Random: The Ads at the Top of the Page
Wow, what a neat idea. Do a search on stuff in the blog and show relevant ads. Ingenious, really. You guys don't get to see it like I do, as I am reloading blog after every entry and different crap is appearing at the top. It's really cool =) I was going to upgrade to premium blogspot stuff, but now I think I'll keep the basic.
Writing: Story Analysis Stuff
I am working on my analysis of "A Poetics for Bullies". Each Monday (starting tomorrow), I am going to blog about a different story. As for my previous comment about my blog not continuing to be a rambling, incoherent mess... "Oh well".
At least I will keep my movie/TV opinions short and simple.
Movie: Underworld
The acting in this movie was absolutely horrible. The dialogue was *almost*, but not quite, as bad as the acting. The basic plot was ok, even interesting. Too bad the main human character (Michael Corvin) was as flat as a board, totally undeveloped, and completely uninteresting to watch. Mindless action sequence followed mindless action sequence, with a laughably bad final shot (I won't spoil it; it's so bad it's hilarious). Not completely unentertaining, but really not a good movie. 2/5
Sports: Crooked Boxing Judges
My friends Pete and Russell got me interested in boxing. I'd never really watched it much before, but once I saw a few bouts when they came over to watch, I was hooked. Boxing is a lot like chess or tennis, one person against one person, celebrity against celebrity. I've always liked these sorts of contests, be they mental or physical.
Last night, I watched the replay of the Oscar Delahoya-Sugar Shane Moseley fight, followed by the Chris Byrd-Fres Oquendo fight (live). Delahoya clearly won the first fight, Oquendo clearly won the second. Now, I don't consider myself to be an expert on boxing, but:
1. I can read Compubox numbers that show punches landed. Yes, I know Compubox isn't everything, but when someone is dominant in all categories, it's really telling.
2. The losing fighters' demeanors in both fights suggested that they clearly suspected/knew they were losing. Moseley went all out in the final 4 rounds of his fight. And Chris Byrd, a totally defensive boxer, started getting really aggressive and going for Oquendo at the end of his fight.
So, as it turned out, Moseley won a unanimous decision over Delahoya, and Byrd won a unanimous decision over Oquendo. This can only mean one of two things:
1. The boxing judges for these contests were utterly and completely retarded OR
2. The judges had been bribed and the fights were both fixed.
It is truly sad that I have to conclude that #2 is the case. Boxing has always had a reputation as a sleazy sport, but never before have I seen bribery and corruption so obviously rear its head. These fights were just plain fixed. As long as the fight went to a decision, the losing fighters just stood no chance.
This all begs the question: what do we need judges for anyway? Why not just fight till one guy knocks the other guy out? At the very least, fight 15 rounds. So someone will get killed occasionally in the ring. Shit happens. That's the nature of the sport. Right now, the state of boxing is even worse than the state of chess. It's a miserable failure of a sport with only a few bright shining moments (like Gotti-Ward and Lewis-Klitschko).
What I don't understand is why boxers and boxing fans don't get more outraged. They just shrug their shoulders, say "I thought I won", and go about their business. Part of this is just due to money... the Bernard Hoppkins philosophy (who cares, just pay me)... where boxers just care about the fat paycheck and not about the title.
I don't know if I feel like watching any more boxing any time soon. Last night was the lowest I've ever seen the sport sink (in my limited experience with it).
Politics: Wesley Clark in 2004?
Well, a while ago I blogged about my excitement in first seeing General Wesley Clark speak on Meet the Press. Now it turns out he will in fact be running for president. I haven't been this excited about a candidate since Paul Tsongas in 1992. He seems really intelligent and I like what I've heard him say about the war in Iraq. He has declared as a Democrat, though, so I'll have to wait and see what his economic policies are. I'm more of a Republican when it comes to paying taxes. More on the General as things develop!
Movie: Once Upon a Time in Mexico
I saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico and really liked it. Richard Rodriguez is such a brilliant filmmaker. The movie isn't about plot, or characters (except in the case of Depp, who rocks), or story... but all about the beauty of filmmaking itself. Rodriguez shot, edited, and even scored the film himself. There are many wonderful shots and sequences. Lots of great visuals and great music. Mickey Rourke with a chihuaha, Depp as the sleazy CIA agent, Ruben Blaydes as the noble ex-FBI guy. Just a totally cheesy, utterly unrealistic, yet somehow incredibly fun romp. 4/5
TV Show: Carnivale
I caught the second episode of Carnivale on HBO tonight. Totally bizarre, but it sucked me in pretty quickly with quirky characters, numerous mysteries, and Matrix-like prophetic statements ("He is the one!", "You are the one", etc.) The series is strongly reminiscent of Twin Peaks, my favorite TV show of all time, as well as of The Matrix. It even has the midget from the red room in Twin Peaks. Entertaining stuff. Highly recommended.
A New Start
Well, after two months of silence, I'm ready to start blogging again. Instead of a rambling incoherent mess that touches on a bizarre range of topics, the new blog will focus primarily on my 'writing odyssey'. No, I'm not going to post my stories on here, so don't ask (what self-respecting aspiring professional would do that?) I will, however, share insights and anecdotes as I move towards the ultimate goal of publication.
Many people have asked me what sorts of stuff I want to write (and what stuff I read). "Surreal fiction" is my usual response. But given the looks of incomprehension people throw me when I say that, more recently I've just been mumbling "sci-fi, fantasy". "Ah", they nod, understanding the easily digestible tidbit I've thrown them. Well, now that I am blogging about my writing, I would like to talk a lot more about the stories I like to read, the authors who have touched me, and the quirky surreal sequences that I have found so interesting. Towards that end, I am going to try to analyze one story a week, take it apart like a watch, and figure out what makes it tick. Maybe some of you will read this blog, go out and find the stories I recommend, and get the same level of "wow" that I got when I first encountered them. That would be pretty cool.
It is my hope that the names of Borges, Poe, DeMaupassant, Calvino, Elkin, Barth, Marquez, Ellison, Bradbury, LeGuin, and many more, will soon become intimately familiar to you the way they are to me... and the next time I see you, and start babbling something about surrealist fiction, you may actually have some idea what I am talking about.
So, sit back, enjoy the new blog and new look, and get ready for the first story, Stanley Elkin's "A Poetics for Bullies".
Hepburn and Hackett dead
Katherine Hepburn and Buddy Hackett died this week. =( Much sadder news than the departure of a Force of Darkness (see previous blog entry). Both, along with Gregory Peck, will be sorely missed.
The World Is Now a Better Place
I am in a very good mood today because Strom Thurmond finally croaked. In an amusing thread on a message board I read regularly, people made comments like "be sure to cut off the head and bury it in a separate grave... and stake the corpse." Anything to make sure he doesn't come back. Now if only Jesse Helms, Judges Scalia and Rehnquist, and Clarence Thomas would suddenly have heart attacks. Oh, well. Can't get everything you wish for in one day, I guess...
Martin Who??
I watched a lot of the French Open last week and the week before. There were many exciting matches, but the big story of the tournament for me, still, is the amazing Martin Verkerk. The 6'6" Dutchman with a huge serve and an awesome backhand just came out of nowhere (where nowhere = #46 in the world and no previous wins at slam events) and blazed a trail into the finals. His match with another up-and-coming player, Guillermo Coria of Argentina, was my favorite of the entire weekend.
The most entertaining thing about Verkerk (besides his humility and great sense of humor) are his utterly bizarre facial expressions. My favorite Verkerk quote from an article I read (which pretty much sums it up):
French newspapers on Wednesday carried a sampling of
the facial elasticity Verkerk demonstrated after winning
shots in his Tuesday quarterfinal against No. 4 Carlos
Moya: the fully elongated mouth; a fist pump accented
with arched eyebrows and a crunched-up nose.
"It's ugly," said Verkerk, who faces No. 7 Guillermo Coria in
the semis. "But I'm not here to be beautiful. I mean, I'm
here to win."
Hopefully he'll do well at Wimbledon and make lots more funny faces.
What am I missing About Bruce?
Why is Bruce Almighty only 48% on Rotten Tomatoes? What am I missing? It made $86M in its opening weekend. BY FAR, the funniest moments in the movie WERE NOT shown in the preview. People in the theater were just rolling... it was almost (but not quite) There's Something About Mary level hysteria in places. The critics must be too busy smoking crack and watching Solaris (or, as I like to call it, so-lare-ASS) on DVD to get this one right. If a comedy makes me laugh, it's done its job. This one had a packed theater dying of laughter pretty much throughout the whole movie. I don't see how Liar, Liar could be a 78% and this one 48%. If anything, Bruce was funnier than Shadyac's previous film with Carrey. If you're reading this and waffling about going, go. I had more fun at this film than I did at The Matrix Reloaded.
Incidentally, I've seen some really really terrible awful movies on HBO/Starz over Memorial Day weekend. Do NOT, unless you want to experience great pain, subject yourself to the horror that is Jennifer Lopez in Enough. It gets 1 1/2 stars only because Jennifer Lopez is hot. Next we move on to Resident Evil, another movie which gets 1 1/2 stars, and only because Milla Jovovic (from The Fifth Element, a fantastic film, go see it if you haven't) is also hot. My favorite scene in this movie is when they find dried blood on the floor... and they say "this blood... it's ... it's... coagulated! But blood doesn't do that until you're dead!" OMG LOLOLOL. Finally, I saw the worst of all of them, at a mere 1/2 star, Reign of Fire, because the only thing hot in this movie were the dragons. You know it's bad when you start rooting for the firebreathing monstrosities and laughing whenever someone gets fried. Anyway, the premise for this movie had me rolling. I had thought The Core was bad, but listen to this: Apparently, hundreds of years ago, dragons wiped out the dinosaurs (no, I am not making this up) by burning them to death. Now, the dragons have come back and have Freedom-Fried humanity... only, get this: the dragons are beginning to starve, because they've killed so many humans! Hmmm, lessee, so what did they eat for the millions of years between exterminating the dinosaurs and 2020 when they awake to take on Mankind? Uhhh, never mind, please don't tell me. This is an absolutely ABYSMAL movie, but at least it has what I like to call the Antitrust Factor. You enjoy it a lot just because it sucks in such gigantic, entertaining fashion.
Antitrust, to this day, is one of the most entertaining bad movies I've ever seen. To this day, I cannot think of "Wait, I know how his mind works" or "The secret isn't in the box, it's in the band" without bursting into uproarious laughter. Tim Robbins as the evil Bill Gates... the Asian American actor who plays Teddy to doomed perfection (you know he is going to die like 5 minutes into the movie)... Ryan Phillipe as the young hotshot programmer... it is all too much. Mystery Science Theater couldn't even do anything to this movie; it already exists in such a perfect state of self-parodying splendor.
At least I didn't have to sit through Baby Geniuses again.
Because of Me....
All the Citysearch.com and Match.com spam letters now have clear instructions about how to unsubscribe right at the beginning of the emails! I guess my complaint with the BBB and angry letter to their legal department paid off. Ah, well, I know I can't defeat the Spammer Nation, but it still makes me feel good to reclaim a bit of territory from the evil empire of direct marketers. I have unsubscribed to their hated newsletters, so we'll see if it works.... with any luck, the battle has ended in my favor.
Oh, by the way, if you spam people for a living, I hope one day your testicles are chewed off by the rats from Willard. That is all.
The Whole Click Thing and Retraining
Heh, I should further add that I never knew you could select the URL text in IE by single clicking it. I must have double clicked it the first time I tried it, and I've been doing that ever since. Funny how you do something one way (which isn't even the normal way), but you just assume it is because the software is letting you do it. Now I am sitting here in IE playing around with single clicking URL texts and amusing myself. Retraining is very difficult =) Once you've done something thousands of times a certain way, it's hard to learn to do it differently. I double click by default before I even realize it... and in Mozilla, it was stranding me inside the URL bar. Actually, I realized what annoyed me wasn't so much the single vs. double click, but the fact clicking to the right of the URL text doesn't select it (in Mozilla... does in IE).
Mozilla Stuff
Well, re: the four complaints in my previous Mozilla blog entry... my brother has blogged about them, so thought I should respond.
He writes:
And finally, to answer your question, triple-click will select the entire URL bar text even if the cursor is inside the URL bar..
This is acceptable, and now I can use Mozilla. I really would not have used it had this not been available. Triple click requires a little more work, but I can handle that. I still don't really understand the rationale behind this design though. In IE, I put my mouse to the right of the URL text and I double click. Here is what is really annoying: You single click to the right of the URL in IE and it selects the text, but if you do the same thing in Mozilla, nothing, nada. So here is a case where even the supposed 'single click' functionality doesn't work. Even after realizing I could select the text with single click, I still got annoyed because I typically (just out of habit, no particular reason) in IE would select the URL text by double clicking to the right of the URL text.
All I know is: I am Joe User, and I like my IE. I run my web browser exactly the way my brother once described that novice web users do, maximized and without any bells and whistles. If I'm going to switch to Mozilla, I have to have, at a minimum, the same capabilities as whatever I do in IE. When I discover things done better, that's a nice bonus and makes me go "Cool, Mozilla goood." But the URL selection was a case where the first thing I tried (double click to right of URL text to select all) just didn't work... which led to instant annoyance. My suggestion to Mozilla folks would be to make it so at least single click to right of URL text selects it all (as it does in IE).
Re: the download manager, Dave writes:
Anyway, if you don't like the download manager, you can go to your Preferences and under Navigator/Downloads you can tell it to open individual progress dialogs (just like WinIE) instead of using the download manager. You can even set the progress dialogs to auto-close when done.
I have done this in IE, so these windows spawn but go away automatically. My problem isn't with the windows spawning; it's with the fact they don't close. So why isn't there an option to use the download manager but have it close automatically when the download completes? Also, I should point out this is the #1 Mozilla complaint among my friends; people (at least people I know) hate this extra window with a passion. I will tell you why... because in X-Windows, you cannot ignore this extra window. It spawns in a different place than the browser window, often obscuring some xterm you had open. You can't just ignore the window; you have to do something about it before you can proceed. In my novice maximized Windows Mozilla, it doesn't bug me as much. Under X, this extra window had me frothing.
As far as being able to adjust settings to do what you want, the sad truth about software is that a lot of people don't try options, and, if they do, they don't like spending a lot of time looking around for the right ones. Much software gets judged by the way it acts by default, even if, unfortunately, it can actually perform the way you want it to if you just knew how to adjust the settings. So why not make the default behavior the least intrusive?
Actually, I did try Mozilla like a year ago (or longer, I don't really remember). I got ridiculously annoyed at not being able to find how to block popup windows. Finally, after like 10 minutes of staring at the preferences, I wound up in who-knows-where (scripts and proxies or something) and found the 'allow script to open unrequested windows' or something. I forget because Mozilla has since made popup blocking much easier to find, which is a very sensible change. Again, I don't understand why blocking popups isn't the default (see previous paragraph). What you have is a browser that, by default, still produces popups, doesn't emulate certain (imo superior) behaviors of IE, and spawns an annoying download window you have to close manually. (To be fair, I think it is also the default behavior in IE not to close its download dialog windows).
I still think the mail program is wonderful and vastly superior to Outlook Express.
