Deadly Mantis

2010-05-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

Hm. It seems the U.S. government did fly flying saucers out of Area 51 after all. If this story is to be believed (and I think it is), Area 51 was the home base for a top-secret spy plane named OXCART which had a large disc-like fuselage to carry fuel. Information about the program is just now becoming public because the records are being declassified as they become fifty years old.

Not quite as cool as reverse-engineered alien technology, but pretty cool nonetheless.

2010-03-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

My mathematical grandfather just won the Abel Prize. (I.e. the "Nobel Prize of math", with apologies to Good Will Hunting.)

2010-03-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

So there was just an article in the times arguing that the best actor oscars shouldn't be gender-segregated. I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument. The obvious problem with making this change is that you can't really just cut the number of acting awards in half, and "second best actor" somehow wouldn't quite work. Anyway what really interests me here is who would have actually won a unified award. Here's my guesses (these are for would have won, not should have won). I'm starting in 1996 cause that's where my movie knowledge starts. Which do you disagree with? I think the toughest guesses are 99, 03, 04, 06

1996: Frances McDormand (Fargo) over Geoffrey Rush (Shine)
1997: Jack Nicholson (As Good as It Gets) over Helen Hunt (As Good as It Gets)
1998: Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) over Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love)
1999: Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) over Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry)
2000: Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich) over Russell Crowe (Gladiator)
2001: Denzel Washington (Training Day) over Halle Berry (Monster's Ball) [though maybe Crowe if he didn't win in 2000]
2002: Adrien Brody (The Pianist) over Nicole Kidman (The Hours)
2003: Charlize Theron (Monster) over Sean Penn (Mystic River)
2004: Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) over Jamie Foxx (Ray) [on the "she was robbed for Boys Don't Cry" theory]
2005: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) over Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line)
2006: Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) over Helen Mirren (The Queen)
2007: Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) over Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose)
2008: Sean Penn (Milk) over Kate Winslet (The Reader)

2010-02-24T16:22:00.000-08:00

Poll numbers show a staggering majority of voters oppose the Citizens United decision overturning limits on political expenditures by corporations. The numbers are high enough that a constitutional amendment overturning the decision isn't out of the question.

If there is a constitutional amendment, the next question is what the amendment should say. My home state senator, Tom Udall, has introduced what I would call a narrow amendment, which would enable Congress and the states to regulate corporate political expenditures.

A more intriguing option would be to draft a broader amendment limiting the freedom of speech to natural persons (i.e., not corporations or other artificial entities). This would have all sorts of effects outside of the campaign finance world. To name a few, this would greatly aid in the regulation of pornography and advertising.

About the only downside that I can think of (although I am sure there are others) is that a poorly worded amendment might enable interference with the press or with churches. Because the First Amendment separately protects the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the freedom of the press, however, I don't think it would be impossible to maintain those protections that I think most people would want to keep in the First Amendment.

2009-12-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

I was reading the other day about how, at the temple of Delphi, when the holy fire was extinguished, it could not be re-lit by earthly fire. Instead, according to Plutarch, it would be lit using "concave mirrors, of a figure formed by the revolution of an isosceles rectangular triangle." A few days later, inspired by the Greeks (and in imminent danger of falling asleep during a meeting at work), and wondering what was meant by the term "isosceles rectangular triangle," I decided to try to derive the formula for the focus of a parabola. I gave up after muddling into trigonometric identities long since forgotten, and didn't bother looking up the answer. (I did, though, manage to stay awake through the rest of the meeting.) Today, I saw this picture in a NYT story about how students are taking too many AP tests. Hopefully those students will be qualified to be Delphic priests!

2009-11-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

There's a shelf at my mother's house that is devoted to storing, apparently for eternity, the fruit preserves that people give her as gifts. This summer I decided to help her clean off the shelf. We threw out the jars that looked obviously toxic, but (I'm still not sure why) I decided to salvage the unopened jars and try them out.

So, for the past month or so, I've been testing these aged fruit preserves. I've thrown out some, but a few have been ok. I ate one jar of a brownish fruit that could have been either figs or some unknown berries, and another jar that was either apricots or peaches. Now I'm eating a jar that's simply labeled, "Crabapples '92."

Apart from an admonition about botulism, AM's comment was, "why would anyone want to preserve crabapples?"

2009-10-02T02:05:00.000-07:00

Unless the Twins manage to pull off a miracle in their last three games, this year's MLB postseason lineup is going to be very disappointing. When the Twins aren't in the playoffs, I root for the team that "deserves it most" as measured by when they last won a championship. By that measure, almost none of the teams in this year's postseason deserve it. Seven of the eight teams have appeared in the World Series since 2002 (Yankees '03, Red Sox '04 & '07, Tigers '06, Angels '02, Phillies '08, Cardinals '06, Rockies '07), and five of those teams have won this decade (the Rockies and Tigers lost; the Yankees lost in '03 but won in '00). The remaining team is the Dodgers, who technically deserve it the most, but as an adopted San Franciscan I have a hard time rooting for them, especially after how their fans behaved at the game I went to in August.

So I guess you can call me pretty apathetic about this postseason. This is probably just as well, since all of the games will be on at 2.30 in the morning where I am. Of course, last time I spent a fall in Europe (2002) it was one of the most memorable postseasons in recent history. So I guess my position is: I'll get up in the middle of the night to watch any Game 7, and World Series Game 6 if it was 2-2 after four.

Unless the Twins are in it.

2009-09-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Virginia yesterday, and I'm staying with Almea while I continue to look for an apartment. For those of you who don't know about it, the website spotcrime.com is a lot of fun. It gives you a searchable map pinpointing all the reported crimes in an area during a specified time period.

Something interesting I saw on the website: Arlington, a city with a population of about 200,000, had about 200 reported crimes in the past two months. Alexandria, with a population of 150,000, had about 200 reported crimes in the past two weeks. Washington, a city with a population of about 600,000, had about 200 reported crimes in the past four days.

According to the spotcrime map, most of the Washington crimes are not in the poorest neighborhoods, but are instead property crimes in some of the trendiest parts of the city. Perhaps criminals have easy pickings among the young and well-to-do. (I am reminded of the Harvard students who were repeatedly burgled when they left their dorm rooms unlocked.) I'm not sure, however, why the trendier parts of Arlington have so many fewer crimes; maybe would-be criminals are deterred by northern Virginia's famous transportation problems.

2009-09-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

My apartment in Arlington just fell through, so I'm back on craigslist looking for a place to live. My favorite listing so far: "$650 Basement near Ballston with 20 Some restaurant workers." After I clicked on it in sheer fascination, I realized they were refering to their ages, not their numbers.

2009-08-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

In the past month, three people independently recommended that I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Two bought me the book. The other said, "this book will make you want to tear off all your clothes and go running into the wilderness."

I just finished the book, and I can only nod in agreement. And I bet it has an even more profound effect on non-runners.

2009-08-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

We've been back in the U.S. for a week now and are halfway through our Tour de California. Some things we've noticed:

air conditioning
weird small green money
fat people
sandwiches with more stuff than bread
toilets with lots of water
diversity
SO MUCH DRIVING!!!

2009-08-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

What kind of important issues will Justice Sotomayor be handling in her first term on the Supreme Court? How about crush fetishes? In United States v. Stevens, the justices will be considering the constitutionality of a statute banning the depiction of animal cruelty, which was apparently intended to crack down on crush fetish porn but whose language is sufficiently broad to prohibit depictions of all kinds of animal cruelty, whether or not high heels are involved. Here's an interesting (if slightly technical) preview.

2009-08-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

It's already been a year since this post about Norman Schwarzkopf's "Be Bear Aware" campaign. I'm planning on going back into the mountains, and for the first time I'm going to be camping in grizzly country - the Wind River Range.

Following General Schwarzkopf's advice, I'm trying to be Bear Aware, and for the first time I've bought bear spray. Annoying thing about the bear spray: it has an expiration date of June 2010. That means even if I don't use it I have to buy some more next summer. I was hoping I could keep this canister forever, kind of like a fire extinguisher. What? Those have expiration dates too? Oh man.

2009-08-06T14:16:00.001-07:00

Wailin was interviewed about social media on last night's episode of Chicago Tonight, the local news program on Chicago's PBS station. I thought she did a nice job!

2009-06-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, featuring my novelette "The Last Resort," is in bookstores now! You can probably find it at any larger Barnes & Noble or Borders. It's a nice way to bookend my time in New York. (I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon for Chicago...)

2009-06-26T18:50:00.000-07:00

Three important updates:

Domna retired

Malia has joined a traveling math circus

Here in Harlem they sure do love their Michael Jackson. We heard 5 different cars playing his music just on the walk back from the subway.

2009-06-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

One of our local papers has this front page article today: Bigfoot: a search in Utah. The article is a real gem. It tells about a group of bigfoot seekers who are gathering in Utah this weekend to look for the big guy. There are too many wonderful touches to recount here, but my favorite is this: "Reported Bigfoot sightings vary, but according to folks like Curtis, 80 percent happen at night."

Of course, it may say something about the state of the media that this is on the front page. Although the Wall Street Journal usually has a funny story on its front page, this article, from what I can tell, isn't trying to be funny.

2009-05-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for a unique and special pack animal? If so, perhaps you should consider raising and training pack goats. This website has all the information you will ever need on the subject, including the pros and cons of removing the goat's horns, how to transport your goat, and first aid for goats. All very interesting stuff. This goes to show people will try to train anything these days.

2009-04-21T19:59:00.001-07:00

By the way, I know that I haven't been blogging a lot recently, but I've switched a lot of the action over to Twitter. If you're still interested in what I have to say about things (with the added advantage of it being 140 characters or less), you can find me there.

2009-04-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

Now that they've finally paid me, I can officially announce that my latest novelette is being published in this magazine later this year. I'll let you know when it comes out!

2009-04-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Apart from explaining the bribes and backroom deals that helped keep Robert Moses in power in New York for over three decades, The Power Broker has a lot to say about an issue that is currently receiving a lot of attention: the role of newspapers in modern American democracy.

The book does not cast newspapers in a flattering light. By courting publishers and bribing reporters, Moses was able to grossly manipulate media coverage of his construction empire. The Times comes off looking worst of all (the only paper that stood up to Moses at the height of his power was, ironically, the Post.) Eventually the newspapers turned on him and exposed scandals that led to his downfall, but they were literally thirty years late.

The message is this: if newspapers are democracy's only hope, we're in a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, they probably are the best way to keep public officials accountable. Investigative journalism is expensive and difficult, which categorically rules out television news as a replacement. The blogosphere might break a few stories, but I doubt bloggers can match the investigative skills (not to mention journalistic ethics) of veteran reporters. If newspapers survive in more than a few cities, I will be happy. I'll also be hoping that media critics on the internet will be able to call out newspapers when they're not doing their job so that Moses's tactics don't work in the future.

2009-04-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

The Bobcat Bite is a couple of miles from where I grew up, and I just learned it was named best burger in the US by Bon Appetit magazine. (Apparently this happened a couple of years ago, but I'm slow to learn these things because I don't watch the Food Network.) Anyhow, this is a cute little documentary about why their burgers taste better than everywhere else.

2009-04-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

In The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes the rise of "Impy," the New York City Council President who became mayor in 1950 when William O'Dwyer resigned to become Ambassador to Mexico:

The nomination of this totally unknown minor Tammany ward heeler to the city's second-highest elective office, the position of succession to the mayoralty, had "staggered . . . even the most imaginative among political reporters." And so had the explanation of how he had obtained the nomination. At a last-minute reshuffling of the 1945 Democratic ticket, the leaders finally agreed on Lazarus Joseph for Comptroller, and then realized that since O'Dwyer was Irish and from Brooklyn, while Joseph was Jewish and from the Bronx, the slate could have ethnic and geographic balance only if its third member was an Italian from Manhattan -- and were unable to think of a single Manhattan Italian official they could trust. After hours of impasse, one leader reasoned that since legal secretaryships to State Supreme Court justices carried a respectable salary for which little or no work was required, they would have been given only to the "safest" of Democratic workers. Pulling out a little "Green Book," the official directory of city employees, he turned to the list of legal secretaries, ran his finger down it looking for a name that even the dumbest voter would be able to tell was Italian -- and came to Vincent R. Impellitteri. . . .

. . .this explanation seemed almost unbelievable -- until one met Impellitteri.

I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or excited about my future job prospects.

2009-04-02T08:10:00.001-07:00

Sources tell me the Guardian fell for yesterday's Moscow Times story about Russian PM Dimitri Medvedev's limousine for the G 20 conference, coined (among other things) "the hippopotamus." Apparently the vehicle has more armor, more weapons, and more rear window curtains than President Obama's limousine, and contains a desk with six telephones and a shower. The vehicle is capable of withstanding a small nuclear attack "if the wind if blowing in the right direction."

2009-04-01T17:10:00.000-07:00

What I learned this April Fool's Day: fake plastic insects do not need to look perfectly realistic in order to scare people. They just have to be unexpected.

2009-03-15T09:09:00.001-07:00

In an effort to assist readers in filling out their NCAA tournament brackets, I've looked at results from past years (from the beginning of the 64-team era) to determine if there are any upset tendencies they can use to their advantage. There's nothing really earth-shaking, but here are my takeaways:

1) 1 seeds do far, far better than 2 seeds. Picking all 1 seeds for the final four is almost never a bad strategy.

2) 10-12 seeds win their first round matchups roughly a third of the time; interestingly, they also do well in second round matchups, and 10s and 11s do well in the sweet sixteen. 10 seeds are more likely to reach the elite eight than everyone except seeds 1-4 and 6. They have never made the final four, however.

3) The 8-9 game is a tossup in the first round, but that doesn't mean those seeds are interchangeable. In the second round 8 seeds beat 1 seeds 20% of the time, but 9 seeds almost never do.

4) 5 seeds almost never reach the elite eight.

5) Once in the elite eight, 1-5 seeds perform similarly.

6) Seeds 1-3 have won all but three of the championships.

2009-03-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

The Ivy League is one of the only Division 1 conferences with basketball games on Friday night. That means Ivy League basketball draws an inordinate amount of attention from professional sports gamblers looking to place bets on Friday nights. This is a tawdry scandal/grade B movie waiting to happen!

2009-03-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

Why did no one ever tell me Manny's middle name is Aristides??

2009-02-28T13:44:00.000-08:00

An fun part of living in Salt Lake is the opportunity to watch sporting events and root loudly for the visiting team. I live within an hour of two of UNM's archrivals, BYU and Utah, and when UNM came to play both teams, I went to each of the games. It requires some thick skin, but it's not physically dangerous unless you're a jerk or you try to do it in Oakland.

There's definitely an art to rooting for the visitors. You cannot out-cheer thousands of enemies, so you have to use the weapons of asymmetric warfare to maximize your effectiveness. The first key is sitting close enough to the court so that someone can actually hear you. The second key is to cheer when the crowd falls silent. The third key is to yell coherent phrases, rather than just make noise. Words are easier to pick up on than a clap. Usually what happens is the people next to you get annoyed and start cheering louder. Then they start cheering at you specifically, sort of as a taunt. At this point you cannot avert your eyes from the court and look at the taunters, as this will trigger a taunting match, and you cannot win a taunting match on enemy territory.

Alas, my cheering was not effective enough, as New Mexico lost both games up here. Maybe if I learn how to whistle loudly. . .

2009-01-30T09:24:00.000-08:00

Some exciting news. First off probably everyone still reading this blog already knows, but Malia and I got engaged last month. Second, I got an NSF yesterday, so we'll be moving to NYC where I'll be at Columbia. As Malia said, "Now you're all grown up! A month ago you were just a grad student, now you're engaged and employed."

2009-01-27T15:07:00.001-08:00

Here's what Nicholson Baker had to say about Updike in 1991:

With Barthelme gone I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike's death. All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality: his open-ended stream of books, reviews, even poems, and especially responses to pert queries from Mademoiselle and The New York Times Book Review. I thought I remembered him saying recently in Esquire, in response to a survey question about popular fiction, that "in college I read what they told me and was much the better for it." I wanted more of those monocellular living appearances. More awards-acceptance speeches! He was, I felt, the model of the twentieth-cenury American man of letters: for him to die would be for my generation's personal connection with literature to die, and for us all to be confronted at last with the terrifying unmediated enormity of the cast-concrete university library, whose antitheft gates go click-click-click-click as we leave, dry laughter at how few books we can carry home with us.

Click-click-click-click...

2009-01-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

From Rabbit at Rest:

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. "Don't die, Dad, don't!" he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.

"Well, Nelson," he says, "all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad." Rabbit thinks maybe he should say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

2009-01-23T12:27:00.001-08:00

On the biggest Oscar snub of the season, David Carr writes: "Sure, the big studio movie The Dark Knight came up short, but that probably had less to do with who made it and how much it brought in than with a third act that left some moviegoers and Academy members cold and confused."

Right. Because the Academy would never nominate a movie with a confusing third act.

2009-01-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

Time for my Mystery Hunt review. I'll discuss individual puzzles in a future post. This year's hunt, Escape from Zyzzlvaria, was put on by the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight who also wrote the hunt from two year's ago. It was fun, beautiful, and very ambitious. I subscribe to the Setec opinion that your first hunt should be short and clean, and your second hunt should push the envelope. By that metric the Bombers have been a great success. Furthermore this hunt fixed many of the issues that made my team not really enjoy their first hunt (lack of a feeling of progress, too much data mining, not enough puzzles available ever, and no pure metas). Although it went long, we had a lot of fun almost the whole time. Thanks a bunch to the Bombers for putting on a great show.

It's good to have an overambitious hunt once in a while that can raise the bar a bit and have lots of new ideas for other teams to process in their later hunts. Monopoly, Matrix, Time Bandits, and this hunt are the recent ones that had lots of new ideas. Of those Monopoly was perfect, while the other three wold have been improved by dialing it back a bit. It could rightfully be said that most of the structure of our SPIES hunt was just taking a third of the ideas from Time Bandits and doing them well. Of these I think Zyzzlvaria will be remembered as being the most innovative, and its impressive that they managed to be that overambitious while still ending up with an good product (sorry Time Bandits).

The dollarbucks round opening mechanism was really really good. Other teams in the future should just steal it. Really. The first round metas were beautiful, and by using round titles as a clue for each they allowed themselves more flexibility to use ideas that would otherwise have been too difficult (for example, Hiigari). I liked the idea of having a first half with pure metas and a second half with shell metas (although, see rant below). Having some pure metas is important to me as Mystery Hunt is almost the only time I get to work on them, but I'm happy with 5 good ones and shell metas allow for more flexibility. The Bombers used this flexibility very well. The production values raised the bar a lot (an actual game for each of us!). Finally the second half of this hunt had a greater number of interesting structural innovations than the last three hunts combined. It's really fun to figure out how different hunt structures work, and one of the downsides of mystery hunt relative to similar events is that there's often only one structure to figure out which leads to a low puzzle to structure ratio.

The puzzles were hard but fair (but hard!). It seemed to me that there were many fewer easy puzzles than in the Normalville/SPIES/Hell era. I was happy that this year seemed to have less data mining than Hell, but on the other hand it seemed that there were more puzzles where the answer extraction was difficult. I firmly believe that answer extraction should be either interesting or easy. Many puzzles (the hitchhiker's puzzle comes to mind) had fair gettable answer extractions that were still difficult to find and detracted from the overall quality of the puzzle. Nonetheless the puzzles on the whole were excellent. I'll have some shoutouts on particular ones after I get to go through the puzzles I didn't see.

Now for the rant... The second round metas... I joked at some point on Sunday that after everyone complained about the Senate meta the Bombers decided "Well maybe if we just make all our metas like this people will stop complaining and just figure that's how metas are supposed to work." Of the 7 metas we only solved Lazyr Zone. Nonetheless we had also solved Orbital Nexus modulo reading the clue phrase, and for both Astro Jail and Harvoid it was our fault not the puzzle's fault (we were close on Astro Jail but missed the connection with the cards even though we figured this meta used the cards, and on Harvoid we misplaced the box and forgot about it). The remaining three all had major major issues. Of the 4.5 point people from our hunt (Reid, Roger, Aaron, Andrew, and half me) I can't imagine any of us approving any of these three puzzle ideas without modifications. I'm still baffled by how they got in a hunt that otherwise was of such high quality. A checkers puzzle where not all the pieces are on the same colored squares?? Really? How could this possibly be a good idea?

Sometimes in these post hunt discussions I feel like some other people have a puzzle aesthetic that's totally foreign to that of my team. I can already anticipate someone commenting "Yes but the switching colors was clued! So it's fine." I don't care if it was clued, it's still ridiculous. The key property of checkers is that it only takes place on one color, a puzzle that ignores this is a bad puzzle. When you think of checkers as an option the first check about whether it's a sensible theory is to check if the pieces are all on one square.

On Combat Zone, I essentially solved the meta on my walk in on Sunday (my one good idea all hunt, I was mostly off my game), I showed up with a complete theory of how it worked that turned out to be exactly right. Except that the two obvious checks for whether my theory was right failed (the mapping wasn't well-defined because some of the reversed letters occurred multiple times on the same dice, and the ominoes didn't fit into a rectangle). We still tried it, but when we couldn't make out any words (we never had more than 7 puzzles) we assumed that we must be missing something (something in the names of the gods? the "God given order" given by the order of the gods? the pairing between puzzles and shapes?). Any small confirmation and we'd have solved this puzzle. Why not make it a rectangle? Why not make the mapping well-defined? Why not mark the boundary edges of the final shape? Why not put the gods in the same order as the puzzles? Sure the puzzle was solvable as is, but why not make it better?

The Virtual Sectors meta I just don't even want to talk about.

Our team's aesthetic is very much based on Setec's hunts and on the advice they sent us about puzzle writing. These three meta puzzles all fail badly: Was there only one aha? No. Were the steps obviously right in retrospect? No. Is the puzzle solvable without psychoanalyzing weird flavor text? No for two of three.

Again, other than these three puzzles (which didn't spoil our enjoyment of the hunt that much) it was an excellent fun hunt. But I'm really curious about how the second round meta debacles could have happened and how future teams can avoid it. Especially because in my mind it was only this issue that stopped this hunt from being in the argument for best hunt ever.

2009-01-18T20:13:00.001-08:00

Hooray! I finally gave in and turned on the heat in my apartment. Toasty and extravagant.

In other news, I attended Sundance screenings yesterday and today, and I'll go again tomorrow, Wednesday, and next Saturday. It's sort of surreal to watch a movie and then at the end be introduced to the director and the cast and be able to ask them questions. Much better than my last experience like this, with the Grizzly Man.

Yesterday I saw Push, which was a great movie that had everyone in tears. And in case anyone was wondering, Mariah Carey actually pulls off the role of middle-aged frumpy Jewish social worker. (She and Lenny Kravitz were the only cast members not in attendance. Carey probably didn't show up because she didn't want to be upstaged by Paula Patton.)

Today I discovered that not every Sundance movie is great. Victoria Day is a Canadian coming of age tale set in the late 1980s. It's technically well done, but it leaves about a million story lines unresolved. The director said that was intentional because that's how teenage lives are. Whatever.

The movie I'm most looking forward to is Good Hair, a Chris Rock documentary about, well, hair.

2009-01-14T16:58:00.001-08:00

Here's what Pauline Kael had to say about Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

Montalban is unquestionably a star in The Wrath of Khan (and his grand manner seems to send a little electric charge through Shatner). As a graying superman who, when foiled, cries out to Kirk, "From Hell's heart I stab at thee!," Montalban may be the most romantic smoothie of all sci-fi villains....And that great chest of Montalban's is reassuring—he looks like an Inca priest—and he's still champing at the bit, eager to act: he plays his villainy to the hilt, smiling grimly as he does the dirty....You know how you always want to laugh at the flourishes that punctuate the end of a flamenco dance and the dancers don't let you? Montalban does. His bravado is grandly comic....This man, who believes that his search for vengeance is like Ahab's, makes poor pompous Kirk even more self-conscious. Kirk is Khan's white whale, and he knows he can't live up to it—he's not worth of Khan's wrath.

But then again, who would be?

2009-01-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day, from Nate Silver:

In his career running for statewide office, [Norm] Coleman has lost to a professional wrestler, beaten a dead guy, and then tied a comedian.

2008-12-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

The football playoffs are here! There have been grumblings, however, that the playoff system is unfair. This is because some teams could make the playoffs with 8-8 records while other teams could miss the playoffs despite having records of 10-6 or even 11-5. The grumblers argue the system would be more "fair" if the teams with the top records made the playoffs regardless of division.

Just as every political system has its drawbacks, so too does every playoffs scheme. Some are fairer than others, but none is perfect. The NFL has some of the best divisional rivalries in professional sports, and presumably the grumblers do not propose demolishing those rivalries. But if the divisions stay intact, team schedules will certainly be imbalanced. (Unlike in basketball, for example, where there are enough games to balance out schedules.) How fair is it for a team like Washington, who faces tough divisional opponents week in and week out, to get beat out by a team like Chicago, who gets two automatic wins against Detroit?

My feeling is that the teams who get shut out of the playoffs are sufficiently inconsistent that they're not great threats to win it all. A playoffs system is designed to select the best single team as a champion, not reward decent teams for solid seasons.

2008-11-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

Here's how you know that the economy is really in trouble: Rich cut back on payments to mistresses.

2008-11-21T18:15:00.001-08:00

I'm sure all who attended last week's wedding would agree that it was absolutely lovely. I'm also happy to report that an esteemed (some might say notorious) member of our proctor group had her wedding the same day, according to this announcement in the New York Times. I hope no one got conflicting invitations.

2008-11-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

I can't put it any better than Dave once did: other authors of this blog (and certain other regular readers), mark your calendars for August 22, 2009.

2008-11-07T11:21:00.001-08:00

So what's going on with Alaska? The polls were 15% off and the number of ballots cast is 15% less than in 2004. Sounds fishy to me. (More info here.)

2008-11-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

It's looking like Omaha might come through and make my prediction right!

2008-11-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

Topic for discussion: should Larry Summers be the next Secretary of the Treasury?

(It's hard to believe that I've already met two high-ranking cabinet members in my uneventful life. Summers was one. The other was the Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush. What was that guy's name again?)

2008-11-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

Looks like my Senate prediction was too optimistic. Seriously, there must be something in the water in Alaska. On the other hand, Obama could appoint Specter or Snowe to the cabinet and flip a seat.

The Onion, as usual, is spot on.

No, really, I'm happy. In fact, for the first time in my adult life I can honestly say I'm proud to be an American. This will make living abroad a whole lot easier.

2008-11-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

None of us hit the number 364 exactly (I'm assuming NC and IN will go to Obama and MO to McCain). But no one else did, either.

2008-11-05T05:42:00.000-08:00

I finally went to bed around 1:30 am, waiting in vain for some results from IN, MO, NC, MT. Or the senate races in Alaska or Minnesota. Turns out that I didn't miss too much. (IN, though...crazy!)

For some reason, as I went to bed after following this crazy campaign for two years, that line from Macbeth came to mind: "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."

Anyway, today's analysis is going to be a lot more fun than the postmortem from last time. (Scroll down for the good stuff.) Although this post now seems smugly prescient. Yes indeed.

2008-11-04T20:38:00.001-08:00

FTW!

2008-11-04T13:49:00.000-08:00

You really asked for my predictions?

Obama wins the Kerry states + IA, CO, NM, VA, but loses PA, giving him 265 EV. Franken loses in MN because the third party candidate pulls 25%, almost all of which is the "kick-the-bum-out" vote. (Robby shares this prediction.) Prop 8 wins because polling underestimates support for gay-marriage bans. Dems have 57 Senate seats after Lieberman defects.

I may not be right, but at least I won't be disappointed. :)

2008-11-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

Lest anyone be tempted, the fabulous Nate Silver has 10 reasons why you should ignore exit polls today.

2008-11-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

Nat = Karl Rove + NC - OH.

I'm less optimistic about NC now that I bothered to check the weather, where I see there is rain in the Democratic part of NC and no rain in the Republican part. There is also rain all over VA but I don't think VA voters will be affected as much by the rain as NC voters.

The only other parts of the country where rain might play a factor are Denver and Philly, but I don't think it's raining in either place yet.

2008-11-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

In rough summary (ignoring the 10th circuit where Alec and I agree anyway).

Nat = Alec + (FL-OH) + 2 more states (FL and NC)
Noah = Nat + 3 more states (OH and then IN/MO and GA/MT/ND)

2008-11-03T20:07:00.000-08:00

Are you trying to get us to bet on this? Count me out! I'm declining to talk about any races where my judge might hear an appeal, so that means nothing on Utah, Colorado, NM, Oklahoma, Kansas, or Wyoming. I'm giving Obama 5.5 points nationwide.

As for the rest of the relevant states, here are my predictions:

Obama wins:
Nevada
Minnesota
Iowa
Wisconsin
Michigan
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Virginia
North Carolina
Florida
(Garnering 319 EV, not counting 10th circuit states)

McCain wins:
Arizona
Missouri
Arkansas
Georgia
West Virginia
Ohio
Indiana
(Garnering 184 EV, not counting 10th circuit states)

As for the Senate, I predict Dem pickups in NC, OR, AK, and VA. I'm also guessing Prop 8 goes down in a nail-biter.

2008-11-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

And here's my prediction: Obama by 5%. 311 electoral votes. OH but not FL; VA but not NC. IN, MO, GA, MT, ND all go to McCain. And yes, we should know by 8:45, although the networks probably won't call it until 11:01 or so. 59 Senate seats for the Dems.

Nat, Dave, what about you? Care to make it interesting?

2008-11-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

With the election only a few hours away, I thought I'd share some of my favorite thoughts about Barack Obama, courtesy of the noted pundit R. W. Emerson:

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his ministers, not knowing what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Obama understood his business. Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without a plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse from abroad...As he is, Obama inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action...His victories were only so many doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way forward, in the dazzle and uproar of the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew at his mark...

We cannot in the universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took Occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage, and thoroughness.

The original text can be found here.

2008-11-03T09:51:00.001-08:00

After a long long campaign season, it's prediction time. Here's mine. Obama by 7 in the popular vote. Electoral vote either 375 or 379. Kerry states + IA, NM, CO, VA, OH, NV + all but one of FL, IN, NC, MO + one of GA, MT, ND, Omaha. If I have to pick exactly one scenario I'll go with MO as the loss above and GA as the win. Senate pickups in VA, NM, CO, NH, OR, AK, NC, MN, with GA going into a runoff. Time when we'll know the presidential election is over: around 8:45EST when VA and OH are called. The close races keeping us up at night: MN Senate and Prop 8, both of which will come down to a couple points.

2008-11-01T09:49:00.001-07:00

I was really looking forward to Halloween this year. I finally live in a neighborhood where parents let their children go trick-or-threating, and I had a perfect costume idea: John Stockton. Then the wheels came off. Incomprehensibly, there were no John Stockton jerseys in my size in any sporting goods store in town or on ebay, so no costume for me. Then I bought $30 worth of candy because I thought there would be tons of trick-or-treaters given the region's robust fertility rate. Alas, it rained, and I had something like five or six groups of kids. Now I'm stuck with a LOT of candy; luckily this stuff never goes bad.

2008-10-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

Today on the reduced price bakery rack at my neighborhood grocery store I noticed a peculiar item for sale: a "Marion Berry pie." Because it was very cheap, and because I was fascinated by the prospect of a pie named after the former mayor of DC, I bought the pie.

It turns out that the marionberry is a type of blackberry. The "Marion" in the name comes from an Oregon county where the hybrid was developed. So my pie is more likely to be filled with fruit than with, say, cocaine.

2008-10-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

I became somewhat depressed today when I began researching the various discount ticket packages available at Salt Lake's ski resorts, and I learned I wasn't young enough to qualify for a "young adult" discount. (And they don't mean "young adult" as a euphemism for teens or students. K-12 students have their own discount, as do college students.)

Luckily my old age didn't prevent me from climbing Mount Olympus yesterday. (They're kind of weird about mountain names in these parts.)

2008-10-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

We had our first snowfall of the season today. I hope things clear up by Monday, though, because I have plans to visit a corn maze cut in the shape of Utah's American Idol hero David Archuleta.

2008-10-06T14:30:00.001-07:00

I really miss Mike Huckabee.

2008-10-02T15:15:00.001-07:00

I'm incredibly proud to announce that Wailin's weekly column debuted today in the Chicago Tribune. If you look carefully, you may be able to see a cameo appearance by yours truly. (Hint: I'm a "friend.")

2008-09-13T19:28:00.000-07:00

I've become settled in my new digs in Salt Lake City. It's really a lovely place, and there's a standing invitation for anyone who wants to visit to ski, hike, or go to the Sundance Film Festival.

A couple of initial thoughts:

1) There are tons of bees here. It's the state symbol, and so I guess there are a lot of beekeepers. If that much-dreaded bee extinction is still a problem somewhere else, they know where to get extras.

2) There's no Trader Joe's here, which is deeply unfortunate. Rumor has it they won't come here because of our wacky restrictions on liquor sales. This confirms my suspicion that Trader Joe's is really a liquor store with good snacks.

2008-09-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been busy, among other things, catching up on The Wire. I just finished the third season (out of five), and it's great. But the trouble with watching a television series that follows a single epic storyline over the course of sixty episodes is that you can't read anything about it in the press, for fear of learning crucial plot points. For the better part of a year now, I've been extremely careful about avoiding spoilers for The Wire—shunning Wikipedia's coverage of the show and not even reading the recent New Yorker profile of its creator—and I've done pretty well.

Until now. A few minutes ago, I learned that a popular character, to quote my source, "is murdered in the antepenultimate episode of the series." And where did I learn who this character is?

It's the answer to 58-Down in today's New York Sun crossword puzzle.

Aaaargh! Why, Peter Gordon, why?

2008-09-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I begin my new job as part of the article III branch of the U.S. Government. As such, I'm going to stop commenting on politics (even though this might be the most interesting political moment in my lifetime to date).

Instead, I'm sharing my observation of the day - when moving large pieces of furniture alone, try rolling them instead of carrying them. I found it to be very efficient.

2008-08-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

This month's Harvard Magazine has an interesting article by Larry Summers about the economic challenges facing the next president. I've always wondered why the Clinton economic team was so successful, and this article helps explain why: Summers is pragmatic, nuanced, and open to changing positions as the facts warrant. In particular, he seems much more concerned with income inequality than I would have expected him to be (he even promotes universal health care as one way of combatting it), and his views on free trade agreements and globalization seem to have evolved, as he now favors negotiating international corporate taxation and labor standards.

Of course, he's still Larry Summers, so he has to say something that is capable of generating a lot of smoke. This time, it's advocating against a reduction in energy prices (on environmental grounds): "with the economy getting used to far higher energy prices...it would be a great tragedy if prices were allowed to decline very sharply when the current crisis passes." Ouch. Something tells me that quote will resurface if he ever gets appointed to anything.

2008-08-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

Some readers may remember that I have, in my youthful days, used microwaves to put on light shows. Rumor has it I also have some experience with grease fires.

I was reminded of this when I read these comments on the Volokh Conspiracy, a law professor blog. The original post remarked that many household cleaners have a warning that failure to follow the directions is a violation of federal law; the blogger was curious what federal law that might be (the best suggestion was FIFRA, which regulates pesticide use). Many commentors, however, decided to speculate about which federal laws they could violate with cleaners and other household products. It looks as if there's some pretty potent explosives you can make; lest any readers worry, however, I think my pyromaniacal days are behind me.

2008-08-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

I heard about this on the radio this morning...the worst obituary ever, and apparently real - it was written about a woman from New Mexico who moved to northern California.

Note to self: if you're about to die, and your kid just got foreclosed on or something, tell them it's not necessary to write an obituary.

2008-08-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

I just saw this t-shirt today, and I have to say the design wasn't very well conceived - I thought it was one of these t-shirts until I puzzled through why the color scheme wasn't crimson and white. Apparently someone else noticed the problem and came up with these things as a joke.

2008-08-14T15:34:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a successful apartment hunt in Salt Lake City, and last night I stopped in Moab on the way back home. The place was chock full of European tourists, which I had not expected but which made sense once I saw it. What was more suprising was that the servers at both restaurants where I ate in Moab weren't native English speakers. This struck me as an odd coincidence, especially since I had noticed the same thing in Aspen a week before.

I dug around on the internet when I got back home and sure enough, it turns out that there's a government program allowing foreign university students to do seasonal work in the US during their summer vacations. There's also a whole slew of companies offering to pair these students with employers. While I'm not certain all my servers were part of this program, I'm guessing at least some of them were. The one thing I'm still trying to figure out is why I've never heard of anyone in Santa Fe participating in the program; Santa Fe has a very big need for seasonal hospitality workers, so I'd expect there to be some of these workers there. The program looks like it's been up and running since around 1999, but maybe Santa Fe employers just haven't caught on yet.

2008-08-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Note to self: when you return home from a week in the mountains, smelling like a Superfund site, and your spouse is kind enough to not only greet you (despite said smell) but also to help unpack your filthy belongings, it is not a good idea to give your spouse a firestarter pellet (which is basically a clump of compressed sawdust) and tell her it's a macaroon. Apparently that's bad form.

2008-07-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

Yippee! I'm done with the bar exam, but not after it took two months of my life. Plenty has been said about bar exams already, but one positive that I took away was that I really did get to learn a lot of stuff that I wanted to learn in law school. Sure, I learned it in a superficial way (and I'm already on my way to forgetting much of it), but for a few fleeting moments I actually felt like I knew something about the law.

Anyhow, New Mexico has a high pass rate (you could invert that statement and say we have lower standards than some states) so I'm not too worried about failing, but there was enough wacky stuff on there that one can never be too sure. Thankfully I have one month of freedom before I return to the folds of the gainfully employed, and I aim to enjoy it. First, I'm going to watch the Dark Knight and play minature golf. Then, I'm going to disappear into the mountains of Colorado for a week. After that, I'm not sure, but I'll think of something.

2008-07-25T21:08:00.001-07:00

In a recent review in the New Yorker, David Denby describes The Dark Knight, unfairly I think, as having a mood of "constant climax." Reading his review made me wonder what it might be like to see a movie with a mood of "constant anticlimax." Now I know. And unfortunately, it's called The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

This isn't a terrible movie, but it's unbearably—and, it seems, intentionally—disappointing. Over the nine seasons of the original series, The X-Files managed to come up with at least fifty amazing stories (out of a total, it must be noted, of two hundred episodes). Now they've had six years to write one more story, and this is the best they can do? Clyde Bruckman must be spinning in his grave.

2008-07-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Apparently The Dark Knight is on track to break the all-time record for an opening weekend. If it maintains its current trajectory, this may turn out to be the first year since 1981 when the highest-grossing movie was also the best.

2008-07-18T22:31:00.000-07:00

To call The Dark Knight the best comic book movie ever made is to do it a disservice: as a crime epic, as a thriller, as a portrait of a city, it deserves comparison with The Departed and L.A. Confidential. Watching scene after scene unfold with incredible invention, complexity, and ingenuity, I was reminded that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan once wrote and directed a little movie called Memento, which is still the cleverest movie of the decade. That film was a twisty, intricate indie thriller shot on a shoestring; The Dark Knight must have cost something like $180 million, but it lavishes the same amount of care and attention on every image, every story point, and every line of dialogue—it has enough ideas and inspiration for half a dozen lesser movies. What's more, in the three years since Batman Begins, where the big set pieces were often a little muddled, Chris Nolan has learned how to shoot an action scene, and he gives us two or three that are as good as anything since Children of Men.

In this movie, the pleasures come as large as a semi truck turning a somersault—and as small as a graceful somersault of the camera itself. And the cast is, by and large, phenomenal. Heath Ledger has, deservedly, received most of the attention, but I'd like to spotlight the work of another actor: Gary Oldman. Back when Batman Begins was released, Oldman seemed like an odd choice for Commissioner Gordon—Kurt Russell was originally tapped for the part—and at the time, it felt as if the producers had simply tried to cast a big name, regardless of his suitability for the role. Not anymore. It may seem strange, but Gordon is the heart of The Dark Knight, and Oldman follows through with his best performance in years. He's the closest thing to a recognizable human being that I've ever seen in a film like this. Could Commissioner Gordon: The Movie be far behind?

Anyway, I could go on and on about The Dark Knight, which belongs to a very short list of recent films—including Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Zodiac, and There Will Be Blood—that have raised the bar for the entire industry. But you probably don't need my encouragement to see this movie. Right?

2008-07-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

For some reason, this website featuring Norman Schwarzkopf as the national spokesperson for the "Be Bear Aware" campaign was one of the funniest things I'd seen in a while. Schwarzkopf instructs us that "North America is home to three different species of bears, some say actually four." Huh? Why did this campaign (which seems designed to prevent people from approaching bears) need a celebrity spokesperson? And why Stormin' Norman?

Well, I poked around on Google and found out that Schwarzkopf's other nickname is "The Bear," so that makes some sense. And according to Wikipedia, he's spent his retirement as spokesman for lots of charities, so I guess that helps answer the puzzle. (He also sits on the board of directors of Remington Arms, if you care about that sort of thing.) I guess you learn something new every day.

2008-07-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

Despite such postings as this, this, and this, it seems that this blog's language is pretty tame:

Created by OnePlusYou

(For what it's worth, I was unable to find any instances of Nat swearing online.)

2008-07-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

What's the deal with prosciutto and fruit? I went to an engagement party on Friday night where they had canteloupe wrapped in prosciutto, and now I read in the New York Times that that's how one is supposed to eat prunes, er, dried plums. Is this some trend that everyone else knew about and is only now trickling into the the flyover states?

2008-06-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I waited in line for five hours to see the Public Theater's production of Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Park, and while I wouldn't say that the effort was wasted, the more I think about it, the more I end up feeling perplexed and disappointed. For most of its great length, this version of Hamlet is a fine one: Michael Stuhlbarg—although old for the part at 39—makes for a manic but lucid Hamlet; Sam Waterston and Jay O. Sanders are excellent as Polonius and the Ghost; and Lauren Ambrose—yes, her—is a perfect Ophelia. As far as the cast goes, the only real letdown is Andre Braugher's Claudius: I've been a huge fan of Braugher for years, but he fails to give the part any spark of inner life. As a character, Claudius is always outmatched by Hamlet, of course, but here, his presence barely seems to register on the other characters, much less the audience.

This isn't a fatal flaw. Up to the very last moment, this production of Hamlet is entertaining, engaging, and, best of all, beautifully spoken—it does perfect justice to the density and beauty of the text. And then...

The last ten seconds are a travesty. John Lahr describes the utterly baffling ending here, and does a nice job of expressing how bizarre and unmotivated it seems: "What is going on? Is this the end of history? Of storytelling? Are we on Candid Camera?" It's as if the last scene of The Departed had been accidentally spliced onto the end of the play. On its own terms, the ending is clever, but in context, it's so grossly miscalculated that it makes me question my lingering goodwill towards the rest of the production. Instead of leaving the theater with thoughts of Hamlet, Shakespeare, or anything else, the audience is compelled to discuss an infantile sick joke. It hijacks the entire play. If other directorial choices throughout the production had prepared us for it, I might feel differently, but as it stands, it feels utterly arbitrary. As such, it represents an incredible show of vanity on the part of the director, Oskar Eustis, who should have known better. As Hamlet says to the players: "That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

2008-06-10T16:02:00.001-07:00

Before going to the R.E.M. concert on Friday, I ended up at a bookstore near Wailin's office, where I bought a discounted copy of the tie-in book to Wordplay. (I was running out of crossword puzzles.) Later, during an intermission at the concert, Wailin and I ended up working on one of the crosswords. When the man seated next to me saw what we were doing, the following conversation took place:

Man: "Is that a Will Shortz puzzle?"
Me (holding up the book): "Yeah, from Wordplay. Have you heard of it?"
Man: "Well, actually, it was directed by my brother-in-law."

His wife, who was seated nearby (along with their three children), turned out to be Patrick Creadon's sister. She was amused by the coincidence, and even took a picture of me holding up the book, which she said that she would send to Patrick. (Apparently he's a big R.E.M. fan.) We chatted a bit about crosswords before the concert began. Apparently they held the premiere party for Wordplay at their house, where they got to meet all of the contestants profiled in the movie. According to the husband, Al Sanders, not surprisingly, is a one heck of a nice guy, while one of the other guests was "one of the weirdest people I've ever met in my life." (Guess which one!)

Anyway, that improbable coincidence overshadowed the rest of the concert, which was a lot of fun, although I quickly realized that most of my favorite R.E.M. songs ("Find the River," "Electrolite," etc.) are less than suited for a stadium setting. Stipe looked and sounded great, though, and they even brought Johnny Marr onstage for a quick jam session. At the end of the concert, Stipe pinned an Obama button to his lapel, to thunderous applause and cheers from the Chicago crowd. All in all, it was a pretty good night.

2008-06-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Wailin and I are seeing R.E.M. tonight at the United Center in Chicago, allowing me to cross another entry off my list of Bands to See Before I Die. (Largest remaining omission: the Arcade Fire.) Although I'm excited by the prospect of the concert, and reassured by the fact that Accelerate is a very solid album (Noah, any thoughts?), I'm finding myself even more thrilled by the presence of Modest Mouse, a band to which I've hitherto had little exposure. The reason for my excitement? Their latest album is a fine one, yes, but there's also the matter of the band's latest member, a fellow named Johnny Marr. Marr is arguably the greatest guitarist of my lifetime, and between this concert and the Morrissey show at Radio City Music Hall (four years ago!), I'm that much closer to mentally assembling the Smiths reunion of my dreams. And who knows? Sometimes these dreams come true. Stranger things have happened...

2008-05-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day:

"Now I guess you folks have heard, or read, or been told somewhere that recently I became fifty years old, and I'm here to tell you right now, it's a dirty Communist lie. Direct from Hanoi—it came right outta there! My body may be fifty, but I'm twenty-eight!"

—Frank Sinatra, Sinatra at the Sands

(Sinatra adds: "And I would further like to say that I'd be twenty-two if I hadn't spent all those years drinking with Joe E. Lewis, who nearly wrecked me.")

2008-05-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008. The obituaries understandably focus on his career as a director, but for me, Pollack will always be Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut, delivering one of my favorite lines in movie history: "Life goes on. It always does. Until it doesn't."

2008-05-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

With a little trepidation, I'm wading into the wars over the supposed "liberal bias" of today's academy. Stanley Fish blasts the University of Colorado over its plan to endow a Chair of Conservative Thought and Policy. While I agree with Fish that it's a silly idea, I disagree with some of his reasoning.

It's a silly idea, to me, because the academy should strive to describe the world in (we hope) useful ways. The manner (or subject) of inquiry should dictate how the academy is structured - not the normative conclusion to be reached. Professors should be selected based upon the quality of their research, not upon their political views. Problems arise, however, when faculty politicize their positions - either by blocking new faculty hires who are talented but who have minority political views, or by using their teaching positions to indoctrinate new students. If these practices are going on, then administrators should address them directly, instead of further politicizing the university by expressly hiring faculty based on their political views. Fish spends a bit of time on this point.

Where I disagree with Fish is where he argues that a politically slanted faculty has no bearing on the quality of the university. As I mentioned above, politically slanted faculties can create problems - for instance, they might influence the hiring process by blocking candidates based upon politics. This can create a chilling effect that can only be detrimental to the free pursuit of knowledge - the world is deprived of talented scholars whose only fault is their political persuasion, and young scholars might alter their research queries to avoid politically unpopular results.

I'm not saying much of this is happening - at least not yet. And it's surely less likely to be a problem in less-politicized disciplines (the field where I have the most experience, the law, is probably the most politicized of all). But I'm not ready to say that political homogeneity is problem-free.

2008-05-24T11:31:00.001-07:00

Having just seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for a second time—never mind why—I'd like to add the following observations:

1. When viewed with reduced expectations, the first ninety minutes of this movie are passably good. If the ending were anything other than an anticlimactic fiasco, I'd be pretty happy.

2. The first three Indiana Jones movies were about the search for a sacred artifact—the Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara stones, the Grail—and climaxed with the artifact's recovery. In the new installment, the crystal skull is found within the first forty minutes, and the rest of the movie is devoted to putting it back. Somehow this doesn't seem as dramatically compelling.

3. During the "climactic" scene, in which the true nature of the crystal skull is finally revealed, instead of being overwhelmed with awe, I found myself remembering something that Chief Wiggum once said: "Yeah, right. How ya gonna get 'em? Skeleton power?"

2008-05-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia, screenwriters who either wrote or were approached to write drafts of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull included M. Night Shyamalan, Tom Stoppard, Stephen Gaghan, Jeffrey Boam (who wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and Frank Darabont (writer and director of The Shawshank Redemption). Apparently Darabont's version of the story was enthusiastically approved by Steven Spielberg, but rejected by George Lucas, prompting the immortal observation (by me) that Hollywood is the sort of place where the guy who wrote The Shawshank Redemption gets script notes from the guy who wrote Attack of the Clones.

I mention all these names because although the new Indiana Jones movie is energetic and sometimes fun, the final screenplay, by David Koepp, is a real mess, a hodgepodge of half-developed plot elements and MacGuffins without an emotional center. It's especially disappointing compared to the screenplay for The Last Crusade, which is literate, exciting, emotional, and makes a surprising amount of sense. No other screenplay has ever seized my imagination as strongly as The Last Crusade did (partly because I was ten years old at the time). By the last reel of Crystal Skull, by contrast, we're still confused about basic plot points and character relationships, and the ending could be scored, not with John Williams, but with Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is?"

As my previous postings on the subject might indicate, nobody approached this movie with more unnatural passion than I did. It's possible that I'll change my mind after another viewing—which may happen tonight. There's a lot to admire here, especially near the beginning, and there's one extended chase scene that ranks with the best in the series. In the end, though, action is cheap. I'm not sure what I was hoping to feel instead. Awe, maybe. Or illumination. George Lucas would probably tell me that I'm crazy. (Although, as the Onion points out, he'll probably fix it twenty years from now.)

2008-05-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

It's graduation season, so congratulations to those bloggers and readers who are getting degrees. My graduation doesn't really feel like such because I immediately began studying for the bar. Nonetheless, I got some post-graduation validation that I had entered the right field when I read that the legal profession ranks as one of the top career fields for introverts. This was surprising to me, since my personal feeling is that a lot of legal work involves dealing with other people, and I don't think introversion helps at all.

The most interesting thing about the list is it ranks the legal field second in the category of best-paid professions for introverts. What is first, you ask? Astronomers! Who knew? Maybe those people who took Celestial Navigation were on to something.

2008-05-10T18:58:00.001-07:00

When I heard that Errol Morris was making a movie about Abu Ghraib, my first reaction was unmitigated excitement. Morris, as I've said before, may be the most consistently interesting director in America, and he's one of the few artists in any medium whose engagement with a topic tends to yield meaningful, valuable discoveries. I genuinely thought that I was going to learn something important from this movie. Having finally seen Standard Operating Procedure, I'm left feeling alternately impressed and frustrated, with a sense that the film raises more questions than it answers. This may have been what Morris intended, but it's unfortunate that I find myself suspecting that the answers I wanted to see, far from being inconceivable, have simply been left on the cutting room floor.

Morris's great gift has always been for exploring the personalities of his subjects. It's hard to think of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control or Gates of Heaven or his short profiles for First Person without remembering specific, indelible human faces, men and women who have taken up permanent residence in my imagination. None of the participants in Standard Operating Procedure ever comes to life in quite the same way, which is a considerable loss. If Morris could have turned Abu Ghraib into a place populated by individuals we've come to know and understand, it would have been his greatest achievement. Instead, we're left with a very intelligent and ambitious essay by a filmmaker who exercises complete control over his material, to the exclusion of the weird, tangential, serendipitous moments that made his earlier work so wonderful. The result is still compelling, and there are some virtuoso sequences, but it leaves you craving the raw footage.

For what it's worth, a recent piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch in the New Yorker fleshes out one of his subjects, Sabrina Harman, in a way that the movie does not. Reading this piece makes me wonder about the messier, more humane film that Morris could have made instead. The footage must exist, but it's outside the frame.

2008-05-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that more than two years have passed since I last saw Blue Velvet on the big screen, but this weekend, it's playing at midnight at Landmark Sunshine, a theater that may be one of the great unsung treasures of New York moviegoing. (In the past year alone, I've seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Pink Floyd the Wall at the Sunshine, and in two weeks, they'll be playing The Shining.) I went to see Blue Velvet last night, and I can say that the Sunshine has provided close to the perfect set of conditions for seeing this movie—large screen, nice auditorium, gorgeous print. The sound could be a little sharper, perhaps, but since this movie has some of the most challenging sound design of any film ever made, all things considered, the sound crew has done commendable work on what had to have been a rush job.

Watching Blue Velvet again, I was struck for the first time by the work of one of its unsung heroes: Duwayne Dunham, the editor, who also edited Return of the Jedi and Wild at Heart and went on to direct important episodes of Twin Peaks, as well as Little Giants and Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. (That's one hell of a resume.) Although it's impossible to say for sure, I have a hunch that Dunham was responsible for pulling this movie into its current shape. A glance at the original screenplay, as well as the deleted scenes on the DVD, reveal that a lot of extra material, some extraordinary, some naive, was shot and cut. The final version of the film moves from one astonishing set piece to another, going from high point to high point almost without interruption. Nothing that David Lynch has done before or since matches Blue Velvet's focus and power, and Dunham may be largely responsible for this.

At the moment, Dunham doesn't seem to be doing much, spending his time directing TV movies and contributing to special features on the Twin Peaks box set. Would a reunion be too much to ask?

2008-05-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

On a lighter note, you can take this prediction to the bank: Robert Downey Jr. will be named People's Sexiest Man Alive within the next twelve months. It isn't that Downey has suddenly become all that more attractive, but People has been running short of reasonably presentable A-list actors for some time now (seriously—Matt Damon?), and a $100 million opening weekend is enough to make anyone look good.

A decade ago, Downey was in jail. Now he's Iron Man. Apparently there are second acts in some American lives. I was contemplating Downey's meteoric rise, and pondering the equally dramatic, but opposite, trend in the life of Tom Cruise over exactly the same period, when I remembered an astonishing fact:

Tom Cruise turned down the part of Iron Man.

Interesting, isn't it?

Was there a secret karmic transfer between Cruise and Downey in early 2005? Is the role of Iron Man the opposite of the Superman curse? And what does this mean for Gwyneth Paltrow? I'm sure that the blogosphere will uncover the real story soon...

2008-05-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Iron Man may be the first $180 million comic book movie in history with a great curtain line—which means, of course, that the New Yorker spoiled it. I'm getting a little tired of Anthony Lane and David Denby's determination to reveal the ending of every movie that has ever been released. Denby is usually a little better about this, but if you look at his Iron Man review, you'll see that he blows the ending for absolutely no reason. You could delete the offending sentence entirely without detracting from the point he's trying to make, which (spoiler alert!) is that there may be a sequel in the works. Really?

For the record, A.O. Scott, who is probably the best movie critic working today, hints at the ending much more gracefully in his own review, and without detracting at all from its critical merit. Clearly, this is an institutional issue. The New Yorker's editorial policy on spoilers, if it exists, must be a joke. Well, no more. As of today, I'm no longer reading Lane or Denby reviews of movies that I haven't seen yet. It just isn't worth it.

2008-05-03T15:34:00.001-07:00

What the heck kind of sport is this where you surround injured competitors with large trucks (so no one can see what you're doing) and then kill them? Sheesh.

2008-05-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

I can't say I ever expected a video of me shaving my legs to make in on Youtube.

(Last month I went with the UNM triathlon team to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the collegiate national triathlon championship. Gatorade sponsored a contest for teams to shoot videos that featured Gatorade. I shaved my legs to help on the swim, which is a bad idea because they're still scratchy three weeks later.)

2008-04-30T21:22:00.001-07:00

I used to think that having 25 pounds of rice in the house demonstrated an admirable degree of preparedness, but it turns out that I'm behind the curve. (Wailin and I saw this sign in a restaurant during our recent trip to Seattle.)

2008-04-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

My Blueberry Nights is minor Wong Kar-Wai, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Chungking Express is minor Wong Kar-Wai, too—and also one of the greatest movies ever made. Whenever My Blueberry Nights manages to tap into the same spontaneous, inventive spirit that informs all of Wong's best films, it's literally intoxicating. There are moments in the opening scenes, in which Wong brings his style and sensibility to New York City, when I was all but levitating out of my seat with happiness—and that was before I heard Cat Power on the soundtrack.

The frame narrative, which stars Jude Law (miscast but irresistible) and Norah Jones (amateurish but adorable) as a pair of Wong's quintessentially romantic oddballs, promises a lot more than the film ultimately delivers. Once Jones hits the road, we're treated to a series of bittersweet episodes set in an entirely imaginary America, none of which is especially compelling, despite the presence of Rachel Weisz (luminous, with one perfectly tousled lock of hair across her face), Natalie Portman (miscast as usual), and David Strathairn (underused). A detour to Las Vegas, which should have been amazing—Wong Kar-Wai in Las Vegas!—fizzles out too quickly. In the end, we're left with a double handful of wonderful moments and a movie that is intermittently enchanting if you're a Wong Kar-Wai fan, and if not, not.

If My Blueberry Nights is something of a misfire, at least it's an encouraging one. Over the past decade, Wong has made a pair of undeniable masterpieces—In the Mood for Love and 2046—that are formally perfect, visually stunning, and utterly unlike his best work. This new movie represents a tentative return to the qualities that made him, for a few precious years, the most exciting filmmaker in the world. With Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, all of the stars were perfectly aligned, but you can't expect it to happen every time. I'd rather see Wong make ten more movies like My Blueberry Nights than another 2046, because, sooner or later, lightning is bound to strike again. Or so I hope. Because when it does, it's going to light up the entire world.

2008-04-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

The Times has finally written an article combining two of my favorite subjects: typography and Obama. (My favorite exchange: "What is it about the typeface Gotham that adds personality to the Obama brand?" "I don’t think that Gotham adds any personality to Senator Obama’s brand.")

2008-04-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Recently, after realizing that my annual Kinko's bill has reached levels much too embarrassing to mention, I splurged and bought myself a refurbished 3-in-1 printer. (HP Photosmart C3180, in case you're interested. Less than fifty bucks, not counting shipping and USB cable.) I'm fairly satisfied, except for the fact that the darned thing drinks ink. It took fewer than two hundred manuscript pages for the cartridge to run dry. Fortunately, I've just discovered that Walgreen's is offering a free ink refill for one day only. All I need to do is, uh, print out a coupon...

2008-04-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

April Fool's Update:

I managed to fool AM for the first time in years (I think since the wombat farm hoax of '00). Here are some pointers I learned from this year's prank:

-Red food coloring is a GREAT substitute for blood, both on skin/clothing and splattered about, say, a kitchen.

-That being said, it seeps into the skin fairly quickly to create a sort of pink stain, so apply the food coloring just moments before the prank for maximum effect.

-Aforementioned pink stain does not wash off the skin, so think about where you apply it (i.e. avoid the face. Luckily for me it's confined to the hands and wrists).

-Food coloring can be washed out of clothing quite effectively with a rapid application of dishwashing soap, followed by vigorous scrubbing and rinsing.

2008-03-31T18:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why, but I had an uncontrollable urge to post a link to this article today.

I also enjoyed reading this list of the top 100 all-time hoaxes. The only one that I've been fooled by was the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer (#9 on the list). Some of my favorites include Nixon for President in '92 (#6 on the list), the Arm the Homeless charity drive (#23), the Tasmanian Mock Walrus (# 44), the Nat Tate memorial (#60), and the closure of all of LA's highways for a month (#92).

I have to admire some pranksters for their tireless efforts: one man airlifted hundreds of tires into the crater of a dormant volcano and then lit them on fire to scare nearby townspeople (Mount Edgecumb, #14), and another man transported horse manure by gondola to make it appear that horses had ridden through Venice's water-bound Piazza San Marco (#78).

Some entities seem to make for good pranks. The old Soviet Union was an easy target; their reported purchase of two Connecticut newspapers is number 28 on the list. Euro Disney is another easy target (case in point: its reported purchase of the Eiffel Tower (#93)), and the two were combined when it was announced that Lenin's body would be put on display at Euro Disney (#68).

2008-03-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

Today's random but possibly meaningful discovery: when you type the search term "Wikipedia" into Google, the first three subsidiary pages to appear—at least this morning—are Commodity Market, Denzel Washington, and Chitty Bang.