One for the Price of Three

The last three movies we rented were Munich, Little Miss Sunshine and An Inconvenient Truth. One of these I liked very much. One of them was okay but didn't say anything I felt I needed to hear. One of them took up almost two hours of my life and left my sockets sore from rolling my eyes.

In that order:
First) Little Miss Sunshine had me laughing out loud at so many points and not all of them because what I was watching was funny. Most of it because I was so disgusted or uncomfortable with what I saw. No character the movie is impressive. Everyone is flawed. I suppose several people would argue that the little girl is sweet and intelligent and dedicated and honest. Well if you think that's all it takes to be a good person...fine. Abigail Breslin does a fine job in a role that made me yearn for innocent self-abandon like I haven't since I first saw Blind Melon's video for "No Rain".

Steve Carell is very believable and sympathetic and pitiful in a strait non-comedic role. Toni Collette is good, as she always is. Alan Arkin once again plays a person I've never seen him be before. And Greg Kinnear plays one of the most believably varied characters I've seen on film lately. He is both loathesome, tiresome and tender. (I'll let you make that into two qualities somehow. It's necessary to see his character moving back and forth without moving only on one axis.) If I was to sum up his character in one word I'd have to leave out several other necessary words. His first scene almost made me teary-eyed. Almost. Okay not even close, but it did touch on my deepest fears.

B) Munich isn't terrible. The acting is good. The organization is clear and simple. Perhaps too simple. It has a very linear progression and introduces no interesting complications after the establishment of the main conflict. The film reveals its moral questions quite early and repeats them until the end. There is a lot of Spielberg-ian melodrama and over-styling. At the emotional "climax" of the film Spielberg turns up the volume and slows down the images with his tried and tedious technique. His films have a habit of grabbing the viewer by the lapels and shaking, demanding, after a point has been elegantly made, "Do you see what I mean! Do you see? Do you?!" He picks important topics and seeks sometimes to educate or give the first soft notes of history. This time he doesn't do anything new.

Last) Al Gore thinks the country is made up of teen-aged minds looking to get emotional rather than educated about important issues. I believe the climate is rising in temperature because of increased carbon dioxide. I believe emissions need to decrease. I believe legislation is a fair way to encourage that ebb. I believe Al Gore doesn't trust the world to listen unless he simplifies arguments, vilifies counter claims to some of his non-essential beliefs, uses sarcasm in an attempt to intimidate the viewer (eliciting laughter from his live audience as well as groans gasps and applause that work much like a laugh-track on a bad sitcom) lest anyone choose to step in the scope of the ridicule. Warped statistics graphs and projections as we find in this video brochure are not necessary to make an argument that the government should pass environmental protection legislation.

He claims this is not a political issue, but a moral issue. I was hoping this PowerPoint presentation would avoid both and treat it as a scientific issue. But he sensationalises a valid discussion. He represents any dissent as nefarious and calculated. He highlights speculation calling it fact. He presents graphs without numbers for crying out loud.

Let me repeat--I believe the government should legislate higher and stricter standards for mileage and emissions. I believe resources should be valued and more prudently shepherded. I believe wind and solar energy should be used more. I believe the smog in L.A. is reason enough to change the habits of Nebraskans. I don't believe Al Gore makes a sound argument in this film.

[Side note for Sevvies: Buffy said it reminded of the Net 9x series. I agree.]

Picture Charades

I'll let Meghan choose to provide any clues. I think this one is really hard for a non-creative mind like mine to communicate.

Coming Soon: the next post

I'm back and ready to write. But first I have an episode of The Sopranos to watch. And later this evening Munich. And on this site is where I'll be putting up the little picture charades drawing. that I get to draw because I figured out the drawing on Meghan's site.

Sing it Brent

My friend Brent is getting his PhD in choral conducting at North Dakota State University. He and I taught at the same school in Bismarck about five years ago. We've lived to tell the tale. And we've agreed never to talk about it.

His skills as a director are impressive. He has an ability to diagnose a performance and to instill good habits in his singers. With a wide focus on such basics like posture and eye contact to the specifics like enunciation, vowel quality and pitch stability he transformed a sad little choir into a solid singing group.

In my office the other day Casey asked a question about the obviousness of "good" and "bad" chords. Some agreed that there was something inherently good about some combinations. I disagreed. But I had to leave before I could impress everyone with my amazing insights. What? No I'm serious. I'm amazing.

In a recent email exchange with Brent the topic came up and he gave me this bit of enlightenment--much of which I remember reading and hearing (in books and on NPR) and very little of which I would be able to say on my own.

I would disagree completely that music is biological/genetic. I would agree that it is cultural. There's the old story about the group who took the visiting Indian (dot, not feather) ambassador to his first symphony, and when asked afterward which song he enjoyed the most, he chose the "first song" - the one the orchestra was playing before the conductor came out and started the program. Remember George Harrison using a sitar on some of those Beatle tracks
like Norwegian Wood, and others? Someone asked Ravi Shankar what he thought of Harrison's playing, and he said "it was terrible!"

Even if the first story isn't true, the tuning/tonal systems in eastern Asian music are completely different than anything we have in the west. I've tried to understand how a Raga is put together, and all I can really say is that it is almost impossible to notate in our
western system - microtones, complex rhythms and all that. But, it sounds fine to those that live there!

Western music itself has evolved quite a bit since we started writing things down in the 10th century. A440 didn't exist as a standard - there are organs in the old churches where A=415 on the low end, and A=460 on the high end. The early Pythagorean tuning system (2:1 = octave, etc - which is what our western music is based on) didn't quite work out when you started tuning keyboards, which resulted in "wolf" tones and the whole "diabolus in musica" avoidance of the
tritone. People experimented with 19 note/octave (and even larger!) keyboards and other things just trying to get it correct. It wasn't until well/even temperament - where musicians said "the hell with it, I'm just going to make these all even" did we get music even close to sounding like it does today. Now we use tritones and all manner of dissonances regularly that would have shocked the Renaissance composers.

The reason why your colleague thinks that notes "X, Y & Z" (or C, E and G if you will) sound good to "everyone" is because they've heard it over and over. Notes J, Q and L might sound like noise to him, or might sound very cool to someone else. Eric Whitacre is a upcoming composer about our age that everyone is drooling over. His choral music for the most part is nothing but suspended chords linked together. The choral world is freaking out over his music - people just can't get enough - but the rest of us that understand what's going on just roll our eyes and wish we would have thought of it first and made some money on it as well.

Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" is not about a little piano that never gets angry--It's a technical piece intended to prove that the new tuning system works.

Seen on Book tv

Thomas Hager was on C-SPAN2 talking about his new book The Demon Under the Microscope. When asked about his research for the book he felt it was necessary to prove that he "knows" science. He tried to do this by telling a joke.

An atom walks into a bar looking utterly dejected. He shuffles up to the barstool and sits down obviously depressed. The bartender comes over and asks him what's wrong.
"Oh I'm feeling really depressed because I just lost an electron" the atom explains.
"Really?" asks the bartender. "Are you sure."
The atom says "I'm positive."

I don't know that this proves he knows much about science. It's good evidence that he doesn't know much about humour.

But his book sounds interesting. The full title is The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. He tells the story of the search in the first part of the 20th century for a drug that could end the terrible reign of deadly infections. Sulfa drugs became a popular panacea, especially after Eleanor Roosevelt convinced a skilled doctor, George Loring Tobey Jr, to use them in the treatment her son FDR Jr who was fading quickly from a ravenous strep infection.

The drug became immensely popular and was not patented. Companies everywhere were making it and selling it which led to a predictable result. In 1937 A chemist for the S E Massengill company decided to mix the drug with diethylene glycol because it was an effective solvent allowing the drug to be taken as a tasty syrup. Diethylene glycol is basically antifreeze/coolant. 107 people died. The result was the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic act of 1938 which allowed the Food and Drug Administration to control such products.

The chemist who came up with the mixture defended his formula and even took the "elixer" to prove that it was safe. He didn't die from it. He died months later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while he was "cleaning his gun."

I'd like to read this book. Some of my favorite books have been scientific memoirs or histories. The two that stick out and which I've read several times are How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin Nuland, and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is also excellent, though so much more challenging.

It's like saying one thing...

I know I sort of promised to keep this web log free of the technical boring stuff regarding language. But this isn't boring. It's hilarious. (Imagine Buffy's way of saying that. You know when she says "It kiiilllled me" or "It's hilaaaaarious". She's so dang inflected.)

I just wish I had heard the story on NPR and noticed this and commented on it before this other "~michael" fellow did. (I take the tilde in his sign-off to mean that he's sort-of a "michael". I however like to think I'm "∞Michael")

Michael Adams made this excellent observation on the American Dialect Society List

I heard Nora Raum's little prescriptivist essay on NPR, the one in which she decried the development of other than etymological senses of words -- you can't say "half of the population was decimated" because the "deci-" is 10%; you should only use "massive" to describe mountain ranges, which have mass, but not headaches, which don't. She complained that people say "literally" when they're not being remotely literal; she complained about "ironically" used in any loose sense. Then she concluded by admitting that maybe she is too "anal," but I didn't know how to take that -- literally or ironically. A perfect example of McKean's Law in operation, I think.

~ Michael

Mckean's Law, conflated with Skitt's Law and Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation) states roughly that any article, post or statement correcting grammar, punctuation, spelling or usage is bound to contain at least one eror, the likelihood of which is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.

I mashed together the definitions I found here.

Yes I left that there on purpose. It's spelled that way in the article I linked to.

How do you like it now?

Buffy stood silently in the doorway, backlit by the light in the hall, watching me writing for a few seconds. I type in a dark room so I couldn't see the expression on her face. I motioned for her to come over to me and patted my knee--she sat down put her ear to my chest and said quietly "I didn't like your post."

At first I was confused. Was it boring--pointless--confusing--too long--stupid--full of typos?

She explained.

"I don't like how it makes you look." And I laughed and laughed. "It makes you sound like you have nothing to offer." Buffy hates to think that others might see me as a loser. And she thinks it's inevitable unless I stop doing my own PR. It's true: she likes to sing my praises more than I do.

I once told my friend Keith that my procrastination is only a liability. (I'm not a black and white thinker but I talk like one when I'm doing preemptive self-flagellation. It's a good way to elicit the reassurance from others that I'm not evil. Keith is always and easy one to bait.) Oh no, he said. Procrastination is one of your best qualities. I didn't understand. He was reaching but I like his explanation. He continued:

Whenever we're in a conversation you are completely devoted to it. You think about what I'm saying more than I think about what I'm saying. That's how you are with everything. You get so caught up in your current situation that your other responsibilities get pushed aside. It's not irresponsibility it's dedication.

It sounds nice. But of course I argued against it and I continue to see problems with the analysis.

1: The order might be reversed. I might focus on the present in order to put off work.

B: Even if my motives are good, procrastination causes problems.

Last: I'm actually very bored when talking to Keith.

But about this living-in-the-present idea...
I've always said that autumn is my favorite season. I have to admit that's not true. My favourite season is any season that isn't acting like it should. In the summer I love a cold cloudy day. In the winter I love a warm day. Spring and fall don't really have a type. But they are a constant reminder that the weather is changing. Autumn edges out Spring because temperatures are dropping and I prefer colder temperatures. Though just earlier this week I was outside wearing a t-shirt shorts and sandals. And I loved it. But I was happy to hear that snow was in the forecast for the end of the week. Doesn't everyone love the first snow? Now that the flakes are whipping around outside I'm appreciating the warmth of the living room at pre-dawn 5am. I'll love every snow storm this winter. But I'll start looking forwards to golfing weather. Then in a few months when it's sunny and hot and I'm sweating on the golf course I'll look back on the crunchy fall weather and wish there were leaves on the ground.

So much for living in the present.