Cuz We Said So

David’s 2012 Micro-Review

While no one can know the future, I think we can safely predict that when the end of the world really does arrive, it will be entirely less preposterous than nearly everything you will see in this movie.  Of course, you would not go and see a film like this because you were yearning for realism. 

I enjoyed 2012 well enough; it has a great cast, and it has all the requisite pieces: the heroic speeches, the sad farewells, the knowing looks between the hero and his wife as he goes off to almost certain doom so that others may live—and of course, incalculable death and destruction, rendered in glorious hi-def with Dolby Digital sound.  It could, however, have used a bit less… almost everything.  Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy watching scores of people being incinerated, drowned, and crushed under falling buildings as much as anybody.  But Emmerich could have easily made this film a third shorter, a third as expensive, and two-thirds better.

It should be a massive hit.

Triumph Spitfire in the Wild

No, I’m not turning this into a car blog, honest.  But can you blame if I spotted some interesting cars during my recent time in New Hampshire? 

No.  Of course you can’t.

Anyway, this specimen I spotted it on the way to lunch one day.  It is, if my eyes do not deceive me, a Triumph Spitfire.  You don’t see too many of these on the road these days; the last one rolled off the assembly line in 1980, making this piece of rolling automotive history close to thirty at minimum.  (The chrome bumper might suggest the car was older still—no later than a ‘78—but of course, there’s no way to know if it’s the original bumper.)

If you’re wondering if your cat can get swine flu…

…it appears the answer is yes.

Thought for the Day

“Your inability to see your own bad argument does not mean there are flaws in my logic when I point them out to you.” —John Scalzi via Twitter

David Regards Ferrari 458 Italia, Approves

It is irrelevant in nearly every way how much I like or dislike the design of the latest Ferrari.  But I’ll still toss out there that I think the 458 Italia (seen here in the wild back in August via Autoblog) looks pretty hot, particularly compared to the F430 it replaces, which never really did much for me.

Side note: I enjoy that Ferrari’s promo site for the Italia lets you play sounds clips of the car starting, accelerating, passing at the track etc.  Ferrari clearly understands their target demographic, which essentially = me + a whole boat load of money.  And yes, the car sounds fantastic.

How to Understand Flow Charts

A guide in flow chart form.  Funny

Lloyd Weber To Make A New “Phantom”

Sequels, especially to classics, are tricky things.  Hopefully this won’t be a terrible, horrible mistake:

Andrew Lloyd Weber has announced a sequel to his massively successful "Phantom of the Opera" that will be set at Coney Island.

Weber's new production, "Love Never Dies," is due to open in London in March of next year.

“Seven-year-old Blind Boy ‘Uses Echoes to See’”

An article in the Telegraph this morning about a boy in England taught to echolocate by my friend Dan.

Zombieland

I'm a fan of zombie films, and zombie comedies are even better!  (Okay, I liked "Shaun of the Dead".  That's the only one I can think of at the moment.)

This very tongue-in-cheek riff on the well-worn tropes of zombies is one of the least socially resonant I can remember seeing.  Yes, once again, zombies illustrate a social force in our society.  But this time around, they're a stand-in for our technology-based alienation from each other.  And it takes the the destruction of our civilization for our heroes to realize they really do need each other.  (Yawn.)

The jokes, on the other hand, are pretty good.  Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland") is our narrator, giving us his backstory along with several Max-Brooks-ish rules for surviving in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland, such as "Check the back seat" and "Don't be a hero".  His mentor in zombie killing is a suprisingly likeable Woody Harrelson.  (I say "surprisingly", because I haven't liked the guy in anything since Cheers.)  Joining these two are a pair of sisters played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin.

There are a few too many reversals which seem to have irretrievably broken our little foursome up... but since you're a movie viewer, you know they won't be broken up for long.  An extended celebrity cameo is a great deal of fun.  And the finale surprised me a little.

All in all, it was enjoyable, but nothing very earth-shatteringly original.

“The New Rules of News”

Dan Gillmor has 22 ideas for changing how news is produced. It may not be a perfect list, but the product he describes sounds a lot more compelling than most of what comes out of today's newsrooms.

Universe Closer to Death

Yes, it’s more bad economic news on President Obama’s watch: it appears the universe may be closer to its eventual end than previously thought:

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated.

Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg

Egan and Lineweaver’s new value for the entropy of the universe is still a billionth of a billionth the maximum possible entropy that researchers have estimated…

Please plan your vacation time accordingly

Fun Car Sighting of the Week

…at my hotel here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, standing out among the rentals that festoon the parking lot: this Ferrari F355 GTS.

Wikipedia says the F355, last built in 1999, is “more common than other Ferraris,” and it’s not even the fastest car around—a base C6 Corvette should beat it to 60 by half a second.  Yet somehow, I find the appeal of the cavallino rampante to be undiminished by the car’s life among the hoi polloi.

Break Up the Dance: Roman Polanski Arrested

I see they finally nabbed Roman Polanski yesterday, as he attempted to enter Switzerland to attend a film festival.  Well done.  I’m a little astonished, however, at the statement released by the film festival that was intending to honor him:

"Roman Polanski, among the greatest film directors of our time, should have been in Zurich today to receive an award for his lifetime achievements," a spokesperson for the festival said in an e-mailed statement.   …The statement said the arrest was made after a request by U.S. authorities, and said it learned of the arrest with "great dismay and sadness."

How is this not entirely loathsome?  Surely it would be more appropriate to identify the man in question as, “Roman Polanski, confessed fugitive child rapist.”  Leaving this detail out is a bit like saying, “Jeffrey Dahmer, former factory worker.”  In light of this, I’m trying to decide if I could conceivably care less how good a director he is. 

Nope, I don’t think I could.

I’m with Hillary Fields on this:

The way I see it, Polanski committed a crime and it sets an awful precedent to allow him to skate free. All these years he's been making  art, living it up in Europe, while being lauded and well compensated for his talent. Basically, he didn't like how his case was being handled, so he decided he was above the law -- an option the average person doesn't have the resources to take, much as they might wish to. Never did he have to face up to his actions -- until now.

I hear a lot of outcry that he's a special case -- so talented, so much tragedy in his life. …But… I don't see how the things done to you excuse the things you do to others -- particularly 13-year-old girls you ply with champagne and a sliver of quaalude.

Why Are Conservatives So Mean?

Andrew Klavan tackles the question in this video from back in May.

Ebert's List of 312 Great Movies

With links to his reviews (via Newmark's Door). 

I have only seen 31 of these films all the way through that I can be sure of, though I may have seen others and simply don’t remember them.  For what it’s worth, I maintain Kieslowski’s Three Colors should count as three not one, and I should get partial credit for seeing several of Apted’s Up films, though I’m still working my way through them.  (I wonder if there will be a 56 Up in 2012?)

Lessons From Dow 36,000

The book that is, not the actual value of the index, what with the latter not having happened yet.  Market strategist Barry Ritholtz:

…Let us congratulate James K. Glassman and Kevin Hassett, the authors of the incredibly money losing advice in their book Dow 36,000, on their 10 year anniversary.  …[L]et’s see what lessons we can learn from their errors. Here is what I can deduce as valuable lessons from the foolishness in their book

Ouch.  Ritholtz' list is here.  Of course, the real lesson may be, “beware of people telling you what lessons you should have learned from the past market.”  Nobody’s got a crystal ball, other people have agendas and priorities that may or may not be yours, and your mileage will almost certainly vary.

Smith & Wesson 642 .38 Special

I had a chance to fire this Smith & Wesson 642 Airweight Centennial revolver yesterday, and holy cow, what a little monster it is.  

I have fired revolvers before, including the longer-barreled Smith & Wesson I blogged about here a couple of years ago.  Shooting the 642 was a different… and I must say not entirely agreeable… experience. 

First of all, I couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with this thing.  I completely missed a standard bulls-eye target at 7 yards with my first 5 rounds, and hit only twice on my second five.  Now, I’m not likely to win a shooting competition any time soon, but I’m not usually that bad.  For comparison, I switched to my XD after shooting the 642, and put five rounds in an inch-and-a-half circle from the the same distance.  I have read elsewhere that the 642 is highly accurate, so I’ll write it off to user error.  I can see some serious practice being required to shoot well with this gun.

Being a much lighter gun than the XD (with an unloaded weight of around 15 oz, it weighs about half as much) it makes sense that perceived recoil of the 642 should be higher—and indeed it was.  The double-action trigger pull was also much heavier than the XD’s striker action, or even the DA/SA trigger on my Bersa Thunder 380, and in tightening my grip to overcome the greater tension, the recoil was transferred more forcefully into my arm.  It was a little uncomfortable.

I’ve read favorable review of the 642 elsewhere (here for example) which speak to its virtues of small size, simplicity, and value, and I can certainly appreciate the perspective.  I don’t think it’s really my cup of tea, however.

When Will Real Estate Recover Its Losses?

The real answer: nobody knows. 

If you believe Moody’s, however, it’s going to be a while.  They predict it will take until 2020 for average home prices to return to their peak value nationwide.  They assert that some states will recover before 2014, while California, Arizona, and Florida won’t see those highs again until 2030.

Take it with a grain of salt.  Analysts can’t see into the future any better than you can.

links for 2009-09-19

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Your Tax Dollars Insanely at Work

…If you live in Washington state, anyway.  Stop me at the point in the story where you begin to suspect plans were not well thought out:

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A criminally insane killer from eastern Washington is on the run after escaping during a field trip to the county fair that his mental hospital organized.

Whoa!!  That’s about as far as I got.  Someone please help me understand why the people who came up with this genius idea aren’t locked up with the rest of the criminally insane?

…Authorities at Eastern State Hospital, where Paul is a patient, are being criticized for allowing him to visit the fair despite his violent criminal past and a history of trying to escape.

"Why was he allowed to take such a trip?" the governor said Friday. "Why did they go to a location that was so heavily populated with families?"

Those do seem like excellent questions to be asking.  This, however, does not seem like an excellent time to be asking them.

Authorities believed Paul, 47, was headed for the Sunnyside, Wash., area where his parents and many siblings live.

Paul was committed after he was acquitted by reason of insanity in the 1987 slaying of an elderly woman, whose body he soaked in gasoline to throw off search dogs. Paul buried the woman's remains in her flower garden.

…Spokane County sheriff's officials were told Paul had $50 when he escaped Thursday — enough money to buy a bus ticket, said sheriff's spokesman Dave Reagan.

This story just can’t get worse, can it?

…Paul also had time, according to a union that said hospital administrators waited nearly two hours before calling law enforcement. The union said workers alerted their superiors minutes after discovering Paul's escape.

Okay, maybe it can get worse.

"They believe he was an extreme escape risk and the administration should never have allowed him on the field trip," a statement from the Washington Federation of State Employees said. "The workers have unsuccessfully fought to stop the outings for murderers, rapists and pedophiles committed to the hospital as criminally insane."

You think? 

The article is notably lacking an account from the people responsible for this program.  I’d like to hear their side of this now, please.