There's something awfully off-kilter in a country where (supposedly) the use of torture is condemned... but Hostel becomes the top-grossing movie at the box office on the first weekend of the new year.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
King Kong in Brevity
The Brevity comic strip is a new one to me, but this strip they ran on December 14th is so funny that I might have to check it out from now on...
NASA contract with Russians to use Soyuz not a good sign
CNN is reporting that NASA has signed a deal with the Russian government to use its Soyuz spacecraft to bring relief crewmembers and cargo to the International Space Station. It'll cost $21.8 million to send a single passenger one-way to or from the ISS.
I know our own Space Shuttle program is grounded for the time being and that something needs to be done in order to transport personnel and equipment to the station, but this isn't a very good indicator of the current status for either NASA or the United States. There's been remarkably little innovation in the way of manned space flight to come out of this country in the past two decades: the proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle isn't even a clearly defined concept at this point, now a few years before the Space Shuttle is due to be retired. So in a situation strikingly parallel with how the Romans eventually came to rely on foreign mercenaries, we are having to hire other countries and the technology that has traditionally been regarded as inferior to our own in order to keep up our end of things. I'm not "dissing" the Soyuz spacecraft - it has a pretty good history of being a reliable workhorse - but this is a vehicle that's forty years old that we are now putting the brunt of our space effort onto.
Guess what I'm trying to figure out is: Where has our technological creativity gone to?
Saturday, January 07, 2006
The only thing about "Bareback Mountin' " I intend to post
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is slamming NBC's Gene Shalit because Shalit has (gasp!) said he doesn't think that the new film Brokeback Mountain is all that good.
You know: "the gay cowboy movie". Now, I have no intention of seeing Brokeback Mountain - ever - but I know some people who have. People I happen to trust quite a bit. And as one of them put it, if Brokeback Mountain had been about anything but the homosexual relationship between two cowboys, it would not have been that big a deal. But that one thing has become the point about which the entire movie is now being labelled as "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary". And now, as evidenced by GLAAD's response to Gene Shalit, if a person does not buy into that and furthermore disagrees that Brokeback Mountain is a good movie, this somehow equates that person with being prejudiced against homosexuals.
Admittedly, I happen to believe that there's a lot of things very wrong with homosexuality. For a lot of reasons too complex to adequately detail in the time I'm wanting to give to this. To me it all boils down to whether the concept of love is something that can be defined by physical expression at all. Oh yes there's definitely acts of love we express to others, like hugging and kissing, and things beyond that... but can love itself be framed within the context of sensual pleasure for sake of that pleasure and still be considered to be true love? The act of deepest physical love is one where both participants simultaneously yield to and receive from one another... but how can there possibly be something beyond mere carnality when that act is either only one of giving or receiving?
Like I said, my take on this is really, really complex. And I'm not the kind of Christian who is going to condemn to Hell anyone that I happen to meet who's doing this: Lord knows I've done enough things in my life - none of which even approached this kind of behavior, by the way - that would readily condemn myself. But neither should people like those at GLAAD condemn someone for the weak infraction of not believing that Brokeback Mountain is a very good movie. If someone is willing to say that this film is wrong, that's their right. If another is willing to be so bold as to point out that the biggest reason this movie is being called a success in some quarters is that it relies too heavily on the concept of gay love between cowboys, then that's my right to do that too.
What it all comes down to is this: is Brokeback Mountain that strong a movie to stand on its own without relying on the crutch of a novel gimmick? Just going by what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be that much faith in the film without regarding that.
I don't really care to spend seven bucks watching gay cowboys "go at it"... so what else is there in this movie that would make it worth my money?
Friday, January 06, 2006
No encore, please!
The world's longest-running concert is underway in Halberstadt, Germany, as the second chord has sounded in a performance of John Cage's "organ2/ASLSP".
The performance is not scheduled to finish until the year 2639!
From the article:
Second chord sounds in world's longest lasting concertHey it could be worse: project organizers could have chosen to perform Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida" instead!
Thu Jan 5, 11:12 AM ETHALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform.
The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992).
Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639.
The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003.
Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5.
But at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Thursday, the first chord was due to progress to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.
Cage originally conceived "ASLSP" in 1985 as a 20-minute work for piano, subsequently transcribing it for organ in 1987.
But organisers of the John Cage Organ Project decided to take the composer at his word and stretch out the performance for 639 years, using Cage's transcription for organ.
The enormous running time was chosen to commemorate the creation of Halberstadt's historic Blockwerk organ in 1361 -- 639 years before the current project started...
(By the way, composer John Cage did a lot of weird stuff, the music-historian who is my wife has just informed me. His "4'33" was especially laughed about in college, she said: a three-movement piece comprised of four and a half minutes... of dead silence!)
Best frozen pizza I've ever eaten
My Mom has been getting a lot of good food from Schwan's. She finds what she'd like to order from the Schwan's catalog, tells the deliveryman what she wants and gets her new order when he comes back around two weeks later. Lisa and I have been "ordering" through her and getting incredibly delicious stuff like chicken alfredo, potato skins, shrimp scampi, and some darned great ice ceam. Well last night I had their regular-sized pepperoni pizza (I think it's item #901) and I gotta tell ya: this is bar-none the best frozen pizza I've ever tasted in my entire life. Everything about it, from the crust (lightly dusted with cornmeal) to the sauce - maybe the best sauce I've had on a pizza anywhere - is just darned perfect. It puts most restaurant pizzas that I've experienced to shame. If nothing else it must be said that it does not taste like it's a frozen product at all. Schwan's also sells the same pizza in one-person servings, in boxes of six. Can't recommend this highly enough. If you appreciate a good pizza and wanna try real gourmet eating for a very good price, give Schwan's a try.
The Ice Storm... ten years later
This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the 1996 blizzard/ice storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast. Can't believe it's been that long. In this area it was really two storms: one that covered the place in ice and snow and then a second one hit a few days later with much more ice. There wasn't nearly as much precipitation as there'd been in the Storm of the Century three years earlier (I doubt anything I'll ever live to see will be comparable to that) but it still ended up being a major nuisance for everyone affected by it.
The thing I remember most about the storm was that it forced me to move into my first apartment much sooner than I'd expected. I was taking a winter-term history class at Elon and my new roomie was off in London for the entire month: nobody was in the apartment and the last roommate had owned most of the furniture, so the place was really bare. Well, during the first storm I wound up staying one night in my old dorm room, made the very careful drive back home the next afternoon and heard that a second storm was on its way. I figured the logical thing to do was to hole up in the apartment a lot sooner than anticipated, so I'd be close to campus if we had class the next day. So I packed up a sleeping bag, a lamp, some books, and the TV/VCR combo I'd gotten for Christmas - and a few other essentials - into the car and headed for my new digs. I got the car unpacked and headed out to find food and some entertainment to hold me over in case I got iced-in with nowhere to go. I wound up getting a Battletech novel and a Doctor Who videotape ("The Five Doctors" episode) from the Burlington mall and then one of those 2-pizza deals from Little Caesar's (and some breadsticks 'course), and some two-liter Cokes. The accomodations that night - my first ever in my own apartment - were Spartan to say the least: without my own bed for the time being I had to sleep on the couch. But as I ate my pizza and watched the video, with the ice that ended up trapping me indoors for the next two days falling outside... I felt so much triumphant pleasure. Like a king over my own domain. It didn't matter that I barely had anything at all in the apartment: that it was my very own place to live in for the first time in my life was all that mattered to me. And I was loving it! It was so much fun in fact that a few years later when I moved into my next apartment, I just had to replicate the ritual of eating pizza while watching that same Doctor Who tape on my first night in the place.
Lotta good memories that were had in that apartment, along with a few crazy ones and some that... well, no one would ever believe me if I wrote about it here. But they all started with the ice storm ten years ago this week. And I just felt led to share my own memories about it, to add to those of anyone else who probably remembers the storm also.
