John Petrie’s LifeBlag

Ah, I love 4th of July weekend. Not necessarily because of anything intrinsic about it, but I loved this one and I loved the one two years ago, so it’s becoming a trend.

Today I got up early and ran in the Tortoise and Hare 5k in downtown Ann Arbor, hung out at home and finished editing a paper that I was unable to finish last night, and went out to lunch at ABC with Dave. Lame-ass Theresa and Rich didn’t join us, but that’s okay, they probably didn’t feel well or have time. Since I had no particular thing to do or place to be, and I didn’t want to go back home and sit in my hot, stuffy apartment for 6 hours, I decided to drive around to a couple stores and look for furniture or electronics that I could buy in the future (after I move next month or next summer). I headed for Art Van, the furniture store, to look at coffee tables, end tables, night stands, and couches. I saw lots of good ones, probably plenty of things Kathy and I would like, but it felt kind of pointless without her there (for her knowledge of home design and her opinion of every piece, as they will be joint decisions), but then I saw the TV store that existed in an annex in the back of the store: Paul’s TV. It is like the “home theater” section of Best Buy, just a medium-sized room in the back of the store, and it operates as an independent store. I’m sure they have plenty of TV/furniture deals in coordination with Art Van, but other than that, they’re separate.

I went back to Paul’s TV and sat down in an armchair to watch a plasma TV (Panasonic P50S2) and an LED-backlit Sharp (LC52LE700U) that were set up perpendicular to each other. I had a good angle to watch the Tigers game on both, though it was closer than I’d typically sit at home. The reason I sat down to watch those two, mainly the Sharp, is that the local appliance store ABC Warehouse had given me a guaranteed price of $1500 for the Sharp, to be delivered in August after I move, if I paid a down payment on it, but I saw that Paul’s TV had it for $1197. THAT…is insane. Paul’s TV never charges for shipping, whereas ABC Warehouse would have charged $50.

Naturally, my first thought was that this was too good to be true, but I double-checked the model number and size. I had been keeping track of many TV prices in a spreadsheet over the last year (yes, total loser-geek), so I had gotten good at memorizing model numbers and was already familiar with this one anyway. It was definitely the same TV, for $350 cheaper. Its MSRP is $2000. My second thought was also along the lines of, “This is too good to be true,” but referring to the picture quality—maybe this TV isn’t all that great, despite great reviews (at both Amazon and Newegg, which is a ringing endorsement, considering the tech-savvy videophiles who populate Newegg). It is that great. I thought that its colors might have been a little too bright or washed out compared to the plasma, but, first of all, that’s adjustable, and I don’t believe that the Sharp’s colors will be the slightest, remotest bit sub-optimal after I adjust them. One strong point of the Sharp LEDs according to reviewers is the color accuracy. The motion of the ball and players seemed nearly identical to the S2, with the edge probably going to the S2. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of the colors being turned up too bright, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The big advantage of the Sharp LED was, surprisingly, its black levels (and other dark levels). They were better than the plasma’s. Its blacks were blacker, and it was easier to distinguish a few details in dark places than on the plasma. This is despite the incessant claims by videophiles at CNet and everywhere else that plasmas’ black levels are so superior to LCDs’. Not these two. (Nor any plasmas in ABC Warehouse, which is the very thing that swayed Kathy and me towards the Sharp in the first place.) In and around the backdrop of Comerica Park, which is the dark, empty part behind center field that enables the hitter to see the pitched ball, more detail was distinguishable. It was July 4th, so the Tigers and Mariners were both wearing these special “patriotic” caps (here’s the Tigers one). Before the start of one inning, the camera zoomed in very close to a Tigers hat that was sitting in the dugout or in a shaded part of the stands or somewhere; I guess the Fox Sports crew had set it up there for the purpose of zooming in one inning. The LED-backlit TV was far, far more detailed and accurate in showing the lines of the Tigers’ English D and distinguishing the navy-blue textures of the middle and left side of that logo from one another. It was a mess of navy blue on the plasma, and a clear English D on the LED-backlit screen. Sold.

To make the end of this story rather shorter, I took this price to ABC Warehouse to challenge them to beat it, but I had no documentation, so all they could beat was the website’s price of $1497 (the $1197 was a special 4th of July sale). I went back to Paul’s TV, paid a 10% down payment on my credit card, got the receipt, brought it to the ABC Warehouse manager, who eventually told me he would not only match it but beat it by $100. I don’t know if he mistyped, misspoke, or miscalculated, but he actually gave it to me for over $160 less than Paul’s TV: $1102 after tax and shipping, compared to $1268 in total from Paul’s TV. That is INSANE, people.

When Kathy and I had first picked out the Sharp LED-backlit TV in June, I walked out of there telling her it wasn’t quite a steal, but it was a very good or great deal on a great, long-lasting, highly reviewed TV that we both witnessed outperforming every TV in the store with a remotely similar price. But $1100, THAT is a steal. It’s unbelievable. I am ecstatic. This has made my month.

I am amazed at how familiar the American public is with my favorite line from Not Another Teen Movie, “Oh, it’s already been broughten!” One of my friends made her Facebook status simply “bring it.” Of course, someone else commented before me with something like “it’s already been broughten.” But I still laughed, not so much at them but at one of my favorite parody movies. I know a lot of people who haven’t seen that movie, and it isn’t a really popular, famous, memorable movie, and it certainly didn’t get good reviews…but people sure know that line.

My brother told me about the web page Symphony of Science, where its proprietor, John Boswell, mixes the voices of famous scientists (e.g., Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman) with an autotuner and puts them over R & B–style music. You should check it out.

I have seasons 1–5 of South Park on DVD, and I don’t ever plan on buying any more because every episode is available for free 24/7 at its official website, southparkstudios.com. I know there is abundant evidence that giving something away for free actually increases its sales, but I at least understand the basis of where the RIAA is coming from. I won’t pay a penny for South Park as long as it is available on demand for free.

One of the worst things Amazon.com has ever done is lump the reviews and ratings of the DVD version and the Blu-ray version of every single movie together, so that you can’t tell whether someone’s review and star-rating refers to the DVD version or the Blu-ray version, unless they state they’re reviewing the Blu-ray version specifically. What idiot thought of that? I can’t imagine the level of stupidity required to approve of that idea at multiple levels of management in the Amazon company hierarchy. It is inconvenient, counterintuitive, and simply inaccurate because the two different products are, um, different products!

So, it turns out my TV is a hell of a lot sweeter than I had ever thought. It is a Samsung SlimFit high-definition television. It is capable of displaying 720p and 1080i video. It’s only 30 inches diagonally, and it’s a cathode ray tube TV, so it isn’t as awesome as the larger TV I’m going to buy next summer, but, hey, that means it has a higher pixel density. I found this out because Kathy got me a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and I hooked it up to an HDMI port in the back of my TV (hmm, that should have made it obvious to me that it was an HDTV, but it never occurred to me), and it plays Blu-ray movies in very nice quality. I tried out my new Blu-rays of Star Trek: First Contact and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I’m pretty sure they looked as awesome as they could on a 30″ TV. Maybe a new LCD (or plasma, if they existed at 30 inches) would show an improvement over my 3-year-old TV, but the Wikipedia articles on plasma displays and LCD screens indicate that, other things being equal, CRT produces the best picture in terms of color accuracy, sharpness, and blur. (The problem is, other things aren’t ever equal, not anymore.) However, CRT picture quality fades a lot sooner than the flat-panel displays, so I’m sure mine doesn’t look as good as it used to in high-definition. Those two movies looked really awesome, though; you could tell the source and the display were both high-definition.

I began to suspect that my TV was capable of playing video at some level of high definition (either 720 or 1080 vertical resolution) the night before I discovered it for sure, as I was reading my TV’s manual for probably the second time. I don’t remember reading a lot of it when I got it in August 2006. I think I was reading it to determine if it might be possible for me to use my TV’s remote control for both the TV and the Blu-ray player (both Samsung). I know it’s possible to use the Blu-ray player’s remote to control the TV, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the picture’s aspect ratio/zoom with the Blu-ray remote, and I’ll need this for watching regular TV content that is widescreen because I don’t have high-definition cable, so most things are 4:3, so I have to zoom in on a widescreen program to avoid having black bars on the sides and top and bottom. It might be possible, but first I’ll need to figure out how to navigate my TV’s menus with the Blu-ray controller; all it can do so far is power-off, power-on, and change the volume, channel, and input source.

Well, fuck you, you fucking Redditors! I submitted this article from the Daily Mash (Britain’s Onion), about how Santa hates ginger kids, to Reddit, thinking at least a few of them would get a kick out of it, especially since it is reminiscent of a glorious South Park episode. But, no, I went to check on it a day or two later and saw that it had a score of 0, meaning one more person down-voted it than up-voted it (it starts with a score of 1 upvote—yours—so its vote-score at a given time is the number of other upvotes minus the number of downvotes, plus 1). Probably one loser down-voted it and no one else liked it enough to vote. That person was probably a red-headed abomination himself, goddamned ginger motherfucker, I’d like to bash his face in…

At some point on this public, personal web page, I suppose I should admit I’m not as big of a Jimmy Fallon detractor as most people. I got annoyed at his giggling and breaking of character on SNL in every single skit he was in, but whether people realize it or not, his impersonations are all very good, and the Jimmy Fallon/Tina Fey Weekend Update was, too.

So I have liked most of the clips of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that I’ve seen online, but nothing prepared me for the blinding white light of brilliance that emanates from this clip. I first saw it posted on my friend’s Facebook page and have watched it about 10 times since.

This is a hilarious video of some guy playing a Super Mario Bros. game that was created with a level-designing program by some really sadistic son of a bitch. The hellishly difficult game play is entertaining enough, but the player’s commentary is absolute comedy gold. He sounds like he was born in Eastern Europe but grew up in New York. Incidentally, he seems extremely skilled at playing Super Mario Bros., but no one is a match for this game.

John’s new favorite video of the month (possibly of the year, after some more contemplation) is this mashup of clips from dozens of TV shows and movies edited into a catchy electro-pop music video.

From Randall Munroe’s Wikipedia entry I learned he founded the Limerick Database to collect all the funny classics and new limericks that people could submit. It changed my life. I highly recommend reading the 150 top-rated limericks. However, since the website now seems to be defunct, I won’t try to submit my brilliant creations to it.

Instead, for now, I’ll publish them on my LifeBlag, and I’ll start with a limerick about the book and movie that have been on my mind for the last couple weeks: The Silence of the Lambs. I realized I was remiss in never having seen the movie, but after I discovered it was based on a novel I committed myself to reading the novel first. I added both the novel by Thomas Harris and the movie on Blu-ray to my Amazon wish list. Luckily, the novel was very cheap, about $5.50, so I bought it in the summer and read it this month. I don’t own a Blu-ray player yet, nor do I plan on buying Blu-ray discs or players for a couple years, but Kathy insisted that after I finished the novel, we had to watch the movie; we rented it and watched it last week.

To save you and myself from an overly detailed comparison, I’ll say the movie was about as close in content and in quality to the book as any movie/book combination I’m familiar with. Even though Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor (not Best Supporting Actor) Oscar for his portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter with less than 17 minutes of screen time and the English-speaking public is almost unanimous in regarding Hannibal the Cannibal as the greatest movie villain of all time, an additional few exchanges or perhaps an entire scene between him and Clarice would have made the movie and his performance more powerful. The deleted scenes included some bits of their conversations that were almost verbatim from the book, that would have given Hopkins even more chance to shine, and that would have given viewers more insight into Clarice’s psyche.

Anyway, here’s the long version of The Silence of the Lambs in limerick form. It takes some things that were exclusive to the book and at least one that was exclusive to the movie, but it’s all basically the same story:

In Behavioral Science they sought
murderers who victims caught
one after the other
to rape, skin, or smother
and regarded their humanity not.

Young Starling was but a mere student
whom, Crawford thought, ‘twould be prudent
to send on an errand—
she’s young and she’s fair and
she might reach the madman we couldn’t.

Alone in a sunlight-less cell,
Lecter burned in his well-deserved hell
To get in his head,
to avert one more dead,
to glean clues he won’t straightforward tell:

Young Starling was charged with this task.
Jack needn’t a second time ask;
she was eager to prove
she could easily move
up from her roots, which were white trash.

Down behind plexiglass screen,
he dropped clues for Starling to glean:
A head in a jar
in an old victim’s car
told more than it would, at first, seem.

Another young body emerged,
a girl of considerable girth.
Clarice helped to print her
and noticed that in her
mouth a cocoon was insert’d.

By feigning impairment he caught her,
the tough junior senator’s daughter.
About a fourteen?—
his judgment’s quite keen
for a fiend who takes women to slaughter.

Back to his lair they sped.
Mere scraps and lefto’ers she was fed.
Trapped in a well
in his dark, homemade hell,
her heart filled with mis’ry and dread.

Her pleas and her promises failed
to sway the man who had her jailed.
Put lotion on skin,
send it back up again,
in exchange for her excrement pail.

He doesn’t just capture and kill,
nor does he rape for the thrill.
He covets, Clarice,
to transform, find peace:
the motive of Buffalo Bill.

Clarice divulged long-hidden pains—
quid pro quo was the name of their game—
of horses and sheep
that haunted her sleep,
but Hannibal gave her no name.

In his new high-security cage,
Lecter showed neither malice nor rage
until, with a key,
he broke himself free
and escaped with a cop’s borrowed face.

The first body wasn’t the first;
’twas the third, weighted down to divert.
Why try to hide it
so no one would find it
till after the second or third?

The rationale didn’t quite register
till Clarice grokked the clues Dr. Lecter
had fed her in pieces,
and then said, “Oh, Jesus!
He must have resided in Belvedere!”

To Fredrica’s hometown she went
to interrogate family and friends.
But what gave her a start
were the girl’s sewing darts
like the ones in the last victim’s skin.

Their former employer to seek,
hot on the trail was Clarice.
A sewing professional,
rejected transsexual,
he’s skinning himself a boutique!

“Yes, we know, from Johns Hopkins, a name
with a typo: not Jamie, but Jame.
An address near Chicago
where he shipped pre-imago
caterpillars that later became

the moths and the grand butterflies
with which Jame Gumb identifies.”
Far away’s where the game is!
She was feeling quite anxious
but was closer than she realized.

He acted aloof but complied.
Nothing he said seemed contrived.
A moth in the air.
Mr. Gumb met her stare.
The moment of truth had arrived.

Chasing him down underground.
He was hiding and couldn’t be found.
The girl screamed in fright,
and then out went the lights
and Clarice was left feeling around.

Silently watching her search,
with his night-vision goggles he lurked.
His pistol he cocked,
she turned and she shot,
and he toppled there…dying…inert.

Now Hannibal Lecter’s in hiding,
but doubtless his time he is biding.
On Doc Chilton’s trail,
but he still didn’t fail
to send Clarice Starling his tidings.

Our heroine has proven supreme
and ended the psychopath’s scheme.
And now the lambs’ cries,
as Lecter surmised,
will no longer torment her dreams.

Where did the name Windows 7 come from? I thought maybe it was just a working title until they could come up with something clever to market it as, and then when I kept hearing about it I figured people like the number 7 so they left it as Windows 7. But I count eight previous versions of the Windows operating system that have been pretty successful and widely used: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP, and Vista. Obviously there was a version 1 and a version 2, so with them added I really don’t understand where the 7 comes from. Microsoft General Manager Mike Nash said in a blag post that it was the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense. Maybe NT, 2000, and Me all counted as one?

Speaking of Windows, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.

The entry for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the featured article on the Wikipedia home page on October 6. Freakin’ sweet. I LOVE that movie. Probably my favorite Star Trek movie and definitely in my top 10 or 20 favorite movies of all time. Please don’t read any of the plot summary if you aren’t familiar with it. You should get ahold of the DVD’s of Star Trek 2, 3, 4, and 6, and watch them in close succession. You will discover a strong appreciation for the Star Trek universe.

I am not as good of a speller as I was when I was a child. This kind of disturbs me because I feel it is indicative of reduced perspicacity and failure to pay attention to detail as well as I used to. Maybe my mind is lazier or doesn’t retain information as solidly as it used to. That shouldn’t start happening until I’m really old, like, my parents’ age. I never had a photographic memory or anything, but I used to be able to look at a word once and pretty reliably spell it for years and years after that. (This certainly wasn’t 100% true, and it didn’t help me win any spelling bees, as I missed simple words that I had read numerous times before. In 4th grade, I won my class’s spelling bee but lost in the school-wide competition by spelling apology “apolagy”, and in 5th grade I expected to win my class’s competition again so I must not have studied very much, and I misspelled balcony as “balcany” on my first word of the day! Identical errors, two years in a row, but I didn’t actually think balcony was spelled that way; it was more like a typo than an error of thought or memory. It was a speak-o. “A” rushed out of my mouth when I knew “O” belonged there.) Now I forget all kinds of things I used to know and should have retained. I don’t expect to spell everything right, but words like “broccoli”, “accommodate”, and “preferable” have really enraged me in recent months. I haven’t misspelled “privilege” in a long while. That’s good.

(Btw, the one and only reason I would ever use the word perspicacity in speech or writing is because Lisa Simpson uses it to great humorous effect in the episode “Lisa the Simpson”: “Oh, my god! I’m losing my perspicacity!”)

One of the five or so country songs that I like is “Alcohol” by Brad Paisley. Only recently did I understand all the lyrics of the chorus, because of a Jack Daniels commercial I saw. The chorus begins, “Ever since I left Milwaukee, Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France/I’ve been making the bars lots of big money/And helping white people dance….” I didn’t understand the word Lynchburg. I thought it could have been Pittsburgh, but that didn’t make any sense and it didn’t sound like a P at the beginning, so I was pretty much clueless. And then I saw a Jack Daniels commercial that showed a close-up of the bottle, and the label said, “Lynchburg, Tennessee.” So I knew he was referring to Jack Daniels whiskey at that part. I don’t quite think beer originated in Milwaukee or wine in France any more than whiskey originated in Tennessee, so…I’m not too sure about that chorus.

Speaking of alcohol, there’s a professor here at the medical school who must be kind of a lush (then again, lots of them are) because he is a regular at one of my favorite bars, and somehow he is well-known for ordering a hazelnut daiquiri at happy hour every week before he gets into his beer drinking. It’s like his schtick. I saw him there last Friday, and I don’t know him personally, so I didn’t say anything, but he sat close to where I was at the bar. Somehow I felt privileged to witness him first-hand saying, “I’ll have the regular, [I forget bartender's name], my hazelnut daiquiri.” The bartender said, “Sorry to disappoint, but we were clean out of hazelnuts. Try this instead, on the house.” The doctor looked kind of annoyed and silently drank it. He said, emotionless, “Hmm. Pecans?” The bartender responded, “Nope. It’s a hickory daiquiri, doc!” Rimshot!

Some people, including myself, kind of make fun of me for buying so many DVDs without ever having seen them. I heard they were good, I think I would like them, they were on sale in a weekly ad, and I don’t feel a particular need for high-definition copies of them, so I buy them. But did you ever think about this—how many books have you read before you buy those? The upper threshold of price I’m willing to pay for most movies on standard DVD ($5 or $8) is less than or equal to the price of most paperback books, so really there’s a higher chance of waste in paying $8 or more for a book when you don’t know that you’ll like it. It takes a lot longer to finish and occupies more space on your shelf.

Oh, and lest you think I’m a DVD-buying maniac like Mike, I have about 120-130 movies on DVD plus a couple dozen seasons of various shows on DVD, but my Amazon wish list contains more movies than I already own. The vast majority of them are Blu-rays. I am waiting extremely, excrutiatingly patiently for Blu-ray movies to break the $10 threshold and for good, reliable Blu-ray players to break the $100 threshold. (If I get a good job and a cheap-ish apartment somewhere, I’ll settle for $150. Then again, I’ll probably make my first Blu-ray player a PlayStation 3, so that negates the price considerations.)

I have read a lot about high-definition technology online, mainly Blu-ray movies, Blu-ray players, and TV’s. Most people who pay attention to these things know that downloading movies to a hard drive and streaming movies on-demand is the way of the future. On-demand streaming from Netflix, Amazon, and other companies is already available via your ethernet-connected television, Blu-ray player, or X-Box. Considering how often we experience buffering delays with simple embedded flash videos on the internet, especially with a wireless ethernet connection, I am surprised the streaming services are so reliably smooth and fast with those huge video files.

But I suffer from a bit of Picard’s Syndrome even with movies, so that I want physical copies of movies on my shelf. I like owning them and seeing them all on my shelf, just like all my books. I don’t think I would be satisfied with an on-demand streaming service because I wouldn’t actually own my own copy of the movie or TV show, and what if you don’t have an ethernet connection or that video becomes unavailable for some reason?

Last night I saw a preview of the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts on X-Play, and at first I wasn’t sure if I was watching footage of an actual game, or some demo at a convention or in the studio where the speaker was typing in words on the screen, or what. What an original, unique game concept! If I had a DS, I would get this immediately! Since I don’t have a DS, this is one more game that kind of makes me want one. It might move the DSi ahead of PS3 into second place on the list of game consoles I plan on buying.

Here are Morgan and Adam previewing and interviewing the creative director of the game.

Here is another G4 guy reviewing Scribblenauts.

Randall Munroe must be on the same brainwaves as I am recently, because today he published yet another comic with very coincidental timing related to my recent experiences.

Kathy and I saw the mystery movie A Perfect Getaway starring Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich in the dollar theater today. I wouldn’t call it a “thriller” because it isn’t very action-packed until the end, nothing like the Bourne movies or Taken or anything like that, but it is very tense and stressful from beginning to end, so maybe I should use the term “thriller” more broadly. It is a good mystery story that’s worth more than a dollar to see in the theater. I’m putting it on my Blu-ray wish list now. I hadn’t heard of it, but Kathy was keen on seeing it, and I’m really glad we did, so I’m recommending it to you so you might catch it in the dollar theater before it goes away.

I recently finished the last of my DVD’s of The X-Files and, sadly, won’t be buying the next set, season 8, any time soon. Maybe for Christmas or birthday, but the last two seasons kind of suck and I vaguely remember what happens anyway (not much), so it probably isn’t worth it. What an amazing show, though. Even though I became a fan in 9th grade (season 4) and watched religiously 30 minutes after The Simpsons every Sunday for 5 1/2 seasons, I didn’t fully appreciate how great that show was, how creative and dramatic and imaginative, until I started watching my DVDs about a year ago and went through seven seasons relatively quickly.

Mulder is awesome. He’s one of my favorite protagonist/heroes from TV and movies. Either because I hopped on in the middle of the ride or because I was young and not attentive enough to underlying themes and character development in fiction, I didn’t appreciate how much of Mulder’s heart and soul was in the X-files and how much the X-files made up Mulder’s heart and soul. I did understand that his lifelong quest was fueled by his desire to learn what happened to his sister, and I understood his seemingly futile struggles in the alien/government conspiracy storylines. But I didn’t appreciate how much of a crusade, a struggle, a mission, and a life purpose the X-files were for him every day. I did realize it, just not as fully as I should have. What I think I really didn’t appreciate at all until starting at the beginning of the series was the fact that in nearly every episode and certainly in the ongoing story arc, it was Mulder against the world—Mulder against his skeptics, his detractors, his enemies, and even his truest friend, Scully. It was always “Mulder’s wrong—oh, wait, he’s right!” He constantly had to prove himself, to justify himself and his theories, to Scully, his superiors, and the various people he encountered each week. That, as much as his quest to find his sister and his crusade against the government conspiracies, was why the X-files were Mulder’s heart and soul. He was defined by the constant skepticism he received and his continual vindication in the end.

My main complaint about the characters is that Scully scarcely grew as a person, or at least as an FBI agent, in the entire first seven seasons. I know she grew closer to Mulder, she exhibited a lot of angst and frustration and soul-searching about her choices and her position in life, and she suffered a lot and this helped make her a little more committed to Mulder’s various causes. But after being in a fucking spaceship and seeing it fly out of the antarctic ice into outer space, she was still the same old skeptical, “scientific” Scully, week after week. After seeing and even touching solid, bona fide proof of numerous supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and being proven wrong by Mulder time after time after time, she was still just as skeptical the next time as she was in the beginning. She always concocted some inane, convoluted rationale for why that week’s mystery could easily be explained by “science,” and it was always more far-fetched than Mulder’s paranormal or “unscientific” explanation. I could list so many examples from the first seven seasons that it would make this post long and boring. I’m not saying Mulder grew any more, but as a special agent investigating X-files, he needed to grow a lot less than Scully did.

My main complaint about the show is directly related to why I won’t spend $20 soon on seasons 8 or 9: hardly anything was ever concluded or explained fully. Every question was answered with three more questions. The show had no closure, no climax, no resolution. Plenty of matters were resolved with some finality along the way, but, again, they either seemed to raise new questions or not really resolve anything major about alien visitors or the government conspiracy to cover them up. Maybe a third movie will, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

I just finished reading the Ender quartet by Orson Scott Card. It is so awesome. It is kind of weird that I finished it now because I started it in my third year of college when I read Kelly’s copy of Ender’s Game. A few years later, after I moved to Michigan, I bought Speaker for the Dead but never got around to reading it, until sometime in mid-August when I started it on a whim. I had decided to start reading some of the numerous unread novels that I had accumulated over the years, and I started with Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk. I began with that one because it had a good reputation for being a funny novel, and it was an intriguing enough portrait of life in the Caribbean that Jimmy Buffett made an off-Broadway musical about it, and the senior scientist at my NIH lab highly recommended it, so I had thought about reading it for a while.

However, it turned out not to be that funny and not really fascinating, either. I suppose it was well-written and the characters were somewhat interesting, and I got a little bit of a flavor of what life was like on this fictitious Caribbean island. But all the trials and tribulations that the main character suffers through in the purchase and management of his new hotel/restaurant/bar were more frustrating and stressful than funny.

Next was an Agatha Christie novel, which was very clever, as usual. I have a lot of those still to read, and they’re short, so I felt both interested and obligated to read one of those.

After that, though, I knew I wanted a clever and thought-provoking science-fiction novel. Over the last few months, glancing at my bookshelf, some of the novels I considered reading were Bruce Sterling’s saga about the future technology and space colonization of the human race, Schismatrix; Dan Simmons’s beloved, epic, Hugo-winning novel Hyperion; Ursula K. LeGuin’s story of an anarchist utopia of sorts, The Dispossessed; and Connie Willis’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel about time-travel, Doomsday Book. I have also long wanted to dive into two large books I own, a collection of Harlan Ellison‘s short stories and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which also came highly recommended by the aforementioned NIH labmate.

However, somehow that afternoon I was drawn to Speaker for the Dead and grabbed it first. I am really glad I did because it is awesome in every way. It picks up a considerable time after Ender’s Game, and I had forgotten a lot of the details of Ender’s Game, apparently. I remembered a lot of stuff about Battle School, and his siblings publishing essays under the pseudonyms Locke and Demosthenes, and the little holographic instant messages the students used to send each other, and of course the most important plot points. But a lot of things Ender does after Battle School that Orson Scott Card mentions in the other novels were news to me. Maybe they weren’t actually included in Ender’s Game and we’re supposed to learn this history as we go. Like the good and bad aspects of the Hegemon, who the Hegemon even is, and Ender’s exile from planet Earth for the rest of his life (which is the subject of a new and enticing novel). Some things that must have been featured prominently in Ender’s Game that I had completely forgotten, however, were the ansible, Ender’s killing of two Battle School mates partially in self-defense, and the significance of those dreams Ender kept having about that giant.

Maybe since I had forgotten so much about Ender’s Game, I’m not in a position to make quality judgments about the novel, but nevertheless I would say Speaker for the Dead is an equally good novel. I just loved it. The plot was fascinating, the science-fictional aspects that Card invented like the pequeninos and the descolada were clever, and Ender’s ability to deal with people and understand and love and heal them is just perfect.

Within a day of finishing that, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the second half of the quartet of novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. I loved those almost as much and agreed with the blurb on the back of the latter that described the Ender novels as “a saga of the ethical evolution of humanity”. The main point of each novel, it seems, was to use science-fiction to explore ethical dilemmas that humans and even other species might face.

When I read Ender’s Game I credited Card with inventing or at least successfully predicting the future nature of instant messaging and blags/discussion forums. I don’t know what other authors might have made similar or different predictions that influenced him, though.

I found it very coincidental that today’s xkcd comic was about Ender’s Game and its blag-like ansible forums.

So if you haven’t read any of the Ender books or you were stuck on one for a long time like I was, get out and buy Speaker for the Dead today!

This was one of my favorite Chris Farley skits on Saturday Night Live. Chris Farley’s first line is the best part.

John Scalzi is pretty much awesome as a blagger; I am now tempted to further investigate his merits as a novelist. He blags at the Sci-Fi Scanner, which is, oddly enough, part of AMC television’s website. His last two posts were devoted to exposing and criticizing design flaws in the futuristic technology of Star Wars and Star Trek, respectively. Some samples from his Star Wars post:

R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion—and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”
[...]
Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
[...]
Midi-Chlorians
Oh, man, don’t get me started. Except to say this: If in fact a high concentration of midi-chlorians is the difference between being a common schmoe and being a dude who can Force Choke his enemies, the black market in midi-chlorian injections must be amazing.

Here are some items from his Star Trek list:

The Alien Probe of Star Trek IV
The programming of this probe is even more simple than that of V’Ger, and could be written in four lines in the BASIC programming language:

10. GOTO Earth
20. INPUT “I can has humpback whalez?” A$
30. IF A$=”no” THEN GOTO 40
40. DESTROY EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING

I’m pretty sure this is not optimal design.
[...]
Uniforms
You have your choice: Velouresque pajamas and miniskirts (resurrected for the 2009 reboot), burgundy jackets with puffy blouses (Treks II – VI), or progressively unflattering jumpsuits (Treks VII – X). Do Starfleet personnel ever stop what they’re doing, look at each other, and ask, “Who dresses us?” They should.

On the whole, the design flaws in Star Wars struck me as much more grievous than the ones in Star Trek.

These are a few musings I had that were unconnected except by virtue of the fact that they all have something to do with the homeless.

My favorite game or segment on all the radio shows I’ve listened to is homeless karaoke on the Regular Guys show, based out of Atlanta. I listen to them at RegularGuys.com. They are now the Rock 100.5 morning show, but I knew them as the 96 Rock morning guys in college. Back then, their producer and whipping boy, Southside Steve, would go around to the homeless people on the streets of Atlanta and get them to sing songs on his portable karaoke machine in exchange for a warm, home-cooked meal. Now Steve is one of the Regular Guys and so they get their new lackey/producer/webmaster guy, Sebastian, to record the homeless karaoke segments. The way the game works is that Sebastian will play the voice track of the homeless person without the music, and Larry, Eric, Steve, and Tim try to guess the song based on his/her aimless mumbling and humming. They are surprisingly good at it. It is so hard to make anything of the homeless person’s attempt at singing, but eventually something gets through that gives one or more of them a clue. Sometimes I guess right first, and once I even knew it from the very beginning and was yelling at my computer that they should have gotten it long ago (Blondie, “Heart of Glass”). Here is the most recent example of homeless karaoke, but it is definitely not the best one. (I wish I had downloaded one or two of the really good recent ones, but they disappear after one week.) I don’t know what makes one segment better than another—difficulty, coolness of the songs, multiple songs where multiple people all guess at about the same time, songs I would do well on if I were competing, I don’t know—but it’s still entertaining.

Interestingly enough, their webmaster and segment-recorder, Sebastian, or “Sebas”, is homeless. He lives out of his car and the radio station. His mail and his driver’s license have the radio station’s address on them. He sleeps in his car, in the station, at friends’ houses, in a ditch once or twice, and on random strangers’ front porches a few times. Larry and Eric bring this up occasionally and, justifiably, give him a good ribbing for it. Larry is convinced that Sebas wears his homelessness as a badge of honor, a kind of rugged, urban, free-living, anti-yuppie, street-cred-earning lifestyle. Sebas says he accumulated a lot of student loans and credit card debt during his four years at Georgia Tech, so he is being responsible and working and paying off his bills before he goes wasting money on rent. Well…I guess that’s one philosophy…but, like Eric, I think that’s not the best way to get your life together.

Speaking of homeless people, the street beggars in Ann Arbor are very nice and polite. It doesn’t engender a lot of pity. There’s this one guy I pass on Main Street occasionally who speaks very good English (not at all like the homeless karaoke participants) and says, “Excuse me, sir, can you spare a few cents for a hungry homeless man?” or something similar. I shake my head or look down and mouth, “No, sorry,” and he says very politely, almost cheerfully, “God bless you.”

When my dad visited San Francisco for conferences a couple of times, he said he loved the city and that even the homeless, of which there were many, had a lot of personality. He encountered one kind of unbalanced lady who would hold out her cup or her hand and say, “That’ll be 25 cents, please,” or, “That’ll be 50 cents, please.” I feel even worse for the crazy ones. It makes you think very little that happened to them is their fault.

When I lived in Maryland, I caught the beginning an episode of The Outer Limits while eating lunch one lazy afternoon, and I decided to leave it on that channel to see if it struck my fancy. It was quite good, and on a whim I recently searched for some information about it, like when it was made, if that season was for sale on DVD, and if there were any other episodes made around the same time that sounded enticing. Well, I’m not going to buy any seasons of it on DVD before I buy lots of other things higher on my list, but I did find the episode on YouTube. It was called “Tribunal” and you can watch it in segments on this playlist. It’s probably well worth 45 minutes of your time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Met8sh6w26Y&feature=PlayList&p=46BE47CCCD9E3C5D&index=22

I have a strong penchant for certain motion-picture or still-photography shots in movies or TV shows that are captured in a really perfect, cool, poignant, or subtle but powerful way. I’m not sure if that sentence makes complete sense, so I’ll just explain by giving the four examples of these movie/TV moments or still photos that I really love, that stand out in my mind the most:

1. When Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are walking away from their crashed alien fighter jet across the desert in Independence Day, and they’re smoking their cigars, and the heat is coming up off the ground, and the smoke and fire are in the background, and they’re just totally bad-ass in every way. I don’t care what people say about that movie, I love the movie and I LOVE that shot.

2. Much more obscure: In Star Trek VI, when the Excelsior is flying at maximum warp to rendezvous with the Enterprise at Khitomer to help it fend off the reputed Klingon bird of prey that can fire while cloaked, and Captain Sulu urges his helmsman to push the Excelsior as fast as she can go, and the helmsman warns, “She’ll fly apart,” I love the way Sulu responds, fiercely and intensely, “Fly her apart, then!” I can’t explain this one. I don’t know why I care about that line from Sulu, but it’s just so perfect.

3. The photograph of Sean Maher (Simon Tam) in the opening credits of Firefly…he’s standing with some kind of formal wear on, a suit and a vest, looking off to the right with virtually no expression on his face, but I love it because it’s just so…poignant, stoic, artistic, something. There’s something undefinable about that photograph that makes me want to watch the entire opening credits every time. That, and the very defiant, libertarian theme song.

4. The last shot in the montage of scenes in the opening credits of season three of Battlestar Galactica: The young-ish, clean-cut male Cylon who I think is a #3 model is standing in front of Gaius Baltar’s desk, and two of the female Cylons are walking up beside him, and he’s kind of looking to the right, and then he just turns his head to face forward with this smug, matter-of-fact grin on his face. I don’t know why I like that shot so much, but it’s just perfect. I don’t mean just the still frame you see below, I mean the combination of the movement of his head and his expression.

Do you have any unusual or quirky moments like those that strike you as particularly cool or poignant or perfectly shot?

This is even better than Homer Simpson in the Land of Chocolate. I’ve thought this was absolutely brilliant since the first time I saw it, on TV about 10 or 12 years ago. The best part is hearing the audience catch on to what they’re parodying. True, the “audience” is probably a fake laugh track, but they utilized it perfectly.

Have you seen commercials for Fathom Events at the movie theater before the previews start? I think they are a pretty good idea for affordable entertainment that’s a substitute for seeing the real show live and in person, but I haven’t been to one yet. I only thought about going to two of them, which I saw advertisements for before Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They were operas: The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville. But then a day or two later I realized: I don’t particularly like the opera itself, though there are very good parts of many of them; what I like about going to the opera is the whole event, the experience of going out to the concert hall and dressing up and seeing everyone else dressed up and seeing the orchestra pit down in front of the audience and the singers right there on stage, singing with no electrical amplification whatsoever. I wouldn’t get any of that going to a movie theater, so it would have to be pretty cheap and I’d have to really be in the mood for it in order to enjoy it, so I’m almost certainly going to pass.

Another Fathom Event that I saw advertised several times was Glenn Beck’s comedy show. Now, first, I have a hard time imagining this being very funny. Second, what kind of political-news commentator thinks his career will be helped by doing stand-up comedy? I imagine it’s mostly news/politics comedy, but I still don’t think his image or his credentials as a news/politics TV and radio show host can be improved by doing a comedy show.

On a related note, here are the most famous parts of The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville. You’ll probably recognize the evil queen’s aria from the former, and will recognize the overture to The Barber of Seville at exactly 2:10.