The fact that a country as backwards as North Korea has an official website (interestingly at a .com address, not a .kp address) is kind of weird, but understandable. And sure, I can understand their Central News Agency having a site (at a .co.jp address).
But a gift shop? I will leave the jokes as an exercise for the reader.
Rented Vanilla Sky last night. I usually don’t blog rentals, for no good reason, but this definitely merits an entry. The film’s proximate inspiration was a Spanish movie, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes — starring Penélope Cruz in the same role she played in this movie) but the main underlying plot device seems pretty clearly to originate in PKD’s Ubik. The story jumped around in sequence and in layers of unreality, and keeps you guessing and speculating even after it ends. Despite that, I wouldn’t quite call it a mindfuck — though I’m not sure if this is because I’ve been habituated by other films on this level, like Memento, because I’ve been desensitized and primed by the vastly more mindfucking Ubik, or because this movie’s just not far-out. But definitely enjoyable.
Time to present some more interesting tools for visualizing abstract relationships. I have a feeling tools like this are going to be much more widely used in the future, and much more intuitive. For the time being, a lot of them are way too slow, and somehow too abstruse.
One that is fast and not abstruse — and has a very useful role to fill is They Rule. This lets you explore relationships among movers and shakers. Sort of like a visual Oracle of Bacon, but for the powerful instead of the famous. Very interesting, although not fully fleshed out yet. Requires Flash 5
There are two similar text-corpus mappers, TextArc and Valence (the latter based on Proce55ing). Valence, technically, is more than a text mapper, but that is one of its tricks. For the time being, these two don’t seem to be so much informative as entertaining, but I can see how visual text analysis could be a serious tool in some contexts. Require Java
Saw The Two Towers yesterday. I really enjoyed it. It’s very visual, and has been filling my thoughts ever since.
My criticisms, such as they are, are pretty much the same as they were for the first movie: the characters tend to get lost in the setting, just because the setting — the world and all the stuff — is so interesting and fully realized. It is, in effect, the most important character. And the movie necessarily is cut down a lot from the books. I don’t think Jackson & Co did a bad job choosing what to cut, and to their credit, despite the movie running a solid 3 hours, I never felt bored. I just wanted more. Gwen, who is averse to screen violence, found the combat to be hard to take. It’s definitely not a children’s movie. It wasn’t like watching Sam Peckinpah or John Woo flicks, which make acts of violence into objects of adoration, depicted in obsessive slo-mo detail. But there were a lot of flying heads and a lot of gibs.
Casting was brilliant. Brad Dourif as Wormtongue was perfect. Andy Serkis as Gollum was pretty amazing.
Aside: There’s been some talk that the book and movie are racist, depicting all good guys as caucasian, and the orcs as dark-skinned. While I can’t help but roll my eyes at this sort of thing, the comment is factually false (or very weak), at least as far as the movies are concerned. Orcs get a lot more screen time in LoTR-2, so it’s easier to refute now. The orcs show more variation of color than the other races, some being black (not negro-black but tar-black), some being very pallid. Many have features that caricature caucasian faces. And since all three movies were filmed at once, there’s no way that Peter Jackson could have depicted orcs this way in reaction to the charge of racism. Plus there’s that bit about Saruman the White being a bad guy.
Sometimes, the zeitgeist seems to cause an idea to crystallize in multiple places simultaneously. Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner both diagnosed autism (and named it the same thing) at the same time. Leibnitz and Newton both came up with calculus at about the same time. Likewise Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin with the theory of evolution. Elisha Gray invented the telephone at about the same time as Bell. And so on.
Two ideas that have been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere of late are “smart mobs” and “the lazy web.” These are both manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon: groups that are non-hierarchical and self-organizing.
With the Lazy Web, as illustrated by the case of the LibraryLookup, one guy comes up with a bright idea. He does some preliminary work, publishes that on his blog, and other people spontaneously decide to chip in and polish it up. The results can be interesting. There are obvious similarities to the open-source movement.
Smart Mobs have been defined mostly in the context of meatspace, that is, people in the street sending text messages on their cellphones to physically organize mobs. Smart mobs have been observed in the gaggles of girls that coalesce around Prince William, the protests in the Philippines against President Estrada, etc.
The main difference here is the venue — cyberspace vs meatspace. Also the results: the Lazy Web seems to be productive. Smart Mobs may fulfill useful purposes, but I don’t think we’ve seen a smart-mob barn raising. Not yet, anyhow.
Well, now that he has apologized all over the place and lost his lofty perch, Trent Lott has essentially retracted his recent contrition for his veiled racist remarks, saying
There are people in Washington who have been trying to nail me for a long time,” Lott said in the AP report. “When you’re from Mississippi and you’re a conservative and you’re a Christian, there are a lot of people that don’t like that. I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.
Saying, in effect, “Sure I’m sorry — I’m sorry I was naive enough to walk into the trap laid by those mean old unspecified people who have it in for conservative Christian Mississipians.” So, to review, he still doesn’t think he said anything wrong (or expressed any indefensible ideas), he just thinks the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy finally nailed him. The cluephone is going to ring for a long time before he picks it up.
Going by the numbers, Star Trek: Nemesis should have been a good Trek movie: the rule is that even-numbered Trek movies are good, odd bad. This was number 10. It was so-so at best.
I’ve always enjoyed Star Trek in its various forms, but sometimes it calls for more suspension of intelligence than others. This movie called for a fair amount. Early in the movie, there’s a coup on Romulus, the heretofore unmentioned Remans are now in charge, and they say they want to make nice with the Federation. The Enterprise just happens to be near the Neutral Zone, so Admiral Janeway (!) dispatches Picard & crew as ambassadors. Right off the bat, we should be raising our eyebrows at the Federation’s hasty enthusiasm.
Picard wants to believe, but is too smart to. Good thing. His clone, Shinzan (created as part of a discarded plot to plant an agent in the Federation, and then relegated to slavery on Remus, who somehow (how? dunno) rose to a position of prominence among the Remans, built a kick-ass starship with a baroque doomsday weapon, and instigated the coup on Romulus) has a bundle of ill-defined Issues with Picard and his human heritage in general, and the only way he can see to overcome these issues is to kill everyone on Earth with his death-ray. Although he kind of wants Picard alive, because Shinzan’s DNA was altered, and he might need a transfusion from Picard. Picard, predictably, tries to appeal to Shinzan’s better nature to rise above his baser instincts. He fails, and so a big shootout in space ensues. The crew of the Enterprise triumphs, partly because the death-ray takes so freaking long to deploy, and even then, not without paying a price (one that could plausibly be rebated through some obvious plot devices if there were a followup to this movie).
So the movie insults our intelligence in a few ways. It also absentmindedly invites snarky ridicule from geeks who watch way too much Star Trek for the line where Picard says to Shinzan “your blood is the same as my blood, your heart is the same as my heart” or words to that effect — Picard has an artificial heart, as a couple episodes of the show discussed.
Oh well. I don’t resent the time and (matinee) money I spent on the movie, but they could have done a better job. Instead of staging a coup on Romulus, Shinzan could have been a rebel, leading the Federation to gamble that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” — more plausible story. They could have fleshed out Shinzan a lot more — a potentially interesting character that wound up being very flat and villainous just because that’s his job.
One of the funniest damn books I’ve read in a long time is The Gallery of Regrettable Foods (which has a companion website). So imagine my delight at discovering that the author has a blog.
As an American, but not a deeply, blindly conservative one, I find it difficult to avoid being cynical and resigned. Despite a Bush administration that makes Nixon’s look like a Boy Scout jamboree, the average citizen seems indifferent to what’s going on in Washington. So my schadenfreude at finding this story is mixed with a feeling of futility.
First, we had the rat with the robotic brain. Now we have the robot with the rat brain. No word yet what Ratbert thinks about all this.