I was very upset earlier today because I was looking up Keanoshow, the DVD collection of Dave McKean's short films, and I could not find it anywhere. Not at Amazon.com. Not at eBay. Not at Half.com. A Google search found a number of online DVD stores, all saying the item is no longer available. I thought, What is the good of the Internet, if not to find rare and obscure releases to gratify my very specific tastes?

Then I saw here that the DVD may not have been released yet after all, that it had been canceled by the studio. That makes me feel a little better that I didn't just miss it by two months, but I'm still anxious to see it.

Either way, I turned to YouTube and found a few videos credited to Dave McKean. Here are a couple that I think are probably included on the Keanoshow DVD (although I have no way of knowing).

Sonnet 138

The Week Before (this one appears incomplete)

I really hope this DVD does get released soon. I just can't get enough of Dave McKean's artwork.

Happy Halloween!

This year there were no big parties and we have no plans. It's kind of sad, but I'm over it. Anyway, I didn't even bother getting a costume because there were no plans, but now I kind of feel like a Halloween Ebenezer, so I think I'll whip out my backup plan that I've always had but never used - Wednesday Addams. How hard can it be to dress in black and give myself braids?

Anyway, we should get a ton of trick-or-treaters due to the massive decorations going on both of our next-door neighbors' homes. There's a pirate ship involved, so I'm pretty sure the kids will be coming around by the dozens. Hope I've got enough candy! If not, I'm glad I live across from an Albertson's. I'll try and remember to take a few photos of decorations and costumes.

Have a safe night, everyone!

Before our vacation, I went to see Michael Clayton. I didn't know much about the story and wasn't very interested from what I had heard, but the reviews made me drag myself to the theater. And, for once, the reviews were right.

I think the reason I didn't know much about the movie was because the reviews tend to avoid telling too many plot details. Now that I've seen it, I understand why. To tell how the movie begins ruins the effectiveness of its beginning, and to say the movie is about a lawyer who makes problems go away who comes across a multi-million dollar cover-up sounds incredibly generic.

But, with the man who discovers the cover-up stripping in public and claiming love to a much younger girl as well as calling himself Shiva the god of death, this isn't just a generic movie. I think what I appreciate about it is the attention to character for every single character involved. There isn't just a big corporate president being dealt with - Tilda Swinton is nervous all the time, as if her job is always at stake, and the scenes where she practices her speeches and picks out her clothes somehow add to to the overall tension of the movie, even though they don't necessarily move the plot along. Likewise, Clayton himself has a background that starts out cliche--divorced dad receiving interaction with his son by driving him to school--but there is a lot more, involving former gambling habits, a failed restaurant launch, and other family relationships. Tom Wilkinson's character is the obvious choice for the most complicated, but the characterization of everyone involved makes it so much more.

I read one review that said you could get lost in the plot if you don't pay close attention. I don't think that person had much of an attention span. The plot moves along and there are details, but everything is very carefully laid out and not at all difficult to comprehend.

The big talk about the movie is acting, and I'd have to say there's reason for that, with Clooney, Wilkinson, and Swinton all likely to receive award nominations (unless some impressive movies come along in the next couple of months to make us forget about them). I'm a fan of all three, so I wasn't surprised to see their consistency in performing well.

I also appreciated the cinematography and direction. The opening sequence with Wilkinson's narration, and the next several scenes at the movie's beginning all make a statement that lets us know that this is a movie that will be successful in all areas.

By the movie's end, I was hooked into the tension, and surprised at how much I liked it even though the story itself didn't seem very remarkable at first glance. It was the way in which the story was told, through characterization, camera work, a great screenplay, and solid performances that it was elevated to one of the best movies I have seen this year. Thank goodness for that, by the way, because the fall season seemed to have had a rather slow start.

For some reason I was thinking about things I have been wanting to see on DVD for a long time. Here's some I can think of off the top of my head:

• Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
• Angus
• Grindhouse (The whole thing with the trailers in the middle)
• Some of the Criterion Laserdiscs that never made it to DVD like Goldfinger, Dr. No, The Princess Bride, Pulp Fiction, Ghostbusters, and tons more.
• Real John Hughes special editions.
• The Wonder Years (I know, music rights. Work it out already.)
• Parker Lewis Can't Lose
• The rest of the Nickelodeon Rewind collection.
• Chasing Amy X (Supposedly they're releasing a new disc of extras this year, including the cast reunion Q&A from the Arclight, but I haven't heard anything lately.)

Things are getting better though. There is still hope. We finally got Twin Peaks in its entirety. The Some Kind of Wonderful SE is pretty good, but no Hughes involvement. I got my 90210 and My So Called Life fix. So that's my list, what about yours?

If you use Gmail, be sure to click on the 'Newer version' link in the upper right corner. They've added message prefetching and it's now amazingly fast.

(via Digg)

God bless The Onion. I've laughed quite a bit since I subscribed to their video podcast.

I've got some catching up to do with my reviews, but I think I'm only a week behind as opposed to two weeks, so that's a start.

My most recent audiobook checkout from the library was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I haven't seen the movie yet and was completely unaware of what the story was about, and honestly, I just wanted to familiarize myself with a classic that everyone else seems to be familiar with. The recording I borrowed was very worn. Sometimes it slowed down, sometimes it was muffled, and I could hear echoes of the author's voice during pauses. It was read by a woman, which asked for a bit of adjustment, since the narrator was a young boy.

But, past all of those quirks, I soon settled in for an adventurous story, in which a boy who serves at his parents' inn gets roped into a hunt for treasure when a guest (who is a pirate) dies and leaves behind a treasure map. The trip gets complicated when the pirate's old shipmates come hunting for the treasure they believe belongs to them.

This is a pretty straightforward adventure story, which kept me on the edge of my seat quite a bit with its descriptions of pirates, battles, and storms at sea. I particularly liked the maturation of Jim Hawkins from the scared boy at the beginning of the book to a resourceful young man (and back to being scared, though wiser, at the end). Ben Gunn was also a favorite of mine - a man who had been abandoned on Treasure Island for a few years. He serves as an interesting comparison to the character of Robinson Crusoe, whose adventure I am reading right now.

Like many movies and books that I have caught up with over the years, this is another that somehow escaped my childhood, but I know I would have loved reading it back then as much as I enjoyed it now. I will definitely recommend it to my kids.

So I turned in my application for Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 last week and am eagerly awaiting Harry's decisions, hoping I'm on that list. It's like Willy Wonka for movie geeks. If you're wondering what the big deal is, check out my rundown of BNAT 5, which remains in the top 5 greatest days of my life. This could be a pretty epic BNAT. We could potentially get at least a peek (and probably a lot more) at Project Cloverfield (otherwise known as 1-18-08), John Rambo, Iron Man, Indy 4, The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2 and who knows what else. The possibility of that stuff alone, let alone the fond memories I have my previous BNAT experience, make it worth the attempt to be one of the chosen out of thousands who enter. I just wish Harry would hurry up so I can either be put out of my misery or buy my ticket to Austin.

5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen

Happy Halloween.

(via Digg)

Well, Ryan's bored, so I guess I'd better update the blog now that I'm back at work.

We had a good week off and packed in plenty of stuff to do as well as plenty of rest! Saturday, we dropped off the Pip at his grandfolks' and headed north up to Foster City, which is 1/2 hour south of San Francisco. We stayed at Ric's cousin Kelley's house, which is right off the water. Her family was on vacation, so we got a cool townhouse to ourselves! We relaxed the night away watching some Office season 3 on DVD while we got Ric's new work laptop set up so he could get some database stuff done (he calls that relaxing) and I could check blogs and emails.

Sunday we slept in and then drove to the Legion of Honor Museum in SF. We got lunch in the museum cafe, which was incredibly expensive for little (but good) food. Surprise, surprise - the cafe food was served up by Bon Apetit! I swear, the university follows us wherever we go. We planned to meet my older sister and youngest nephew there, and were pleasantly surprised when she brought along her husband and two additional nephews! We all wandered through the painting and sculpture sections of the museum. I could have stayed there for a while, but spared everyone else and we kept it down to about an hour an a half. After that we took advantage of the awesome view from the museum (it's up high like Griffith Observatory) and took a lot of photos of the bay and the Golden Gate bridge. We headed out to the north shore and had a great dinner at an Italian place (which had steak for Ric) and then spent the evening wandering the wharf and piers. We went into one place that had a massive collection of old arcades. When I say old, I mean most of them were about sticking in a nickel or quarter to watch some figurines move around. The weirdest included an opium den and an execution by hanging. I got to play some skiball, and then I felt old when I noticed that they had Moon Patrol and Pole Position in the arcade. It was good to see the fam and to catch up with them a bit. We watched another disc of Jericho episodes together that night.

Monday, we slept in a bit, ate a meal at Denny's for the first time in years, and then drove north of SF to the Muir Woods (think Vertigo, where the chick looks at a slice of a redwood and points out, "Here I was born, and there I died" - yes, I took a picture in front of that slice). We decided to be ambitious in our hike around the redwoods, so we took the Ocean View trail, which lasts only a little over a mile, but felt like a lifetime. Poor Ric almost suffered from heat exhaustion - the trail was steep most of the time, and the higher we went, the hotter it got. At the top, we were underwhelmed by the "ocean view" (a peep of ocean in between some mountains), and were glad to head back down. We returned back to the townhouse for some rest, then caught a great dinner out at a restaurant in San Mateo called King Fish, where Ric had jambalaya and I had halibut. I highly recommend it if you ever happen, somehow, to end up in that area. Expensive, though. Ric worked on databases while I watched TV later that night.

Tuesday, we packed up and crossed over the San Mateo bridge to head to Castro Valley. We got to Ric's uncle and aunt's house and hung out with them for a couple of hours, then headed down the street to visit his grandma in her home. We caught up with the grandparents there, then went out to eat at a steakhouse with a couple sets of aunts and uncles, and several cousins too. It was great to see everyone, although it was a short time together! We even got to meet the newest baby in the family, George, who we think looks a lot like Ric's grandpa. After dinner we went out to coffee with cousin Emily, who is closer to Ric's age. We got caught up with a lot of family news and had a good time just hanging out. I got to sleep on a sleep number bed that night. Um, I guess I can't find my number, since I was tossing and turning and adjusting the firmness of the mattress all night.

The next morning we hung out with Grandma one more time, then went out to eat with Bruce, Linda, and Grandpa. We headed towards home after lunch, which was later than we had originally planned, and on a different freeway than planned because of the fires, so we had to skip our plans to visit Hearst Castle on the way home. Next time! Ric got hit by the food poisoning bug on the way home, but luckily I carry medicine on every trip, so we made it back in one piece. I'm a terrible driving companion, though. I slept for half the trip.

Thursday was relaxation day. I made it out of the house to see Gone Baby Gone (review to come). I spent a lot of time catching up with tv that day.

Friday, we slept in and hung out at home for a while, then went to Anaheim for the evening. We had dinner at the Jazz Kitchen take out area, which had the longest line I've ever seen there, then we went into Disneyland and stood in line for an hour to go on the Nightmare Before Christmas Haunted Mansion. The park was so full it was like Christmas vacation, so we had our fill of people pretty quickly. We ended up going to a nearby theatre to watch The Darjeeling Limited (rtc).

Saturday, we slept in again, then went to the Norwalk Ice Arena. Ric has decided to pick up skating and try to learn well enough to eventually join a local hockey team. I had never been ice skating before, so I spent most of my time along the boards, along with all the five-year-olds. I could possibly get better, but I don't think I would ever feel comfortable out there. I'm too afraid of falling and hurting my back more. After that I did laundry at my folks', then joined Ric and his parents and drove out to see the Kings play against the Edmonton Oilers. Awesome game, awesome time! When we got home I had really bad allergies, but we hung out with our neighbor on his porch for a bit, watching all the people walking up and down the street in costumes, since there was a party up the street. We watched more Jericho episodes, then I conked out.

Allergies were so bad that I skipped church on Sunday and slept in late. I mosied around the house a bunch, then followed Ric to his parents' place since he was doing laundry there. I watched tv all night and spent a while feeling sorry for myself because I've been missing the ability to just call friends and go do something spontaneously like we used to do in college. These days we plan every hang out, because everyone's always so busy. So when I found myself with nothing to do, I got depressed. Of course, there was always housework, but who wants to do that? I think I was sad about getting back to work, too. But you know, I like the people I work with, so I'm really not that sad to be back now that I'm here. It's a weird time in life, though. Most of my friends are at work, but we don't do a lot together outside of work, and whether friends are from work or not, we all have to check calendars before we can hang out. Boooo for growing older!

Anyway. Back to normal life!

Super Puzzle Fighter II

I love Halloween. Sadly, this year I'm not really doing anything. I've already done Knott's and Universal since they are insanely crowded the week of Halloween. I've already watched a bunch of scary movies. We're watching The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D next month. So what to do on Wednesday? I'm not really sure. I'll probably just rent some more horror movies and eat some Halloween candy. Anyone else have big plans?

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

Jesus Camp

Year of the Dog

Richard Dawkins - Designed and Designoid Objects

This six-part YouTube video shows a youthful Richard Dawkins explaining evolution to an audience of middle schoolers. If you think evolution sounds far fetched, then take a look at the video. I think he does a brilliant job of explaining the basics of natural selection.

Several months ago I got to go to a test screening of Jason Reitman's (Thank You For Smoking) new movie, Juno, which stars Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X-Men United), Michael Cera (Superbad, Arrested Development), Jason Bateman, and Jennifer Garner. It's definitely one of my favorite movies of the year so far and has been getting a ton of good buzz from the festivals. It hits select theaters December 5th but you can check it out before then for free by going here and signing up for a screening near you. Check it out if you get the chance.

In the film Man on the Moon is a memorable scene in which George Shapiro (played by Danny DeVito), after meeting Andy Kaufman, tells him, "You're insane...but you might also be brilliant." These words come to mind every time I listen to Zaireeka, the four-CD simultaneous play album released exactly one year ago today.

After losing their guitarist in 1996 The Flaming Lips were left wondering what they would do with a 3-piece band. They decided to take the opportunity to experiment with what kinds of sounds they could create in the studio, without worrying about how they would reproduce them in a live show.

At the same time the band began taking an interest in creating music through multiple sound sources. There are several stories Wayne Coyne has told to explain where their inspiration came from. According to one account they were listening to remixes on singles by Bjork and The Beastie Boys and decided to play multiple mixes of the same song simultaneously. They noticed that the alternate mixes and the slightly different playback speeds of the CD players caused the songs to slip in and out of synch. They were interested in how well the songs fit together, but also in the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the experience, and the set out to replicate this experience through their own recordings.

After conducting multiple sound source experiments with car stereos The Flaming Lips eventually worked their sound constructions into a (relatively) marketable form with Zaireeka.

Ten years late it's still baffling that they managed to convince Warner Bros. Records to release an album that requires the listener to play four CDs simultaneously. With three previous albums released through their major label and four independent albums before that, The Flaming Lips had one fluke radio hit and a moderate fan following to show for it. Through some miracle their Manager, Scott Booker, convinced Warner Bros. to release the album, with the agreement that it would not count toward the total number of albums the band was contracted to record and that their next album would be a more serious effort. This turned out to be the best possible arrangement for all parties, for the band applied their multi-instrumental approach to The Soft Bulletin and the two albums that followed out. All three albums received high praise from critics and were more commercially successful than any of the band's previous work.

But enough about the events surrounding Zaireeka's release. Is the album itself worth a listen? Only if you're ready for a sonic experience that's like nothing else you've ever heard.

It's important to keep in mind that The Flaming Lips did not approach the songwriting for this project the way they would a normal album. They were not interested in merely dividing normal songs up between four CDs, but rather in creating eight very distinct and very different experiments conceived specifically for this unique medium. One composition is actually made up of four different and conflicting songs that are joined by the same vocal track. Another features all the music on one CD and disorienting ringing sounds in the extreme upper and lower pitch ranges on the other three. These more bizarre experiments reveal a band throwing everything they have against a wall and looking to see what sticks.

That's not to say that the album is merely pointless experimentation, though. Most of the material on Zaireeka really does work musically, and the wall of sound generated by four CD players makes it more than four times as exciting. The greatest moment on the album is the instrumental "March of the Rotten Vegetables." The track starts with a delicate and melancholy tune alternating back and forth between speakers, right to left and front to back. This melody gradually gives way to a piano and Steven Drozd's heavy drumming on one set of speakers, then two. The piano drops out and the track is taken over by an all-out drum solo that builds until a range of distorted percussion tracks are coming out of every speaker. The rhythm is lost in a chaotic fireball of drumming before it suddenly burns out and out of the silence re-emerges the song's delicately plodding melody.

Ultimately, though, any attempt to describe Zaireeka fails. It's something that must be experienced firsthand, and every experience is different. Listeners are encouraged to try combinations of two, three, or all four CDs on different devices and at various volumes. Factor in the unpredictable playback speeds of CD players and the resulting possibilities are infinite.

If you want to know what's going on, watch episodes at ABC.

I don't know if you guys are aware, but good ol' Cracked Magazine has a website and it is awesome. One of the great things on it is their lists. Take The Ten Most Tenuously Connected Movie Sequels, for instance. Here's what they had to say about Robocop 3:

During this movie, RoboCop replaces his hand with an automatic assault rifle attachment, attaches a jet pack to his suit, and fights robot ninjas. How do the words 'jet pack' and 'ninja' even get typed into a script about a cyborg that weighs over a ton? Modern screenplay-writing software should detect something like that and pop up a little paperclip that asks you if you've lost your fucking mind, then erases your hard drive.

Yeah, that's gold right there. So if you're bored and looking for something new and funny, head on over to Cracked.

It seems to be popular to sell home security systems door to door here in Houston. When we first moved in, a guy stopped by offering a severely discounted home security system in return for us putting a sign in our yard to "advertise". However, he led us to believe he was from ADT (not true - they don't do door to door), claimed to have no business cards, and had no way we could contact him. We said no.

Then tonight, two other guys were going around in our neighborhood with the same pitch - an older guy between 50 and 60, and a younger guy. When they finally arrived at our house it was dark. I answered the door and they older guy said, "Are your parents home?" I looked at him and said, "Uhhmmmm, this is my house." You could see the guy's brain begin to backtrack until he said "Oh, you're young!" Then he gave his pitch and I declined.

Kelly about died laughing at him asking if my parents were home.

Anyway, thanks door-to-door security guy for tonight's hearty laugh.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis one of the most influential works of popular Christian apologetics in the English language. It was a very important book to me when I was a believer, but now many of his arguments seem weak. The Moral Argument is central to Lewis's defense of Christian faith and I've dealt with that in previous posts. One of the most famous passages from the book presents a supposed trilemma: Jesus must be a Lord, Liar or Lunatic.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to (Lewis, 42).

The key phrase is "A man who said the sort of things Jesus said . . ." Lewis assumes that Jesus really said all the things attributed to him in the Bible. If we remove that assumption, then a fourth choice emerges. Jesus was Lord, Liar, Lunatic or Legend. It's possible that the stories we have about Jesus are so polluted by legendary changes and additions that we can say very little, if anything, for sure about who Jesus was and what he said.

In fairness to Lewis, he was trying to answer a very specific argument from anyone who accepts that Jesus said the words of the Bible but doesn't believe that he was God. He's right when he says that this position is nonsense. But I've never heard of anyone actually taking that stance. If you doubt that Jesus was God, then you almost inevitably don't trust that the Bible is a reliable account of historical events. So, Lewis is doing battle with a straw man and he's armed with a bad assumption.

Is anyone willing to try to make the case that Jesus did say everything the Bible claims he did? Lewis certainly makes no effort to prove that assumption and now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've every heard anyone put forward good reasons for believing it. It's just one of those ideas that you get for free when you buy into the inerrancy of scripture.

Since it isn't relevant to the imagined argument that he's combatting, Lewis doesn't really address the Liar and Lunatic options or attempt to show why they're not true. It's certainly possible that Jesus was a liar and/or mentally ill. Most people who start religions fit one or both of those descriptions. Almost any Christian would place Joseph Smith, Muhammad, David Koresh and L. Ron Hubbard in one or both of those categories. Is it so hard to believe, then, that Jesus was more of the same? The fact that the Jesus story started so long ago means that there is less evidence to prove that Jesus lied (if Jesus was a science-fiction writer who told friends he wanted to get rich by starting a religion, then we have no record of it), and there has been more time for legends to grow up.

If we stop believing that the Bible is accurate history, can we gain anything from the words that are put in the mouth of Jesus? I think we can. The ideas can and should be judged on their own merit, whether Jesus said them or not and regardless of who Jesus really was. But personally, I think we can very easily arrive at a humanist ethic that is more useful, clear and consistent than what the Bible teaches.

I have a really bad habit of waiting until the last minute to do things, like my assignments. Anyways it is done, I just waited forever to do it.

I swear, if I hear another story about the poor celebrities who are displaced in Malibu without any mention of the hundreds of thousands of folks who have been forced to evacuate their homes, the hundreds who have lost their homes, and the residents and firefighters who have been injured or killed in the fires, I am going to scream. But really, is it even the media's fault? If you're wondering how you can help, head over to the Red Cross page.

So I've finally jumped into the 21st century and got a DVR to go along with my shiny new digital cable service. So far I'm in love. I've quickly realized that DVR + Blockbuster Online + WoW is probably bad freaking news but is also geek heaven. I figured I would share my season passes with you guys and you could share yours and we can compare. Feel free to fill me in on what you think I'm missing out on. Or just make fun of me. I don't care. Right now I have:

1. Heroes
2. The Office
3. Reaper
4. Pushing Daisies (My favorite new show)
5. How I Met Your Mother
6. The Simpsons
7. South Park
8. Robot Chicken
9. SNL
10. 30 Rock
11. My Name is Earl
12. The Soup
13. Best Week Ever

I think that is everything on my list. I'm going from memory here though. Mind you, I don't have premium channels so I'll have to get my Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is pretty freaking great so far this season) fix elsewhere and I'll have to get the DVDs for Dexter and Weeds, which I've heard great things about.

Jam Sessions

Transformers (Two-Disc Special Edition)

The long lost Jonathan sent me this:

It's a month old, quite awesome, and I feel out of touch because I haven't seen it before now.

Kelly and I have a new addition to the family. He is part chihuahua and part blue heeler. He is also 95% bat. And his name is Wembley. (Three cheers if you guess correctly what his name comes from.) For the record, we chose the name Wembley over the competing names Craig and Soup. Here is a picture of the dog/bat. Click on the picture for a whole album of the guy.

Things he likes to do: Pee in the house. Pee every couple of hours. Eat bark. Eat grass. Sniff poop. Chew on Sully from Monsters, Inc. (blue thing in the pictures). Hump Sully from Monsters, Inc. Not learn his name. Bite stuff.

Plainly he has been fun. Since his ears now stick straight up, he really does look just like a bat with four legs. We may fashion some sort of bat suit for Halloween, but that sounds ambitious. And I am very conscious of trying not to become one of "those animal people." You know what I mean.

The other addition to the family is Kelly's new car! Her transmission decided to die two weeks ago. (In my experience, this seems to happen to Hyundai's around 100,000 miles.) We replaced the Elantra with a Toyota Prius. Now she can drive a nice new car and feel better than every one else killing the earth at a faster pace. Ohhh pretension!

Speaking of the Prius, we took it on its first road trip to San Antonio. My company had a gathering nearby on the Guadalupe River where Kelly and I kayaked Saturday afternoon. Then we stayed near the Riverwalk in the city. We took in Howl at the Moon piano bar, and spent Sunday morning at the Market Square. We also did a drive by photoing of the Alamo. Pictures:

San Antonio October 07

Prius

This is a harbinger of things to come: pictures of the dog, stories of our adventure to San Antonio, our 2nd newest addition to the family (comes with 4 wheels), and maybe more (if you're lucky). Coming Sunday! Cabbage man has seen his last days.

I don't know if we'll be online much for the next week or so. Ric and I are driving up to the Bay area to be touristy and visit all of the family we have up there. We'll be back late next week!

Poor little Pip has dealt with a lot in the past several months, but he has discovered that there is one thing that he actually does like about moves - the box towers. He often climbs to the very top, and takes naps on boxes all the time. He's been particularly cute this past month. I recently uploaded a bunch of photos from my camera and realized that most of them were of him. I'm such a pet parent.

After getting laid off in June, which I have already written about, I spent a while searching for a new job. Since my previous job was in the mortgage industry, as a residential mortgage underwriter, things weren't looking very rosy. Things only got worse since then. I applied to several mortgage companies: wholesale, retail, correspondent, broker, mortgage insurance companies. I even got interviews. But no second interviews. A relative got laid off soon after me, but hers was much more harsh than mine. I was told in March, got to work until the end of June, and then got paid until the end of September. She was shown the door that day and got two weeks severance. More and more mortgage companies are going under, more and more are laying off. Two people who were laid off with me have already been laid off again.

So what's a mortgage guy to do when the industry goes to crap?

Start a new business.

This month I am opening a new business with my soon-to-be step-father-in-law. We are opening a store called Ink Station, an ink cartridge refilling store.

It's a very exciting time, but also very demanding. I started officially on October 1st, and it has been a lot of work. But I have had a lot of fun getting it up and running, working on the build-out of our store from design to choosing furniture and displays, to ordering product and equipment, to selecting vendors. I'm very happy with how our logo and store and all of our in-store signage has turned out.

Our grand opening is November 10th, and we have an official ribbon-cutting ceremony with the mayor of the town we are in on November 15th. I am hoping for a busy day!

Hearing praise of Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, and knowing that this movie was scripted and directed by Paul Haggis, I made sure to seek out In the Valley of Elah ("elah, elah. eh eh eh!" - okay, that joke is for Ric, who sings the song every time I mention this movie). The story is about Hank Deerfield, a former military man who receives a call that his son came back from Iraq a few days earlier and has since gone AWOL. Hank sets out to find his son, soon discovering that his son has been brutally killed. Aided by an under-appreciated police detective, he conducts an investigation of his own to find out the circumstances of his son's death. Just in case you're wondering, the valley of Elah is where David defeated Goliath, and that story is referenced in the movie.

The talk about Tommy Lee Jones is well justified, and is the main feature of the movie, since the movie is mostly about Hank's response to his son's death and how he copes with it by relentlessly searching for answers. After seeing The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada last year and this movie this year, he is definitely starting to be an actor I look forward to watching. Theron, as always, performs well, partly due to the fact that Haggis wrote her character to be more than just a cliche in a detective-type plot.

I enjoyed a lot of the details that Haggis wrote in the script. It's a "who done it" situation, but it's more than that, and small details such as the condition of Hank's bed at the beginning and end of the movie are what make it better than your average movie.

Thankfully for me, the movie remains apolitical for the majority of its runtime. I was afraid that Hank's son was part of some sort of political scandal and an Army coverup, but it was nothing so extreme. Sadly, Haggis resorts to making a political statement in the very last shot of the movie, which almost ruined it for me. Strange, how one little shot can make such a difference, but his movie began as something that explored different ideas about loss, coping, the effects of military experiences on men, and the differences between different generations of soldier... and it ended with a blatant exclamation that irritated me so much that I now almost think back on the movie with disdain.

I suppose that, in the end, the rest of the script transcends Haggis' flawed ending, and if I simply change one little detail in my memory, it's one of the better movies I saw this year.

At the top of many directors' lists of favorite films or most influential films, I Vitelloni is one of Fellini's earlier works. The setting is a small coastal town in Italy, where several young men are having a bit of a struggle facing their own futures. What kind of future can they have in such a small town, and how hard do they really need to work if they are living with their parents? The friends often end up acting irresponsibly or impractically, and sometimes dishonorably too. The movie is somewhat autobiographical as well.

Out of the friends, there is only one who seems to have some sort of groundedness, although he, like his friends, still wanders about quite a bit, regularly sitting outside in the late hours of the night. This is Moraldo, who provides somewhat of a stability to his friends, who are all eccentric in their own ways. The least enjoyable of these is Fausto, who has married Moraldo's sister because he got her pregnant. Fausto seems to love his wife, but hits on other (unavailable) women without hesitation. Another is an aspiring writer who naively attempts success as a playwright when the girl next door would most likely provide him with the happiness he is looking for.

The story of these layabouts (which is somewhat what the title means) is told in small episodes, injected with plenty of humor while still letting the audience understand the hopes and hopelessness that they experience. I like these contrasts, as well as the contrasts Fellini shows of the town itself (of their boredom on the beach, where the only entertainment they can think of is to watch someone fish, to the extravagance of the carnivale and the contest at the beginning of the movie).

I didn't make much of a connection to this movie, although I can see how it would have affected its original audiences, and I can appreciate the variety of its characters, sets, and camera angles. The music is nice and there were some meaningful moments. While it's not my favorite of the (three) Fellini films I've seen, I'm glad I finally saw it, since I hear it referenced so often. The final scenes made it worth the watch for certain, and I'm definitely starting to understand this period/area of filmmaking better now that I have seen it.

The Five Books of Moses Translated by Everett Fox

Thanks to some interesting comments about this movie and its recommendation by a few people, I rented The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a movie about young Irish men who are early members of the IRA. I don't pretend to be an authority on the history/opinions of this time in history, but I don't think one needs to be for this movie, which seems to make its emphasis on the reality and sadness of how this conflict slowly changed from country against country to friend against friend. And, in this story specifically, brother is pitted against brother when the cause they fight for splits into two movements. Everyone begins with the same goals for their country, but different methods and ideas of how those goals can be achieved break them apart and cause immense sadness.

I've heard about/viewed the Irish conflict in many different formats, but none that made quite as much of an impact on me. It personalizes the conflict by its setting - the movie is set in a rather small town, and when the two different sides emerge, it's incredibly painful to see how the conflict becomes more important than the ties that they have. When we see young men have dinner at a family's home, only later to be killing that family's son, it's that personal level - how the mourning mother knows her son's killers well - that makes the movie so effective.

A whole lot of sadness, The Wind That Shakes the Barley takes the conflict to the farthest possible extreme by placing two brothers on opposite sides, and especially in the way the movie ends. But that extreme makes it effective and shows how devastating the results can be when loved ones lose sight of each other when fighting for their beliefs (and get carried away).

This is actually pretty damn funny. According to Wired, the RIAA is suing Usenet.com, an online newsgroup reader because it promotes piracy. Why is this so silly, you ask? Well, Usenet.com is one of many different ways of accessing Usenet newsgroups. But what can be expected from an organization that sues things like Kazaa, Napster, and the like. This is even more stupid though because while those programs were designed pretty much exclusively with file transfer in mind, Usenet has plenty of legitimate uses. It predates the world wide web for goodness sakes! Also, they make it sound like this is a new thing. Folks have been using Usenet for nefarious purposes for YEARS. Next thing you know, they'll be suing ISPs simply for providing internet service because folks can use that to pirate stuff.

Many Kevin Smith fans have heard Kevin tell the story about how he joined in on a protest of Dogma when it was released but until now very few have seen the news story about the protest. Looks like the news channel that aired the story decided to throw it up on YouTube:

As Kevin has said in the past, I always find it amusing that folks took a movie that has a rubber poop monster in it so seriously.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Greta Christina Says this so well:

When you look at the history of the world, you see thousands -- tens of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands or more -- of phenomena for which a supernatural explanation has been replaced by a natural one. Why the sun rises and sets; what thunder and lightning are; how and why illness happens and spreads; why people look like their parents; how people got to be here in the first place... all these things, and thousands more, were once explained by gods or spirits or mystical energies. And now all of them have natural, physical explanations.

Natural explanations, I should point out, with mountains of solid, carefully collected, replicable evidence to support them.

Now, how many times in the history of the world has a natural explanation of a phenomenon been supplanted by a supernatural one?

As far as I am aware, exactly zero.

...

Given this pattern -- thousands upon thousands upon thousands of natural explanations accurately supplanting supernatural ones, zero supernatural explanations accurately supplanting natural ones -- doesn't it seem that any given unexplained phenomenon is far more likely to have a natural explanation than a supernatural one?

I guess that's why I'm not bothered by the things that science hasn't explained. How did life begin on Earth? What was the universe like before the Big Bang? We don't know. Some people look at those gaps in our knowledge and assume that God must be responsible. My 5-year-old daughter made that argument to me this week. First she tried peer pressure and told me that I was the only person who didn't believe in God, but when I listed some other people she changed tactics. She asked where people came from and where the Earth came from if God didn't make it.

I told her that she was asking good questions, then I asked her who made God, if he's responsible for making everything else. She said that there were people before God that made him. Who made them? And so on.

The pattern shows that the gaps are closing. This is an issue that any believer needs to think about and any apologist needs to account for. Why has religion been on the wrong side of issues of knowledge so consistently?

One way of dealing with this, and it has always failed miserably, is to attempt to deny and discredit new knowledge. The Church did it with Galileo and some are trying to do it now with evolution. The religious viewpoint just ends up looking stupid in the eyes of history.

Another way to deal with this is to say that the religion was never meant to answer scientific questions. The believer may claim that those parts of the holy book are not meant to be taken literally and the religion only answers metaphysical questions (e.g., What's the meaning of life? How should we treat each other? What actions are immoral?) There are four problems with this.

1. History proves this assertion wrong. Religion has always tried to explain the way the physical world works and how things began. As much as the more reasonable Christians may hate to admit it, the Creationists are part of a long chain of religious groups who try to promote supernatural explanations for the world, even in the face of overwhelming evidence for the natural explanations.

2. After such a long record of being wrong about the world, why would religion be considered authoritative on any subject? Not to mention the parts of the Bible that condone genocide. Do you really want to take ethical advice from a book like that?

3. If Genesis and Revelation don't have to be taken literally, then why does any book between need to be taken literally? If the creation story was just a human author's attempt to explain where the world came from, then aren't the 10 Commandments another human's attempt to prescribe how people should behave?

4. Why shouldn't we see these questions as one more area for natural explanations? Some scientific disciplines, like geology and biology, are limited to the way the physical world works. Others address the mind, society and even meaning. Psychology, ethics and philosophy, though not as exact, do take an essentially scientific approach to the deep questions that humans ask. They gather evidence, propose theories and test them, like the harder sciences. They're self-correcting and they've also replaced some supernatural explanations. I would much rather take advice on issues of morals and meaning from someone using this approach than from an ancient, pre-scientific religious book.

Elektra Lives Again by Frank Miller

Phew, sugar high coming down. I think I can write coherently for a little bit now.

I wasn't planning on seeing the final installment of the Bourne trilogy, since the second movie didn't do all that much for me (since I couldn't see what was going on half the time). But, surprised reviews popped up all over the place, and I decided to double-dollar it (it's $2 at the theater these days). I even saw one review that called the ending possibly the best of the year.

Unfortunately, the movie still suffers from terrible camera set ups, especially shots of the back of people's heads, and it took me a while to figure out that Bourne was beating up a guy with a book in one scene, but overall, it was much improved in that area. The most exciting scenes for me weren't the chases and fights. I loved the scene where Bourne displays his training by coaching an innocent person out of harm's way in a major public area. That kind of stuff is what I loved about the first Bourne movie, and that's what I liked best about this one as well.

The story is still a bit out there and I'm not buying that he would survive some of those car scenes, but that's not important in a movie like this. It was entertaining, and the tension between Strathairn and Allen's characters make it interesting because it's not just about Bourne's experience, but theirs as well. Stylistically/scriptwise, there were a few interesting moments. I liked how his training scenes mirrored his memories of his dead girlfriend, but thought it was a little bit much that Julia Stiles had to mirror those memories as well.

As for the movie's end, I tend to agree with Nobody's analysis, and besides that, it was drawn out, as well as rather lacking in the packing-a-punch area, especially with the boring cuts between tv court hearings and Bourne's figure in the water.

Overall, I do feel like it was an improvement and was entertaining enough, but the first movie will always be the classic while the second two are simply good follow-ups that had the potential to be better.

P.S. When Ric and I left the movie, both of us were pondering whether or not there was an actual ultimatum declared in the movie. Anyone remember?