between jobs so I hired on and out we went. 

Now being an engine man meant I had to earn my keep, right?  So they had me all over the boat.  First I was spooling the net, then stowing gear and I got a little tired, so I go below and unhook the distributor line. Then when the engine chokes up a few minutes later these little Koreans come up to me pointing and coughing or whatever they do for speech. 

“Yeah, yeah,” I says and go below to work on the engine.  Since I have a nip – you know, a pint of whiskey – it takes me a couple hours down there clanking and shuffling.  Then I reconnect the line and the engine roars to life.  Now these Koreans think I'm the shit.  So they leave me alone while I putter the time away on the engine. 

That was until we get out to the tail of The Banks and they want to run out the net. So I go up and operate the winch for them. 

Great Art - Urban Chameleonism

Desiree Palmen recreates in urban settings what some animals, like chameleons and cuttlefish, can do in the wild - blend into their surroundings.  She's a 44-year old Dutch artist who must spend hours perfecting every detail before taking the photograph.  Here are the results:

Click on the photo for an even bigger version, it's amazing.
More after the jump.

Saturday Meme - Obsolete Skills

This meme has been going around the internet for a long time and I don't think any of the blogs I regularly read has done it, so I'm not going to give a credit link to anyone. 

It's obsolete skills – things you know how to do and do well that are worthless today.  Play along, I don't tag anyone.

• I know how to use a Library card catalogue and I know the Dewey decimal system.  We learned it in school and had tests on it.
• I know how to put two spaces after a period.  I still do it.  I can't stop and HTML eliminates it, but there I am spacing twice.
• I can read a sundial.  It's true.  When I found out that my most famous ancestor had turned a room of his house into an elaborate sundial (on the ceiling no less, lit by mirrors), I learned how to read them.  And you'd be amazed at what you can learn from a well-made sundial.
• I can use a slide rule.
• I can use carbon paper to make copies.
• I can count back change.  This one really annoys me.  It's a pet peeve.  It's not hard to take what was owed and count up to what was paid and not give the damned change back in a wad with the coins on top of the bills.
• I can crank a car window up or down.
• I know how to make a chain of pop-tops.  We made a whole bead-curtain of them in the Air Force to separate our barracks room. That was Bobby Joe Maccullum and I.
• I used to know Morse Code.
• I used to use a CB Radio.  My dad had one and when we went on our long car trips that was the entertainment.  Well, there was also the alphabet game.  But I used to CB a lot.  My handle?  I'll bet you would want to know that.
• I know how to use a Polaroid.  I know how to peel the developer layer off the photograph.  I know how to load the cartridge.  I used to have to do the in-processing photos for large transformers at a repair shop – all Polaroids.
• I know how to hitchhike.  That was when it was an accepted form of transportation for a guy on leave from the military.
• I know how to wind a clock.  I also know how to wind a watch.

 

1 in 200 U.S. Adults are Terrorists

This post over at the ACLU is about the number of people in the United States who are on the Terrorist Watch List.

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.¹

At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July.

A million people in the U.S. are on this watch list.  What fucking good is it then? 

Let's think about this for a moment.  Throwing out children and the elderly, there are approximately 181,000,000 people in this country, men and women.  That means by July the government will suspect one out of every one hundred eighty one people of being a terrorist. 

Those people are going to stopped at airports, investigated, watched and monitored.  How many Department of Homeland Security people is it going to take to monitor the activities of a million people?  How fucking big do you morons want that department to get?

In order for a watch list to be effective, it has to be small and targeted.  It has to include known terrorists and their acquaintances.  Putting everyone on the list named Alan Rowley isn't really going to help us if there's only one of those people who likes throwing plastic explosive Frisbees at commuter trains. 

What's more, the Bush Administration wants the right to warrantless wiretap these terrorist subjects because they're on this fucking million-person list.  Coincidentally, most of his political enemies and quite a few Democratic Congressman are on the list.  It'd sure be handy to eavesdrop on their phone conversations, e-mails, and office conversations without their knowledge. It'd be handy to do that without permission from a judge, which means a traceable paper trail.

These nitwits have to be stopped. 

Here's the question - - who do you want administering a Million-Person Terrorist Watch List?  Who do you trust tapping the phones of 1 in 181 adult Americans? 

- rick, awaiting the gestapo.

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part Four

I worked nearly every day at my dad's Television Shop.  My duties included cleaning the store, answering the phone, calling customers, and delivering televisions, both new and used.

The television deliveries were often very difficult and almost always a long drive.  The sets were big, bulky wooden consoles.  Remember, back then televisions were pieces of furniture that you placed vases on and that you matched your couch to.  Some of the sets were triple consoles - a television in the middle, a stereo record player on one side, and an eight track player on the other. 

Since it was a small shop and we couldn't afford to take the technicians, William, Billy, or my dad away from their work, I'd recruit a friend to help me on deliveries.  Sometimes it was Kelly, my rock-solid red-headed classmate who resembled a tank more than a boy.  Sometimes it was Blaine or Shane, twin brothers who were always anxious to make some cash but rarely capable of actually carrying something bulky and heavy without dropping it.  Sometimes it was Alma, my troubled Native American friend.  He almost never wanted the money and wasn't excited about the work, but getting out of the house and away from his adoptive parents was motivation enough.  We also talked a lot on the long drives.  All the other kids told me that Alma was quiet and reserved, but in that delivery truck he was animated and talkative.  I don't know if he was like that with anyone else, but I feel like I got to see a side of Alma no one else saw. 

I think y'all can see where this disaster is heading, so I'll skip a lot of the niceties.

One day I called Alma to come over and help with three deliveries.  The standing rate for my friends was five bucks a delivery, so that was going to be fifteen dollars to drive around for an hour and carry three large, bulky sets up horrible, small staircases.  I just now realized that all of my friends were saints or masochists. 

Top Ten Mystery Movies of All Time

This week Cherise and I are giving you the best mystery movies of all-time.  To be fair, we could've just listed ten Alfred Hitchcock movies and been done, but we decided to mix it up a bit and give you some variety.  Now the nitwits down at the American Film Institute need to come on over, crib from us for their own end of the year list, and send us a nice big check for doing their work for them.  And now for the list:

10.  L.A. Confidential – 1997

 

This film feels like the 1950's noir fiction that it represents.  Originally a James Ellroy novel, it's a gritty, seedy story of corruption, sex, and murder where you can trust no one and the famous and wealthy of Los Angeles get mixed up in the dirty underbelly of the city.  It starts with a mass murder at a coffee shop and devolves into an organized crime story involving pornography, heroin and politics.

Office Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a monster of a cop but his partner, Dick Stensland, was thrown off the force following a police brutality case.  Bud hates the man who testified against Stensland and they both are involved in the crime investigation where Stensland is one of the victims.  The man: Detective Edmund Exley (Guy Pierce), a straight-laced and brilliant detective who plays exactly by the book. 

Enter the third cop involved in the investigation, Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey).  He's a celebrity cop who works in television as an advisor, has ties to Hush-Hush magazine and leaks details of celebrity arrests to the press, for a fee. 

The twists and turns are exquisite and the atmosphere is unbeatable.

PRINCIPAL CAST Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce,
James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito
DIRECTOR Curtis Hanson
SCREENWRITERS Brian Helgeland, Curtis Hanson

 

9. The Big Lebowski - 1998

 

In a case of mistaken identity, two thugs rough up Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) and piss on his rug.  These guys thought Lebowski's wife owed Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) some money.  Now Lebowski likes to be known as “The Dude” and he likes walking around in a bathrobe and he wants to get paid for his ruined rug, so he goes out to find the other Jeffrey Lebowski and get some recompense. 

What he finds is Bunny Lebowski, the Big Lebowski's trophy wife.  She happens to also be a nymphomaniac.  He also finds a rug he likes and he steals it.  But Bunny goes missing and the Big Lebowski figures out that The Dude can identify the men who probably kidnapped her.  Enter The Dude's bowling buddy, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) who comes up with the idea of ripping off the kidnappers and the Big Lebowski. 

Things just go downhill from there.   

This is a quotable movie and a Coen Brother's masterpiece.

PRINCIPAL CAST Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman
DIRECTOR Joel Coen
SCREENWRITERS Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

 

8. Gaslight – 1944

An amazing psychological mystery that has been made and remade, this is however, the best version of the film.

Paula (Ingrid Bergman) discovers her aunts dead body in their home and her aunt's jewels missing. The murder goes unsolved and Paula is then sent to a music school in Italy where she remains until she marries an older man and pianist, Gregory (Charles Boyer), who convinces her to move back into the London house.

Shortly upon arrival in the home, Paula receives a mysterious letter... and the psychological games begin. 

The mystery and suspense in this movie is palpable.  Poor Paula is put through the wringer and the audience is a long for the ride.

Note from Rick:  I've heard of this Ingrid Bergman actress before.  I've been told she's pretty good.  I guess I ought to watch something with her in it.  This one seems like a reasonable place to start.

PRINCIPAL CAST Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten,
Dame May Whitty
DIRECTOR George Cukor
SCREENWRITERS John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L. Balderston

This week Cherise and I are giving you the best mystery movies of all-time.  To be fair, we could've just listed ten Alfred Hitchcock movies and been done, but we decided to mix it up a bit and give you some variety.  Now the nitwits down at the American Film Institute need to come on over, crib from us for their own end of the year list, and send us a nice big check for doing their work for them.  And now for the list:

10.  L.A. Confidential – 1997

 

This film feels like the 1950's noir fiction that it represents.  Originally a James Ellroy novel, it's a gritty, seedy story of corruption, sex, and murder where you can trust no one and the famous and wealthy of Los Angeles get mixed up in the dirty underbelly of the city.  It starts with a mass murder at a coffee shop and devolves into an organized crime story involving pornography, heroin and politics.

Office Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a monster of a cop but his partner, Dick Stensland, was thrown off the force following a police brutality case.  Bud hates the man who testified against Stensland and they both are involved in the crime investigation where Stensland is one of the victims.  The man: Detective Edmund Exley (Guy Pierce), a straight-laced and brilliant detective who plays exactly by the book. 

Enter the third cop involved in the investigation, Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey).  He's a celebrity cop who works in television as an advisor, has ties to Hush-Hush magazine and leaks details of celebrity arrests to the press, for a fee. 

The twists and turns are exquisite and the atmosphere is unbeatable.

PRINCIPAL CAST Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce,
James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito
DIRECTOR Curtis Hanson
SCREENWRITERS Brian Helgeland, Curtis Hanson

 

9. The Big Lebowski - 1998

 

In a case of mistaken identity, two thugs rough up Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) and piss on his rug.  These guys thought Lebowski's wife owed Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) some money.  Now Lebowski likes to be known as “The Dude” and he likes walking around in a bathrobe and he wants to get paid for his ruined rug, so he goes out to find the other Jeffrey Lebowski and get some recompense. 

What he finds is Bunny Lebowski, the Big Lebowski's trophy wife.  She happens to also be a nymphomaniac.  He also finds a rug he likes and he steals it.  But Bunny goes missing and the Big Lebowski figures out that The Dude can identify the men who probably kidnapped her.  Enter The Dude's bowling buddy, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) who comes up with the idea of ripping off the kidnappers and the Big Lebowski. 

Things just go downhill from there.   

This is a quotable movie and a Coen Brother's masterpiece.

PRINCIPAL CAST Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman
DIRECTOR Joel Coen
SCREENWRITERS Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

 

8. Gaslight – 1944

An amazing psychological mystery that has been made and remade, this is however, the best version of the film.

Paula (Ingrid Bergman) discovers her aunts dead body in their home and her aunt's jewels missing. The murder goes unsolved and Paula is then sent to a music school in Italy where she remains until she marries an older man and pianist, Gregory (Charles Boyer), who convinces her to move back into the London house.

Shortly upon arrival in the home, Paula receives a mysterious letter... and the psychological games begin. 

The mystery and suspense in this movie is palpable.  Poor Paula is put through the wringer and the audience is a long for the ride.

Note from Rick:  I've heard of this Ingrid Bergman actress before.  I've been told she's pretty good.  I guess I ought to watch something with her in it.  This one seems like a reasonable place to start.

PRINCIPAL CAST Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten,
Dame May Whitty
DIRECTOR George Cukor
SCREENWRITERS John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L. Balderston

One More Battlestar Galactica Post

I noticed some of you haven't followed Battlestar Galactica.  Here's a shortcut solution - an eight and a half minute series recap.  It'll catch you up on all the important storylines and events.  Then you can watch it along with me when the series resumes in less than a month.

- rick, fan

Great Fiction - Free Reading and Listening

Today I'm plugging some great writers you probably don't know about - For free.

Audio story - Terminal by Chaz Brenchley.  Listen to it via Starship Sofa.  It's been nominated for the British Science Fiction Association Short Story award.

Audio collection - Five and a half hours of great stories by Robert Martin, Harry Harrison, Larry Harris, Frank Herbert, Robert Wicks, R.A. Lafferty, Larry Shaw, S.P. Wright, and Roger Dee.

Perfect listening while you take your dog for a walk.  If you don't have a dog, come on over and take mine for a walk, he never tires of that.

Finally for Audio Stories, here's Jeremiah Tolbert's story, Instead of a Loving Heart.

If audio isn't your thing here's another link that is just a treasure trove of fiction.  It has links to free versions of nearly all the stories, novellas, and novelettes that are up for this year's Nebula Awards in Science Fiction. 

These are great exposure to writers that might not be getting the attention at book stores, but are producing high quality fiction nonetheless.

Enjoy . . . but be careful, audio is addicting (as is all great fiction).

- rick, reader and listener.

Battlestar Galactica Coming Back

I'm taking a week off from Montana Jones.  Here's a great photo from Entertainment Weekly.  The best show on television is set to return - with all its religious references and storylines.

If you can't see it all, click this smaller image.

Ancient Book Art - Rudimentum Novitiorum

Too cool - from a book published in 1475.

This is the book's world map - - - places are represented by hills and circled by an ocean sea.  I spoke to a cartographer historian once and she told me fascinating stories about how representational early maps were - how they weren't used to navigate or find places and they didn't use scale, but instead were symbolic of religious and political hierarchy.
More after the jump

Saturday Meme - Manly Answers to Manly Questions

This one's from Alan, via Mrs. Chili:

1. Boxers? Briefs? Boxer briefs? Thongs? Commando?

I don't do thongs - no butt floss for me.  The rest are open for discussion.

2. What’s your fussiest personal care routine?

I pull nose hairs while waiting at stop lights.  No, I'm not picking my nose, I'm pulling  nose hairs.  I don't want anyone climbing up my face using a rope of weaved nostril hairs.

3. Do you have a favorite tool? Power or manual?

Oh please.  Every man has a favorite tool.  We're men after all.  But I'll keep it non-anatomical.  I like my safety wire pliers.

4. Can you change your own oil? Do you?

I can and I don't.  It takes less time to have a garage do it and they can dispose of the oil properly.

5. What’s the “manliest” thing you do on a regular basis?

Burp.  Fart.  No, it's burp.  Wait, I'm better at farting.  Can I get back to you on this?

6. What’s something “manly” that you never learned how to do?

Wolf whistles or whatever they're called.  It's that thing where guys put their fingers in their mouth and whistle really loud - ear splitting.  All I get when I try it is saliva on my fingers.

7. Do you ever cry? If so, what’s your trigger?

Yes.  Retarded meme questions.

8. Do you have a chivalrous streak? How does it manifest itself?

Yes.  I open doors - car, business, etc.  Oh, and I get in fights.  Maybe that in itself isn't chivalrous, but sometimes the reasons for the fights are.

8. Do you have a chivalrous streak? How does it manifest itself?

Yes.  I open doors - car, business, etc.  Oh, and I get in fights.  Maybe that in itself isn't chivalrous, but sometimes the reasons for the fights are.

Science Friday - Daylight Savings Time

Apparently the government thinks we aren't smart enough to know when to wake up and when to go to bed.  They think that we're under the impression that the sun is dependent on our timepieces.  Of course with all the people who believe that the earth was created *poof* six thousand years ago, plus or minus a day or two, they might have a point.

Originally Daylight Savings time was supposed to save candle wax and allow farmers who live their lives by the pocket watch (instead of the sun and roosters) to get to the fields for maximum sunlight.  It's supposed to conserve energy and we haven't abandoned the arcane practice for that very reason.

Now we find out that multiple studies say this is incorrect:

Last year the US switched to summer time, three weeks earlier than usual and added another week at the other end to cut fuel consumption and help the environment. The concept is that electricity demand falls in the evening because of the extra hour of usable daylight.

DST was signed into law with the Energy Policy Act and was expected to save US$4.4bn in energy bills over 15 years and avoid the need for three electric power plants. So someone has done their sums wrong - either the Government has unknowingly destroyed enough resources to feed a third world nation, or the new studies are wrong.

Just let the clocks run normally and give us a little credit for being able to look into the sky and figure out for ourselves whether the sun's up.

- rick, also smart enough to know if it's raining

Growing Up Mormon - Apartheid Billy - Part Three

I rode with my dad to Idaho Falls to greet Apartheid Billy.  They were flying in from Salt Lake after flying from South Africa. 

I didn't know what to expect.  They way I'd heard people talking this was going to be a destitute family escaping from a battlefield.  I knew South Africa had problems, so I guess I assumed that there were troops in the streets and black people were fighting white people and everyone was dying. 

Billy wasn't what I expected.  He was as tall as my dad, but he was very thin with broad shoulders.  His hair was thinning and blonde.  I put him about my dad's age – mid-forties.  Billy's wife was beautiful.  She was maybe twenty-five, blonde hair, blue eyes, slim and perfectly put together like a make-up model.  Their daughter was just a baby.  It was one of those marriages that a teenage boy doesn't understand – why was she with a guy who could be old enough to be her father? 

Billy shook my dad's hand and ignored me.  Billy's wife nodded but didn't speak. The men discussed some things for a few minutes until the Stake President and one of his counselors showed up.

The stake president handed Billy some paperwork and keys to a car.  Billy drove away in a brand new Oldsmobile.  We drove back home in a beat-up delivery van with a failing clutch.  I didn't understand what was going on.

A few days later Billy showed up at work.  The first thing he complained about was the dinky little shop.  The second thing was that he was expected to work on equipment that ought to just be thrown away.  Those weren't the last of his complaints.  He complained more than anything else. Every word out of his mouth was against someone or something.  He held nothing back.  I think he should have because it got old. 

Billy had a a South African accent, but since I'd never heard a South African accent before, I couldn't distinguish it from Australian.  I just knew it didn't really sound British. 

Fear And Dirty Tactics Work in America

You know why I won't live in a Red State again?  It's because you people in Red States have nothing in common with me.  You like being scared and you believe the world is divided into two teams and yours has to win at all costs. 

Texas and Ohio are Red States . . .  nutters from those states voted overwhelmingly for Bush and yesterday they revived Hillary Clinton. 

She went dirty and pandered to fear.  It worked.  I can't believe that it worked, but it did. 

Hillary claims to be experienced . . . what I want to know is what is she experienced in?  Being first lady doesn't count for anything unless you also want to claim that being married to Donald Trump makes you a real estate expert and being married to Bill Gates makes you an expert on software development. 

You want to know what Hillary Clinton's really an expert at? 

• She's an expert at slashing American jobs and stripping any protections from American workers while raping our economic protections.  That's what being a board member of Wal-Mart gives her for expertise. 
• She's an expert at selling political favors to lobbyists and mortgaging our political will to the highest corporate bidder.  Or am I just reading her corporate support from people like Rupert Murdoch wrong? 
• She's an expert at jumping the gun and preemptively invading sovereign nations against international law - or at least that's what her voting record says.  And she's perfectly willing to give immunity to her corporate buddies who aided Bush in spying on American citizens.

She's not a diplomat - she's never negotiating any peace.  She's never negotiated a hostage release.  She's never signed a treaty.  If you wanted a negotiator, you'd have elected Bill Richardson.  Hillary doesn't believe in compromise - she has no history of it - at all.  She's a winner-take-all authoritarian - JUST.LIKE.BUSH.  In fact, she's more like Bush than any Republican Candidate who ran in the primaries.  She's secretive, she's sleazy, and she's not to be trusted with power. 

Women - - you voted for her because you wanted to vote for a woman.  You voted for a woman who whines and cries when she's slighted and who turns to her husband when things get hard.  You think you voted for a fighter, but you really voted for a crier.  You think you voted for a leader, but the person who's leading her campaign down the road of dirty politics is her husband, Bill.

You're not getting change with Hillary - you're getting more of the same.

She can't win because no Republican on earth will vote for her.  Obama can win.  He can bring more voters and he can run a positive campaign which relies on reaching out to the opposition.  He can bring Republicans and Independents and Democrats together to vote for him. 

You people in Texas and Ohio who thought race was important voted for Hillary - - - that only can possibly mean that you didn't vote for Barack because he's black.  That's another reason I won't live in your backward red states.

If you want to split the Democratic party and galvanize Republicans, keep voting for that divisive person.  If you want to win the election and bring America back together, vote for Obama. 

Texas, Ohio - you've disappointed me and I didn't expect much.

- rick, saddened.

Gary Gygax has Passed Away

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was 15 years-old.  Alan and I hid it from my dad by playing at his house and I never kept any D&D books at home.  Sometimes we'd play at lunch in the Mormon Seminary
building across the street from the high school.

Gary Gygax created the game - well co-created it.  By pretending to be heroes and fighting orcs, dragons, and all the other creatures from mythology, boys and girls became friends and exercised their imaginations.  It's a fun game. 

When I was in the Air Force sometimes guys would get together and play for a month or two - a couple sessions a week.  Then I stopped playing for more than a decade after my discharge.  Then one day I went upstairs in my apartment building to talk to one of the caretakers.  What I heard and saw in his apartment was unmistakable - dice rolling, dragon's being slain, guys having fun.  I said, "John, is that D&D?"  And I was in. 

We still play nearly every Sunday night. 

Here's to you, Gary Gygax.  You made a great game and your legacy will continue for many years to come.

- rick, geek.

Montana Jones and the Fighting Baboon

Alright everyone.  I tried to write the story of Montana Jones and the baboon, but I couldn't do it.  The problem isn't that it's not an interesting story, it's just that I can't put it on my blog.  The fact of the matter is that it was a different world in 1971 when the incident happened.  Back then animals were treated badly and few cared.  Back then handlers were bringing bears around to wrestle people in bars and there were small operators charging people a few cents to see lions caged up in the parking lot.  Back then it was a bit rougher, somewhat wilder, and a whole lot crueler. 

So, when Montana Jones went into the Armory Club on a Friday night and paid his five bucks to stand in a ring for one minute with a baboon, there wasn't the stigma that we have today.  He did it for the prize money, three hundred bucks.  And he did it because he was Montana Jones and that means he wasn't afraid of anything. 

I started writing the story like I heard it.  The bar was grimy, the baboon's handler was as shady and disreputable as Montana and probably just as drunk.  The chalk square on the floor was ten feet on a side and one by one the baboon had dispatched opponents.  Because of the muzzle, the animal couldn't bite and because of the chain it couldn't pursue anyone outside that box, but inside the square he could tackle, attack, and maul human beings.

The reason I couldn't continue writing the story is because I can't glorify that sort of cruelty and the telling of it seemed to glorify it.  The fact is that a man shouldn't be able to stay in the square with a baboon. The primate's arms are so strong it can outpunch any prize fighter who's ever lived.  It's main weapon was it's slap, a lightning quick practiced blow upside the head that dazed some and knocked out others.  After the slap, the baboon would then push the men right out of the ring.  The fights didn't last a minute, they didn't last fifteen seconds.

Mathematical Art

Visualizations of mathematical formulas:

"Coral Star" shows the motion brought about by one particular dynamical system.

This "Fathauer crystal" is built from 13 iterations of a fractal pattern, placing cubes on cubes on cubes.

Saturday Meme - 5 Television Questions

Being sick all week got me thinking about television because it's been on and it's the only thing I didn't have to exert any effort over.  Sometimes, like now, television is the no-brainer noise machine in the background.  Sometimes it's quite the opposite.

Over the course of my lifetime I've heard nothing but bad about television.  I'm rejecting that - television is nothing more or less than any other tool in our lives.  Here's a meme to give each of you a chance to express your own feelings about television.

#1 - Name 3 bad things about television?

    - It encourages a sedentary lifestyle
    - The commercials and product placement injects consumerism directly into our lives.  It creates false wants, masking them as needs.
    - With so much mediocre programming, it encourages accepting "entertainment" that's of a lower value than life itself.

#2 - Why do you watch television, when you do?

    - For the same reason I read.  And for that matter the reason that I write.  For the stories.  Television, like the movies has an important place in our storytelling legacy.  From poetry to prose to stage to the short story to the novel back to the stage to the screen and finally to the small screen, stories are a part of us and will continue to be.  Stories are going to be told and I want to be available to experience them whether that's through attending a performance, playing a great video game or watching it on television.

#3 - Name three television dramas that you like.  What makes each unique.

    - Battlestar Galactica - This is really a classic science fiction novel brought to the screen, told in all a novel's complexity and told well.  It's dark and includes commentary on the human condition, law, technology and morality.  It's challenging in the way entertainment can succeed, by making us want to take a look at ourselves and see how we measure up.
    - Rescue Me - This is a show about a New York City Firehouse in post-9/11 America.  It's funny and sad and examines the mind of a man who lost half of himself in America's worst day.  He lost half of his friends, coworkers, and family, and the biggest question is whether he can keep living with the half that still remains.  It's also a classic novel format made better by being put on the small screen.
    - Deadwood - A Historical drama about the town that brought about the demise of Wild Bill.  The town was dangerous, on the edge of civilization, the product of the gold craze and the quintessential exploitation of all that's human by other humans.  In this story nobody is all good or all bad, but everyone is shaded by the quality of their own self-interest.  It's about what forms a community and how even the most horrible people have a bit of compassion somewhere tucked in with the greed and the cruelty.  The most amazing part of the show is that it's more fact than fiction.  Too bad the series was cancelled.

#4 - What's one of the worst things about television today?

    - Much of reality television is just an outgrowth of horrible daytime television, like Jerry Springer and a dozen "judge" shows.  It's people getting paid to reveal their darkest, nastiest, most ill-educated selves.  It's a parade of commonality, but the common element is juvenilism.  We're watching those among us who never grew up, never learned to control our emotions, never learned to wait till later to satisfy immediate urges.  The people paraded before us are those who fail basic civilization and that's who we exploit. 

#5 - What's one of the better things about television today?

    - Not all reality television is bad, believe it or not.  Some of it shows the reality of hard work and talent striving for the dream of success.  I'm thinking about things like project runway.  People on that show, and some others I'm sure, have the desire and the will and the dedication to hard work to succeed and the reality show isn't exploiting that, but instead is shining a light into a process that would happen whether we're there or not.  This gives them an opportunity to succeed in a field that they'd be striving to succeed in whether the television cameras showed it or not.