Sex Drive has Seth Green as an Amish musclecar mechanic but Miss March has Hugh Hefner and The Whitest Kids U'Know.
******Spoiler******
Don't turn on the strobe light when getting a bj from an epilectic
*****End Spoiler*****
Oh Canada!!!
Anything on the SighFigh channel involving genetically modified creatures. It's always the same movie, only the ways of dying are slightly different.
Do you have a massive spliff on hand for Zardoz? Might help. Might help with the shark-dolphin hybrid thing, too, if you care at all about marine-biological plausibility.
2:I am watching the syfy movie as we speak, as background. Something with a distressed damsel, bad prince, witches, trolls, and a real ugly hero.
Keep being torn at bedtime between Baader-Meinhof and Coraline
Last night I watched Caprica a very very good episode, Spartacus 106 a hoot, my first look at Warehouse 13 meh, this indie rape trial movie produced by and starring Til Schweiger just ok, but I like TS.
Anybody else watch Pit Boss?
I watched about 25 minutes of Baader-Meinhof before falling asleep, but not because the movie was boring. It was ~3 am and I had been drinking wine.
ZARDOZ!
THE GUN IS GOOD, STANLEY, THE PENIS IS EVIL.
WATCH ZARDOZ, BRUTAL!
Warehouse 13 is missing something, like possibly any chemistry at all between the two agents or between them and the audience. Saul Rubinek is good but a little mumbling goes a long, long way.
Special Unit Two did this better, I think. I want my preposterous to be amusing.
If you're not in the mood for dumb movies, this might just be the single stupidest comment thread I have ever read. Anywhere. It's genuinely astounding.
I'm watching The New Tale of Zatoichi; is pot advised?
9: Haven't seen it. You might want to smoke up just in case.
Apo, I read some of that thread. I'm going back to experimenting with mixtures of our left-over insomnia and pain Rxs. Some of the dreams are fantastic.
9: Are you watching it on/at Hulu? I just now read that Criterion is offering the Zatoichi films on its new channel. Awesome.
I watched Deadgirl on netflix the other day. It's almost certainly the worst movie I've seen in ten years.
13: yes.
To be specific, they're offering the first six.
15: Oh, right. Still. The only one after the first few that I'm particularly interested in is the Takeshi Kitano remake, but maybe I'll get hooked.
14:Well, you have Deadgirl and then you have
The Dead Girl by the maker of Blue Car, if you remember that one.
Review by Maryann Johansson Brilliant acting by some of our finest.
Probably a feminist masterpiece, but the kind of real horror that zombie fans are trying to avoid. This one will hurt.
8: I confirm that's really fucking stupid, as comment threads go. Wow.
8: At least no one complained that they couldn't see how to log on to Facebook.
I was trying to guide a student through the process of logging into the college portal the other day. Every time I said, "Go to [college].edu" he'd type that into the search box. I'd stop him. "No, don't search for the website. Go there. In the address bar. At the top of the screen. No, the top of the screen. See where your cursor is? Move it higher. No, up from there. Up even from there. Almost there. See that? At the tippy-top of the whole screen? Click on that, and type in the address." Etc.
I'd never seen this in real life, this "I search for everything" behavior. Does it start in the home?
8: The first two comments are pretty smart. I stopped there.
- May the moronic FairTax bill die with his departure!
- Tom Kirby from Walton County is already announced as a candidate.
Stanley, where are your movie reviews?
I'd never seen this in real life, this "I search for everything" behavior. Does it start in the home?
There was a fairly humorous recounting recently in a Making Light thread, I think, from a web-users researcher who mentioned this 'search for everything' behavior, with the final gobsmacker being the not-insignificant number of people who type "www.google.com" into the google search bar in their browser, get the google search results, one of which is for, um, google, then click on that in order to go to google and do the original search they'd wanted to perform.
Oh my.
The "I search for everything" habit probably only screws you up directly in rare cases, like the Facebook incident, but it indicates a deeper problem: not being aware of the address bar and what it is for. I bet these people fall for phishing scams too, because they don't look for suspicious urls.
Further to 20 and 23: I find myself fascinated by the question just what people who do this sort of thing are missing.
I've watched people who are clearly having trouble finding things on the screen, any screen, more or less any site, as though they can't see them: this is particularly graphic with those who use the mouse to point toward whatever they're looking at, wherever their eyes are moving. The mouse is zigzagging spastically all over the place, this corner, that corner, hover and wobble somewhere in the middle, slow down and move slowly line by line, scroll down then back up, give up and race over to the other corner, hit "Back" because apparently the sought-after thing isn't here. And so on. There might be a lot of squinting and/or expressions of frustration or impatience going on as well.
I used to think it was a sign of someone with a different sort of intelligence, e.g. musical intelligence, artistic intelligence ... rather than verbal/visual. Something like that {waves hand wavily}.
Now, though, I think it's two things: just a mundane unfamiliarity with the typical layouts of screens: menu across the top, search bar invariably at the top, etc. And perhaps more interestingly, an assumption that the computer/internet is as an intelligent being unto itself which can guess your needs and will do things for you.
So you get people typing entire questions into a search engine: "Who is the author of Harry Potter?" or "Is Obama the Antichrist?"
re: 25
It might be a familiarity thing, but some people do seem to struggle with that kind of visual processing. I watch people at work looking at screens [people who program for a living and are certainly familiar with standard UI design] and get increasingly frustrated at how f'cking long it takes them to find things. I want to grab the mouse. They are clearly doing the same sort of f'cked up visual processing you describe the mouse-movers as doing.
They tested me a while back when they were doing user interface testing for a new online database.
"OK, now find blahblahblah"
[10 seconds pass]
"Done"
"Wow, no-one else has done that in less than five minutes"
"wtf, were they even looking?"
I type full English questions into Google fairly often and I swear to you I am not a moron. I do it because it is easier for me to simply type my question in English, rather than mentally remove the words that aren't needed for the search, and then type the question.
I used to think it was a sign of someone with a different sort of intelligence, e.g. musical intelligence, artistic intelligence ... rather than verbal/visual.
Although there are many kinds of intelligence, there are an alarming number of people in positions of power and responsibility who possess none of them.
27: Robert, I have told you one million times; Obama is not the anti-Christ.
26: Yes, this really surprises me. I've worked with students and profs alike who simply cannot follow directions like, "See where it says 'Log In'? Click that." It's especially depressing when they come in saying "I can't seem to log into my account" and my directions are basically "Click 'Log In.' Now log in." Sometimes this does the trick. Sometimes, sadly, it does not.
"wtf, were they even looking?"
Yeah. Wanting to grab the mouse: Stop it, stop that! You are confusing yourself, really!
My roommate was web-challenged in that way for quite a while (hence my theory about forms of intelligence, or visual processing, as he's a sculptor), but during a period of time when he was sharing my computer, I had to insist on giving a little instruction, which consisted chiefly of: slow down.
Just slow down. Look at the words on the screen. It's really not a blur (though the site may be too 'busy').
I grappled with user interface design for a short while, maybe a year, and it really was a bear, and I concluded: I'm not going to be designing a database system for the random user without an entire team to aid in understanding users' assumptions. I still do find it really fascinating, though.
I have a cow-orker who does that mouse stuff. The most annoying thing is that a few times a year she accidentally clicks on a folder and drags it into another folder without noticing. Then she comes to me saying that the computer doesn't like her. She just doesn't notice what she is doing.
She also has a bad habit of rebooting (with the power switch) her computer whenever anything seems wrong. Since most of her problems are from transient network problems, to her this seems to work.
I once spent about thirty minutes looking for how to change the address that my campus email address forwards too. I checked every menu, every sub-menu, everything that said "options" or "preferences" or "profile". Then I went back to the main homepage and decided to finally call the tech support people in frustration. As soon as I got someone on the phone I noticed that on the main homepage there was a box at the bottom left that said "TO FORWARD YOUR EMAILS OR CHANGE FORWARDING ADDRESS".
It's good that that was optimized for people who follow the "Stare blankly at the homepage, moving the mouse in random directions while following it with the eyes" strategy, rather than my favored "Ignore the 80% of the top-level homepage that isn't a menu or dropdown menu, because it is invariably either ads or boilerplate announcements for things that have already happened" strategy. But I think that finding it through a dropdown menu should have been at least a possibility.
it is invariably either ads or boilerplate OR announcements for things that have already happened
re: 30
Yeah. Sometimes it is just unfamiliarity, but sometimes it seems people just don't take information in at all. It's a failure to engage the cognitive functions at all when performing some task or other. Precisley the false expectation that the computer will intuit what you want that parsimon mentions. Some people seem to have the right combination of a sort of hyper-fidgety focus/gaze (but with genuine concentration) combined with the ability to shift between overview and detail mode that makes rapid use of UIs easy, and some just don't. Or they aren't working hard enough at it to wear the right grooves in, iyswim.
I wonder if it's related to the ability to skim a text really quickly and pick out information? People who do it well do it preternaturally fast, and other (seemingly bright) people are barely above the 'sound out every word' level.
Precisely the false expectation that the computer will intuit what you want that parsimon mentions.
Which is why google is such a tempting option, of course, because that is specifically what they attempt to make their search engine do.
35: I think that the ability to skim text for information would be separate from the ability to scan a web page for links and menus. At the very least you can be familiar with one and not the other. But more importantly, the text has a linear, linguistic structure and the web page has a two dimensional organization with lots of different kinds of structures.
I wonder if it's related to the ability to skim a text really quickly and pick out information?
Good lord is this not a particularly teachable skill. One of my SAT students asked me how I go about reading a text, and I really wish now that I hadn't tried to show him.
Presumably the sequel to Giant Shark vs MegaOctopus will feature a battle between their offspring.
38: Srsly. Sadly, I think the key is to start reading very very young, read all the time until you are an adult, and read compulsively, everything you get your hands on, all the time. Read cereal boxes. Read the ads on the subway. I don't think it's even about the quality of the read material so much as it's about not just seeing things around you, but reading them, figuring out how words are displayed and organized in various settings.
33: But I think that finding it through a dropdown menu should have been at least a possibility.
Yes. Bad design. Redundancy, redundancy. Everything should be available in more than one way.
re: 38
Yeah, although I wonder if the web-page scanning thing is equally ineffable. You can learn to do it with practice but it's hard to explain in words.
"Look, I just look at the thing"
"But there's shitloads of information there"
"Yes, but I just immediately see the information I want"
"But how?"
"It's just obvious"
re: 37
It may have a fairly linear structure, but I don't think the scanning process is necessarily particularly linear, is it? At least it's not always for me.
The only actually useful thing I managed to come up with was to look at independent clauses, rather than dependent ones. Good writers will put the key info in the independent clauses, and, by and large, you can ignore the bad writers.
42: I should confess that I'm actually a really horrible scanner, perhaps precisely because I insist on reading texts linearly.
Yes, I sometimes put in full sentence queries in Google, and I read slowly. Also, I multi-task even though I know I am no good at it.
This thread is making me feel stupid. How come I can't log into facebook?
40: read compulsively, everything you get your hands on, all the time. Read cereal boxes. Read the ads on the subway. I don't think it's even about the quality of the read material so much as it's about not just seeing things around you, but reading them, figuring out how words are displayed and organized in various settings.
This is so true. Damn! Not teachable? But I have seen people slowly, very slowly, come into more of a verbal/visual frame of mind. There's a lot of resistance. And frankly, why wouldn't there be? Do you really want to be obsessively rereading the label on the shampoo bottle while you're on the can?
by and large, you can ignore the bad writers.
Hopefully your student did not intend to go into science.
One big difference between my students now and my students at the previous school is that my former students really seemed to make no distinction between passing their eyes over lines of text and reading. I absolutely believe them when they say they sat down and read the whole thing, in that their eyes made direct contact with every word. But to get them from there to basic comprehension of explicit meaning, and from there to thinking about what the text suggests implicitly, and from there to interpretation and analysis, was, for some of them, a grueling work of intellectual development. And what do they get out of it at the end? They don't get to say they know all about photosynthesis or accounting; they get to say that, well, they thought they had learned how to read but somehow actually hadn't until now.
Last Chance Community College has a large number of teachers specializing in remedial reading and writing. It would be interesting to know what techniques they use.
I recently requested data from Institutional Effectiveness and Planning which should tell me something about the effectiveness of the remedial courses on preparing people for philosophy courses.
One good teachable skill is to try reading everything aloud. It's no good for the SAT I guess, but I've had students who seemed completely incapable of reading for comprehension and then figured out how to do it if they read aloud. I've gotten several 3am emails from students in ALLCAPS about how they FINALLY GET POETRY NOW!!!!
This is just conjecture, but it's possible that you have the causality reversed.
That was my first thought too.
51, etc.: With any skill you can get positive and negative feedback cycles.
Some people are good at things because they do them a lot and they do them a lot because they are good at them. Other people are bad at things because they don't do them a lot and they don't do them a lot because they are bad at them.
49.2: Oh wow, that would be interesting. If you're able to share those results, it'd be interesting to hear what if any conclusions you draw.
I have one very bright student who has decided that muttering aloud would be the most helpful technique for the SAT. She's well socialized, however, so I figure she'll find the mute button.
|| ARG. Apparently my coworkers also suck at math. A woman I work with wanted me to make a few things for a little benefit party she's doing. Starts off I'll get $150 for making a few hors d'oeuvres, a cake, etc. for 15-20 people. Fine. She starts pestering me about wanting a final menu. So I ask if she has a date, a time, a clear budget, a number of guests. Now it's 40 people expected. The budget has not changed. No actually, when you cater things, the number of guests doesn't get to double at the same price. And now she's going to be pissed off at me forever for being so selfish. It's a benefit! For the community! ARRRRG. |>
Hey, WhiteBear, if there's any room to hold out for fair payment, do so. If you have to march her through the calculation of your time spent to provide for 40 guests -- and are materials included in the proposed $150? -- go ahead and do so.
re: 55
I know people where that 'mistake' with the maths would be semi-deliberate.
Anyway, isn't it straightforward enough to just ask for double the money?
"Oh, th $150 I quoted was based on a figure of roughly $10 per person, if it's 40 I'll need at least 300".
No fair payment, no nibbles.
In fact, I'd bet that 57.1 is by far the more likely explanation than 'sucking at math'.
Or just make 15 people's worth of food and call it done.
If there's a McD's nearby, you could get 40 McDoubles, 40 small fries, and 80 Apple Pies for $120. With the rest, buy Kirkland Cola, ice and plastic cups.
That's pretty stingy, Moby Hick. She could get 600 li'l debbie snacks and people could eat their fill.
McDoubles aren't that stingy. It's basically a double cheeseburger that got shorted a slice of cheese.
There's no tootsie toll on our turnpike.
Extra time! I hate that golden goal thing, very tense and no room for error.
Yes, I sometimes put in full sentence queries in Google,
I do this too. Depending on what I'm searching for, I actually think that I get better results than I get if I just type related words in. I mean, if the search is "How cute is Jon Hamm? Show me some pictures!" then, of course you type Jon Hamm and choose image search. But when I'm looking for statistics or the answer to a specific question but I'm not sure exactly what the right combination of terms is going to be, I find it more helpful to type in, "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"
I get to just about everything via Google--superior in several ways. Typing into the address bar is so 1990s.
My address bar sometimes searches google.
I have googled google on my ipod touch, because I like the bigger bar on the actual webpage, and that's more convenient than getting the address bar open.
70: Since typing things directly into the Firefox address bar leads to mysterious and capricious results (Sometimes Google search results, sometimes Wikipedia search results, sometimes a Wikipedia page, sometimes the first Google hit), it may lead people to have an illogical view of the other parts of the internet as well.
Wasn't this linked here recently, or was that somewhere else?
I've gotten used to Google Chrome over the past half-year, since I can do all the site-searches from the address bar. I used to stick to keywords in Google searches, but when I have a common-seeming question whose syntax might contribute to the meaning (like "do I need to file a California income tax return"), I now sometimes type out full sentences.
On the earlier off-topic topic of this thread, I usually find what I'm looking for pretty quickly on the screen/webpage, but I'm much slower when someone is looking over my shoulder telling me what I should be finding or looking for.
Crosby!!!
What a game! So tense, wow.
I actually use ctrl-f quite a bit to look for things like "store locator" if they're not in the obvious places and I have a good idea of what they'll be called. This is less helpful when the stuff I'm looking for is hidden from ctrl-f through the use of flash or other fancy designs.
Since this is apparently the web thread, what's up with the Facebook notifications I'm getting today that say "[Someone] has commented on your status", when no such comment appears on my profile, and the word "status" is a link that, when clicked, directs me to a page that asks me if I want to allow "Your daily Status" access to my profile? I suspect this is some application disguising itself as a normal Facebook status notification in some attempt to gather data.
If the app-ification of Facebook continues much further maybe I'll finally delete my account, as I've been threatening for years.
I suspect this is some application disguising itself as a normal Facebook status notification in some attempt to gather data.
Sounds like it, yeah.
Also -- and I have no compunctions about saying this because these people are Facebook friends but not by any stretch of the imagination 'friends' -- the [Someone]s showing up in those notifications are precisely the sort of people I would expect to be stupid enough to fall for phishing schemes.
My address bar sometimes searches google.
Huh. If you've typed in www.whatever.com and there's no whatever.com in existence, it doesn't just tell you 'server not found, pay attention and try more better or harder'? It tries to search? IE does that reverting to search mode (I think) -- but just if you leave off the "www", if I recall.
Sometimes I just type search terms directly into the address bar. If I'm pretty sure the terms will lead me to the page I want, it's faster than getting search results first, then clicking on the top result. (Firefox appears to treat it like an "I'm feeling lucky" search from the google homepage.)
In the bad old days of DOS and mostly empty screens, people missed things too.
Me: "What does it say on the screen?" Them: "Nothing." Me: "Nothing at all?" Them: "I don't see anything." Me: "Not even a C and some other symbols in the upper left corner?" Them: "Oh! Yes, I see those..."
It has something to do with stress and expectations. Crazy-making.
82: Oh. Well, you're treating the address bar like a search bar, so yeah, if it's designed to assume you might do that, it will be that for you. You are contributing to the problem, you!
A question, which is similar to but not the same as other questions discussed here before: it's likely that a couple of months from now I'll find myself in or around Santa Fe with one day to kill (and a rental car). I've previously walked all over Santa Fe, seen the art galleries, been to the O'Keefe museum, and done some hiking at Bandelier. I could do more of that, but if I wanted to go somewhere I haven't been to before, where should I go? teo, is Chaco a reasonable day trip, or would it require too much driving to make it worth going to without an overnight stay?
Essear, have you heard the new New Pornographers release?
Roswell isn't far. It's a long shot, but if you get abducted by aliens and they don't do the mind-wipe correctly, you could learn enough to get that Nobel in Physics.
That game had nothing but upside for USians. If we won, we would have had the joy of being able to make fun of Canada for losing at its own national sport. Since we lost, no one cares, because no one cares about hockey (OK, Minnesota, Michigan, and maybe upstate NY/New England).
Personally, I'm kind of happy to have avoided giving Canadians one more thing to be self-righteously resentful of the United States about.
87: No! Listening to that mp3 now. It's not immediately grabbing me the way my first listen of "My Rights Versus Yours" did, but I'll give it time. Has the rest of the album leaked onto the net? (I will, of course, buy the CD the day it comes out....)
I wish they would announce US tour dates. I need to make sure I don't miss out on my fix. It's been nearly a year and a half now.
Pete Maxwell's place out in Ft. Sumner.
A Canadian friend residing in B.C. reports that $6 billion were outlaid for the Vancouver Olympics, while BC's child poverty rate is the worst in Canada, with cuts to health care, schools and the arts concomitant. Oh, shit.
I haven't had the heart or guts to ask whether there's any justification in terms of provincial income in excess of $6 billion that's then slated to go to public services.
92: Plus lots of homeless people got the 'Greyhound cure' in the last few months.
Why would they expect the Olympics to generate significant provincial income?
I just saw a guy self-medicating with the "Greyhound cure." Not that his sign used those exact words.
Why would anybody ever expect the olympics (especially the winter olympics) to be anything other than a giant financial disaster for the host city?
I am fairly sure that the LA 1984 Summer Games made a tidy profit, although I'm too lazy to look up a link right now. IIRC the key was not building a lot of new stadiums (there were enough in the area already), combined with being smart about selling the TV and sponsorship rights.
94, 96: I don't know; just that one would expect that in order to quell provincial unrest, politicians might argue that a boatload of money would be coming in to the province, so.
But it looks as though nobody bothered to even argue that.
How hard is it to get Canadians to willing suspend critical thinking for a killer hockey game? We have three publicly funded stadia for private, for-profit teams.
"A study by PriceWaterhouse Coopers of summer Olympic games held from 1984 to 2000 showed varying degrees of measurable economic success. All the hosting cities had a positive economic benefit from hosting the Olympics, but the range as a percent of GDP was considerable.
Barcelona had an estimated economic benefit of 0.03% of regional GDP, while Sydney had an estimated economic benefit of 2.78% of regional GDP. (Atlanta, 2.41% of regional GDP, Seoul, 1.4% of national GDP, and Los Angeles, 0.47% of regional GDP). Similar comparisons for the winter Olympics are hard to come by, but it's a smaller event overall with considerably fewer sports, so it may be assumed that its impact would be smaller as well."
You have to look at what they spent the money on -- some infrastructure stuff (mass transit, highway upgrades) you subtract out. There's a stimulus effect of construction that you can't discount. You get a boatload of people spending a bunch of money, from outside the province. It's not the case that every dollar spent on a stadium is a dollar not spent on a poor kid -- not in BC, not anywhere on earth. The politics is way more complicated than that. And anyway, it's Canadian dollars.
I don't know what the final net is. Maybe it's positive, maybe it's negative.
My brother lived in a place in Atlanta that was built for the Olympics. It was pretty much standard nice apartment construction and seemed to hold-up well over the years.
100 is very interesting. I don't quite know why it should be counterintuitive, but it is.
http://www.dcnonl.com/article/id32903
I don't understand 98.2. WADR Parse, are you really up to making a judgment about a decade of debate in BC?
http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/02/05/OlympicsWellWorthIt/
100 is interesting, although I generally wouldn't trust a PwC study as far as I could throw it.
Thanks to thumb drives and .pdf files, you can throw one further than you could in the old days.
are you really up to making a judgment about a decade of debate in BC?
No - I haven't looked at this at all, just reporting my friend's upset, echoed by numerous of his BC Facebook friends. Give me a few minutes to look at those links.
"WADR"?
With all due respect.
I don't know the answer. No one knows the ultimate answer. But it's basically tea baggery to complain about gross infrastructure expenditures. The question is the net.
And there is simply no chance at all that the whole thing wasn't discussed ad nauseum, with every single argument made multiple times by multiple parties. You have Canadian friends, right?
Is it O.K. to bitch in general about the amount of money that gets spent on sports? Especially on infrastructure to get people to sports. Especially in cities that can't plow the streets.
Stupid $600 million subway tunnel to the Steelers and Pirates.
It seems like local opposition to having the Olympics come to this or that city has been growing--becoming more organized and visible--over the last decade.
In any case, you can't deny that dollars spent on road and bridge infrastructure have more of a stimulus multiplier than dollars spent on stadium and Olympic village infrastructure.
China's stadium is looking for more uses and users.
In any case, you can't deny that dollars spent on road and bridge infrastructure have more of a stimulus multiplier than dollars spent on stadium and Olympic village infrastructure.
A large portion of olympic expenditures are likely on the former. In many cases, they are expenditures that might not happen without the impetus of the olympics.
And, in fact, it's more likely that olympic infrastructure improvements will include public transportation, so you have to weigh how much of a good that is (especially if it's a city that's historically ill-served by transit.
108: I have Canadian friends, and they're worried, and they're mostly hippies, cynical.
From the first link in 103:
One factor almost never taken into account, said Matheson, is how much money being spent by or during an Olympics actually stays in the local economy.
That would be the concern, yes.
From the second link, in 104:
"We're going to encourage new investment to come here. Green conservation. Renewable energy. Green building approaches. Green transportation. The city's got a strategy to invite 100 potential investors in these industries to come see Vancouver during the Olympics."
and:
"A lot of cost is being picked up by the federal government and international business community. The cost to the city is minuscule. The cost to the province is basically in security and the extra costs they had to put in the trade and conference centre."
Okay, that sounds pretty good. Though there's also:
"the bottom line is the city has an expanded trade and convention and cruise ship facility and a bunch of new sporting facilities."
That is simply marvelous! Let's hope they translate to something useful.
That Tyee interview with Harcourt is interesting. Thanks, CC.
I object to this in 108, though:
But it's basically tea baggery to complain about gross infrastructure expenditures.
Really, please, use the tea baggery epithet carefully.
Carp strikes me as somebody who speaks very carefully.
Stanley, where are your movie reviews?
I ended up turning off the crazy dolphin movie and never made it to Zardoz. Maybe tonight!
117: British Columbia is the largest producer of citrus fruit in the Western Hemisphere. (For the contrast)
Stargate's on the weirdo free movie channel now. I've never actually watched it till now.
121: it's kind of terrible. I never did figure out why it had such a continuing life.
The new skytrain line - basically heavy rail rapid transit - down to the airport and Richmond was probably going to be built anyway, but it seems the Olympics helped get it going. It opened last August. Another planned new line, to the east, has been postponed for lack of funds, but I don't think it has reached even the construction stage yet.
A lot of the criticism I've seen of VANOC - the organizing committee - has been about it being closed and not really accountable. There was some story about its members awarding themselves millions in bonuses before the Olympics even happened. But I haven't really been paying attention and don't plan to.
Now that I've seen the movie, I can no longer see the word Zardoz in print without saying it (at least in my head, though often out loud) several times over, like the one in the trailer. Which is a little odd, given that I had seen the trailer many times before I saw the actual movie.
Such is the power of Zardoz. (ZARDOZ. ZARDOZ.)
Speaking of bad science fiction, I've never seen "Logan's Run" all the way through. Or any of the Star Trek movies after the one with the whales.
I've never seen "Logan's Run" all the way through
If health care reform passes, you won't have to see it - you'll be living it.
Re: 116, 117: Nope, "tea baggery" is glib. The Tea Partiers are against government investment and outlays, period,* whether for infrastructure investment OR for social programs. The BC complainers about expenditures for the Vancouver Olympics are not against the welfare state, not against infrastructure investment, just not sure whether this particular hoohaw is/was a very good idea.
* except for defense spending
85: Santa Fe to Chaco is about a three and a half hour drive (one way). It's possible to do it as a day trip, and people do, but it takes literally all day. For a closer alternative, I recommend Pecos.
128: I think I'm past my sell-by date in "Logan's Run."
Logan's Run is great! Both the movie and the book! The original book being rather different from the movie, 'course, but still, the movie: Farrah Fawcett, what's-his-name blond guy in close-fitting outfit. Good stuff.
So were some of the main actors.
Pretend the close italics tag in 132 worked.
I'm sure Charley can defend himself, but I took the comparison to be based on the fact that teabaggers -- rather than being opposed to "all government spending" -- are basically incoherent and not-very-well informed, complaining about the activities of the government without a clear idea what it is they're complaining about.
I can second the recommendation for Pecos, but really, after teo's given it the go-ahead I don't think it's necessary.
Oh sure, give the teabaggers all the credit. What are we, government regulated chopped liver?
I guess there's a limit to the length of the name field.
Actually, I rather like tea.
I discovered Canada while looking for tea.
I usually find what I'm looking for pretty quickly on the screen/webpage, but I'm much slower when someone is looking over my shoulder telling me what I should be finding or looking for.
Very true (though I see that the thread has moved on).
141 is over-stated, but I like trying to link themes the way I once liked trying continents.
Logan's Run is one of those movies where I can't decide if I like it as camp or I just think it is a plain good movie. The original Planet of the Apes is another in that category.
The 70s produced a lot of movies like that, because big money wasn't afraid to experiment back then.
135: I think it takes more than being not-very-well-informed and complaining about the government to be called a tea bagger. The latter really do have specific anti-government ideas (entirely anti-government, except, again, for defense). And I don't think the BC complainers are incoherent.
So I say. For lo: by that definition, the majority of the country -- whether the US or Canada -- are teabaggers, which is not the case.
I really don't think it's a good idea to generalize the Tea Party phenomenon to that extent. I don't want to see it become a generic epithet. That is all.
132:Farrah Fawcett my flat bleeding ass, Jenny Agutter was and is the best reason to watch that movie. Also Equus, American Werewolf in London and Nicolas Roeg's early masterpiece, Walkabout.
Cinema!
Last night:Sunshine Cleaning has gotten some mediocre reviews as a mere trifle, but such must come from sexist action fans. A great and subtle character-driven movie has at least 4 things going for it:
1) Performances:Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, and Amy Adams.
2) Backstory and history is allowed to be revealed in action and behavior rather than exposition. Mere hints are given to motivation, and the fun is understanding at the end why characters did what they did.
3) Class. It is a story about lower-middleclass striving to become middleclass (at age 30), and about the process of grabbing credentials, skills, tools, connections. $25k as a maid to $50k is dreams come true here.
4) Location:Albuquerque.
Humor:"I was pretty enough to get looked at, but not enough to get dates or married. And I was good at cheering, but that isn't a marketable skill."
This closing ceremony has gotten a bit scary.
130, 136: Thanks! I'll keep Pecos in mind.
147: As long as they send Crosby back, it probably doesn't matter.
147: Doubling down on the crazy!
Location:Albuquerque.
Interesting. I see that it was filmed there; does it take place there too?
Too bad the inflatable beavers aren't jewel-encrusted.
So should I have been watching the closing ceremony? Oh well.
Still time! Michael Buble crooning to ... well a whole lot of stuff.
Logan's Run is one of those movies where I can't decide if I like it as camp or I just think it is a plain good movie.
I was wondering this about Tron the other day. I speculated that one of the reasons that movie so tempts people to ridicule it is: the outfits! Good god, the guys are wearing, like, skin-tight outfits! So totally gay, right? Can't take this movie seriously.
This is speculation. Maybe it's just a sucky movie.
148: My alternate trip would be Los Alamos (w/a short stop at the museum) then continue up into Valles Caldera. Then either long way home via Jemez Springs or if you are adventuresome down the St. Peters Dome Rd to Cochiti Lake.
Parsley: Tron has been big in our house recently. I was listening to some Walter/Wendy Carlos one night and decided I had to order a copy of Tron, if only for the music. I then introduced it to the children, who have been watching it over and over and over, the way that only children can.
At one point, Molly said to me, "Am I missing something? This isn't really a good movie, is it?"
I said, "Well, I can't defend it in terms of plot or character, but the music and visual design is stunning."
Molly: "Ok, as long as I wasn't missing anything important."
I was tempted to also defend Tron in terms of its significance in the history of sci-fi, but if you care about such things, you already care about Tron.
I would be surprised if skimming a text for information is really unteachable. There are speed reading courses, after all, and people apparently take them and learn to read speedily. What's more likely the cause of Jackmo's experience is the fact that being able to do something and being able to teach someone to do it aren't at all the same and I wouldn't be surprised if they're to some extent independent (probably you have to have some ability to do something to be able to teach it, but you probably don't have to be able to perform at the level you teach your students to perform, to be able to teach them that). This is in part because you can be able to do something without having a very clear (or, if clear, accurate) idea of what lower-level things you're doing such that you do it.
159: Now it isn't all dudes in the skin-tight costumes.
151:Yes, but not integral to much in the movie.
This Indie, which ain't bad, uses the NM locations and scenery as an important part of mise en scene and atmosphere. A winter movie.
I figure there is Santa Fe money and support for a NM indie scene.
The DVD commentary to the 20th anniversary edition of Tron is fascinating; the sting of its early failures are still very much with the creators, and it doesn't seem to have occured to them that the reason they were asked to do a commentary is that their movie is now a much-loved classic.
Behind-the-scenes features on Tron are also very much worthwhile, because that had to be the single most labor-intensive method ever devised for making a movie. One of the things that makes it so great, visually, is that the use of hand-lit backgrounds and characters meant that they couldn't use moving cameras, which accomplished two things: it makes the look very much reminiscent of a hand-colored silent film, and it allowed them to shoot in Cinemascope relatively cheaply, which is part of what makes it so epic-seeming, despite the fact that you're basically looking at animated photocopies.
Who makes fun of Tron, anyhow? The plot basically marks it as a Disney movie, but other than that I think it holds up pretty well, and was of course hugely important in the childhood of pretty much every computer nerd over the age of 30.
The story of the computer effects in Tron is also fascinating, predictably, not least for the fact that they were rendered on the fastest PDP-11 ever made, which, if you know what that means, causes you to say "what?!?"
Recent Movies filmed around Albuquerque.
Wow. More than indie.
Whoops, I take it back: it was a PDP-10.
I know something of what that means, but am apparently not up enough on the intricacies of PDPs to say "what?!?".
167: raytracing at cinemascope resolution on a machine that originally shipped with core memory? I forget where I read the narrative, but the tricks they had to do to get the performance and memory they needed to do the job were pretty necromantic.
I remember reading about an earlier effort to produce a Tron sequel. There was debate over whether they should attempt to recreate to process used to make the visuals in the original, which was nixed because it was too labor intensive. It looks like this current sequel doesn't try either. Its really too bad. There's something about the way the computer generated color interacts with the black and white film--including all the faces--which entrances me.
Although I forget how much of it was actually raytraced. Anyhow, it was a freakin' PDP! It was late 60s technology! IS YOUR MIND BLOWN, NOSFLOW?
159: A new Tron!!! I'm rather pleased to know this. I do hope it's not awful.
Who makes fun of Tron, anyhow?
People who make fun of computer nerds over 30? It just seems childish to people, I think. They don't get the zoom-zoom. Maybe I should watch it again. Actually, why don't they ever show it on tv?
My mind is blown. DEC donated a PDP-8 to my first HS (Marlboro) and a PDP-11 to my second (L-S). We got taught to program the 8 using assembler and switches. We also used a TTY and paper tape to do BASIC. When I moved, the new 11 was a step up. Still…
Some material on the production of TRON and the different companies that were used.
The film industry has been booming in NM in the past few years. Richardson made it a big priority and got a bunch of tax incentives in place that have been very successful in encouraging both indie and Hollywood production.
157 148: My alternate trip would be Los Alamos (w/a short stop at the museum) then continue up into Valles Caldera. Then either long way home via Jemez Springs or if you are adventuresome down the St. Peters Dome Rd to Cochiti Lake.
These also sound like good ideas. Which museum in Los Alamos? There's apparently a museum at LANL and an independent one in town...
The one I've been to was the one at LANL--not real big or anything--but I liked it (no idea on the other one). Also there is a nice overlook of the Rio Grande in nearby White Rock if you don't want to go up to Valles Caldera.
I had no idea that the production values for Tron were so significant -- thanks, all.
hand-colored silent film
hand-coloured
stencil-coloured
This is the kind of thing I mean.
Stencil coloring I don't know much about.
I just wanted to link to that film collection. Some of those coloring efforts are really impressive.
Oh wow, I didn't even get that you could watch them. Hooray, internet!
I've actually never been to Los Alamos, but I have been to the Jemez many times, and Stormcrow's suggestions sound good to me. If you take his "adventurous" route back, Tent Rocks is worth a stop.
Now that we've got east and west covered, here are some other options:
North: Chimayo and/or Taos.
South: Turquoise Trail, perhaps with some stuff in Albuquerque added on. There are some pretty decent museums in Old Town. The natural history museum is great. I haven't been to the Atomic Museum, but I've heard good things about it.
Amusingly, the process of creating Tron was probably more labor intensive than the films fake accent linked, because they were compositing like 20 different hand-colored shots in every frame. They basically shot the entire film in B&W, printed it out, touched up each frame up by hand, backlit each layer, rephotographed it, then composited and rephotographed the full scenes, stacked like cel animation, and then added the CGI. What the fuck Disney was thinking, I'll never know.
176: Ah, good. I can probably fit in a trip to the LANL museum on the other, more time-constrained day of my trip.
183: Too many options! But thanks, I'll consider them. (I've been to Old Town Albuquerque before, but it was ages ago and I don't remember it very well.)
Dammit, declining wedding invitations makes me feel so guilty.
183: To link subthreads, the opening shot of David Bowie coming down the slag heap in The Man Who Fell to Earth was shot near Madrid on the Turquoise Trail (other NM locales in other parts of the film). It was quite recognizable when I first drove by it in the early 80s, less so some 20 years later.
If you don't want to marry me, essear, that's fine. But tell me to my face, ok?
You could always accept and then not go.
Speaking as somebody who was recently married, there's definitely a chance it'll be greeted with relief.
Although I'm not sure if that's better.
I waited too late to mail the "_X_ decline with regret" card, so I'm declining by email, which makes me feel like I have to write a little note instead of just checking a box. Can I say "unfortunately I won't be able to attend" if I'm able to, just, you know, unwilling due to expense and already-full travel schedule and the fact that I haven't seen this person in five years?
I agonize too much about these things. The last time I commented here about not going to a wedding, the people didn't seem miffed and in fact seemed happy with my guilt-driven largesse in gift-giving. Although in this case I don't know where the gift registry is, and adding "P.S. where is your gift registry" to an email declining an invitation seems rude.
I should just send a link to these comments.
Seriously, if it's late in the process and they have their numbers locked in, they might be just as happy to know for sure that you won't be coming. Also, they might have invited you to be nice, and have no expectation that you'l come.
Seriously, nosflow didn't expect you to marry him, anyway. Just let him know that you won't be there.
Luckily, Google knows where the gift registry is, so I don't have to awkwardly try to figure out how or who to ask.
If you don't want to marry me, essear, that's fine. But tell me to my face, ok?
That would require a rather long trip, dude. You have to think these things through.
Seriously though writing formal shit makes me so neurotic. "I wish you the best on this happy occasion." "Regards"? Or "Sincerely"? Aaah stilted prose. Fucking etiquette.
Sorry to have stepped out a bit. Dinner with the guests and all. Tea baggers complain about the stumulus, not because they don't believe in spending money -- they were totally down with starting wars a few years back to remake other societies -- but because it was that socialist doing it. About the stimulus, though, they complain about the gross amount spent, without any consideration what's been bought with that money.
Your hippie friends (especially islanders) aren't going to get much in the way of benefit from the Olympics, most likely. There's nothing wrong (imo) with them grousing to their hearts content. The idea, though, that in 10 years of arguing about this no one pitched the economic benefits of the Olympics in general, or the infrastructure investments in particular, (see 98.2) is just a bit too far. Two billion of the six billion was a rail line downtown from the airport.
Here's another story: http://www.fastcompany.com/1548754/winter-olympics-to-transform-vancouver-for-good
Many of the comments to that interview -- second link -- are blistering. Such is Canadian political debate.
OT: If you were asked to make a model of a process using UML, but were given pretty much no instruction in UML, or any guidance as to which of the diagrams to use, where would you start?
198: I've been running into that a lot while job hunting.
"Yours in Satan,"
If you're in the vicinity of Los Alamos, you should get a bottle of this wine. The winemaker used to work at the lab; his wine is mediocre, but the label is a great souvenir, and the view from his place above the Rio Grande is spectacular.
Do you even have to be formal, given that it's email?
203: Maybe not, but the invitation was so formal that it seemed appropriate. And it was to the designated RSVP email address, not to the person's usual email address. Oh well. I clicked the "send" button, I don't have to care anymore.
199: The idea, though, that in 10 years of arguing about this no one pitched the economic benefits of the Olympics in general, or the infrastructure investments in particular, (see 98.2) is just a bit too far.
I already acknowledged this, babe. I hadn't heard report of anyone having made such an argument, since it's not my beef in the first place, so why would I have; and then I was suddenly hearing from people who are upset and don't believe any of the rhetoric, so it's no surprise that I wouldn't have heard (from them) the counter-argument. I introduced this by saying that I hadn't had the heart to ask them what the counter-argument was.
What you've linked to is well-taken, and thanks again.
Er, sorry for the "babe" if that was inappropriate. It seemed natural at the time. Assume an accompanying smile.
Assume an accompanying smile.
What do you think CMU's scientists invented emoticons for, parsimon?
@>B-O
202: There's also a fairly well-regarded winery in that same general area. I've had some of their wines and they seemed good to me, but I'm not the person to ask about wine quality. They're probably better than that bomb guy's, though.
209: Yes, Sifu said something similar above. I expect this is the case.
Sadly, the stand mixer in the gift registry had already been purchased, so I can't be the one to SWPLfy them.
If there was a stand mixer in the gift registry, they were already as SWPL as they were going to get.
The bomb wine label does look like an amusing souvenir, but I don't know if I'll try to get it. I think I now have three or four day's worth of things to do in that one day.
207: That's exactly why we don't use emoticons, ned. What the hell kind of face is that?
Maybe they were only SWPLardly mobile before.
213: I think Ned is saying that even the @ sign is better than Obama.
208: People have made wine around there for centuries, and the number of wineries there today is surprising given the inhospitable climate for decent wine grapes. I vaguely remember Ponderosa as decent, but apart from them and Gruet, NM wine is meh.
Ah, but have you tried Maynard's wine?
I have not. He gets most of his grapes from California, anyway.
216: Yeah, Ponderosa and Gruet are the only NM wineries that every seem to get any serious attention as anything other than novelties.
I mean, it's kind of ridiculous to even try to grow wine grapes in New Mexico in the first place, so it's pretty impressive that there's a wine industry there at all.
215: That seems the sense of it. It's almost like people don't know how to use their words.
That @ sign, though, some power it has.
The history of Gruet is pretty interesting.
220: Without the Franciscans having planted grapes there 400 years ago, I can't imagine why anyone would think of doing it now. NM at its coolest and wettest is about as marginal as it gets, viticulture-wise.
Without the Franciscans having planted grapes there 400 years ago, I can't imagine why anyone would think of doing it now.
Yeah, for them I guess it was that or import it from... where? Mexico? (Do they make wine in Mexico? I guess they probably do, or at least did then, given how much demand there must have been.)
Did the Franciscans do it because they couldn't easily import communion wine?
Apparently they had to import it from Spain. Wow.
Grapevine planting in New Mexico was initially hindered by Spanish law which in 1595 forbid the exportation of Spanish grapevines to protect the Spanish agriculture industry. At the time, Spanish wine exports provided one fourth of Spain's foreign trade revenue. Franciscan monks chose to ignore this economic law and smuggled vines out of Spain into New Mexico around 1629.
My understanding is that wherever you celebrated Mass, you had to make wine if possible.
I can't be arsed to recover it at the moment, but I found somewhere a 19th-century source (one of those promotional pamphlets for settlers, I think) which claimed unabashedly that there was no more hospitable climate in North America for grapes than New Mexico's.
The rain follows the vine.
Was "rain follows the plow" a kind of cargo cult?
Looks like they do grow wine in Mexico, mostly in Baja. Note that the historical information in that article is not totally consistent with the New Mexico article.
I found somewhere a 19th-century source (one of those promotional pamphlets for settlers, I think) which claimed unabashedly that there was no more hospitable climate in North America for grapes than New Mexico's.
Heh. Man, those guys just lied/made shit up like crazy.
Tron was supposed to be the film that got Disney out of its horrific 1970s/early 80s period (there were a bunch of other attempts at this, like the Black Hole), so Disney sunk a ton of money into it, but the film pretty much failed (and IMO completely sucks, but I am not a computer geek). I think it was the last major Disney film before Eisner and Katzenberg and Frank Wells took over and created the modern Disney.
Tron was supposed to be the film that got Disney out of its horrific 1970s/early 80s period (there were a bunch of other attempts at this, like the Black Hole), so Disney sunk a ton of money into it, but the film pretty much failed (and IMO completely sucks, but I am not a computer geek). I think it was the last major Disney film before Eisner and Katzenberg and Frank Wells took over and created the modern Disney.
Logan's Run is great, and pretty dark for all its campiness. It doesn't hurt that Agutter is super hot.
If one goes to Sumner, it's more appropriate to walk there. Like from Canyon de Chelly. Or the stretch from Pecos to the Bosque. Not that you can fit it into a day. But a day's worth is worth a lot.
If there was a stand mixer in the gift registry, they were already as SWPL as they were going to get.
See, you think this, but then the Christmas after you get married, someone gives you and your spouse matching L.L. Bean slippers.
I have LL Bean slippers. They're very warm. Quite nice.
They're incredibly warm. Occasionally too warm, even.
233/4: There is a forthcoming movie more or less about that part of Disney's history.
(dropping in late again).
I watched Tron a couple of years ago and I have to say I thought it was pretty bad.
The thing that bugged me about it was how obviously it was a Disney movie, not only in terms of plot, but in terms of how incredibly square the entire movie was.
I just couldn't quite get over how hostile the movie was to the video game players while simultaneously having a plot in which video game playing was a crucial skill. It was like they wanted to try to do a movie based around something hip youth oriented, but they couldn't muster any actual respect for the subject.
I just couldn't quite get over how hostile the movie was to the video game players
This cannot be true. Kevin Flynn, the hero and accomplished video gamer, lives in a bachelor pad featuring 1. a sunken living room with 2. white leather sectional sofas 3. and panoramic views of 4. the video game arcade the apartment is slung out over. The man was a king, even in his depredation.
Actually, go ahead and replace it with "debasement". Why'd I do that?
Anyhow, Tron RUUULZZZ
Don't you hate how square verbal adepts don't truly appreciate Tron?
I'M SORRY, TWEETY. I'M AFRAID I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT.
HAL read your lips through the comment box.
Actually, go ahead and replace it with "debasement"
Dissipation.
See that's the thing. He wasn't dissipated. He was beset by unfavorable circumstance. If you can come up with a word better than "debasement", I'd like to hear it. Really, I would. It's been bugging me.
Destitution makes him sound worse off than he was, but more accurate than dissipation. (I'd forgotten how the film starts.)
This thread is making me wish Tron were available via Netflix streaming.
254: You can watch The Boy Who Could Fly, another weird Disney movie from the eighties. That one's definitely available for streaming.
255: "This movie is: Feel-good, Inspiring, Emotional", Netflix tells me. I don't think I'm comfortable with that.
Herbie Goes To Nicaragua is always a good time.
256: But there's a boy! Who flies! Plus! A pint-sized Fred Savage who's weirdly military-obsessed!
Actually, go ahead and replace it with "debasement".
You are un chien andalousien?
Is Condorman a better movie than Tron? Probably not. But I prefer it, and it's surely the most hilarious of the Disney tentpole flops of the early 1980s.
Early 80s Disney Tentpole Flops would make a great film series. Dragonslayer! Tron! Popeye! Herbie Goes Bananas! The Black Hole! The Fox and the Hound!
What the hell was the one about the adventurer type? Maybe with an eyepatch? At the end people turned to gold?
According to Box Office Mojo, both Tron and The Black Hole grossed about the same amount -- around $30 million, or $66 million in today's money. They were beaten (although not overwhelmingly) by Herbie Rides Again and The Apple Dumpling Gang -- the latter grossed about $37 million in 1975 dollars, or about $160 million in today's money.
And that's how I spent the last five minutes.
How could I forget The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again? And yes, Condorman is both awesome and breathtakingly stupid.
262: that's okay, this is how I spent the last 5 minutes.
What the hell was the one about the adventurer type? Maybe with an eyepatch? At the end people turned to gold?
Hmm, not ringing a bell. Interestingly, Wiki says that Midnight Madness was a Disney movie, which I don't think I knew previously despite having seen that movie about 10 million times on cable. Total domestic gross was only $2.9 million!! I wonder how they got HBO to play that flick every five minutes on 1980s HBO.
\\
Roger Scruton does not like Crystal Castles:
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/soul-music
>
I saw infinity million of those Herbie movies as a kid. I'm pretty sure they have not crossed my consciousness in about twenty years.
266: that's a lot of words to get the kids off your lawn.
266: Scruton also penned this little number, in which he vows that his children will not be allowed to anaesthetize themselves with television and grow up to be "inarticulate, short-fused and unable to form lasting or genial social relationships."
