The Sound and the Fury, This Week

It wasn’t planned, but I guess I told you that story to tell you this one.

Much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth went on yesterday to protest two bills under consideration in the US congress: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT Intellectual Property Act – and yes it is a really long acronym like the USA PATRIOT Act). In short, various web sites like Wikipedia and Boing Boing “blacked out” for 24 hours to protest the bills. Craigslist just made a timed interstitial linking to their views on the topic but the site was still functional, because apparently commerce waits for no man.

Nothing persuades like appeals to emotion, if Craigslist may be considered a representative sample of the outcry:

Meaningless Political Activism is Meaningless

Hey, remember that Whole Foods boycott back in 2009 that was gonna bring the company down unless they agreed to support the idea of single-payer health insurance?

Yeah, so how’s that working out?

I’ll wait while you click the link.

Still waiting…

Done yet?

Now?

Why I have zero interest in flash-in-the-pan online “activism”, illustrated.

Print & save.

2011: A Year in Beer

Yes indeed, it’s that time again. After playing around with different display formats in 2010 and 2009, I approached this past year with a bar graph idea. I forgot how I was intending to do it when I started to lay the bottle caps out but as I began to run out of room quickly going vertical, I switched to horizontal, which produced the following result:

Hello, I’m a Lesbian

…film reviewer. I review lesbian films! Or is that films with lesbians in them? Or, as Coupling would have us believe, do I just enjoy porn? After all, as Coupling also tells us, it’s sex with a greater… density… of women! Brilliant!

I suppose some context and back story is in order. It all started when /harp music

Outside Looking In: After Innocence

I just watched a documentary called After Innocence which tracks a handful of exonerated, or potentially exonerated inmates circa 2004. As the title might suggest, the film also gives a fair amount of face time to The Innocence Project, an organization co-founded by attorney Barry Scheck, who is arguably most noted for his work as a defense attorney for OJ Simpson.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to put aside any further mention of Barry Scheck as I don’t want this to devolve into a dissertation about the OJ Simpson trial and whether Barry Scheck was the “bad guy”, or one of them.

In my forays into learning more about the US criminal justice system, I have wondered when, or if, inmates ever truly get out of jail. Sure, officially, even here in Wisconsin, inmates in all levels of the prison system get “released”. But what then?

Thoughts About the Human Centipede Movies

I’m still trying to piece together how I got turned on to the Human Centipede movies, but ultimately I battled insomnia – I mean, “embraced” – and streamed The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence last night in all of its gore-porn (gorn) glory. In digital hiiiiigh definition.

And then, after feeling queasy all day, I streamed The Human Centipede: First Sequence, which writer/director Tom Six assured me (personally) would look like “My Little Pony” by comparison to the sequel.

Now that I am boned up on the HC franchise, here’s my verdict:

I really need a hug.

Unsolicited Praise for the Sony BDP-S280 Blu-ray Player

New rule: [Jerks] can’t write online reviews for anything electronic, ever again.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the idea of online reviews, in that not everyone is going to have the same experience with a given product and it’s nice to know that it’s not just you who got a lemon. And another one after you exchanged it. And another one after that. (Looking at you, Best Buy house brand.)

But fundamentally, don’t submit a 1-star review (out of 5) for a device that serves a primary purpose and bitch moan and groan about how some arcane side feature wasn’t to your liking.

ZOMG this HDTV sucks bcuz it doesn’t render 2180P like my HD cable says it can do waaaaaaah waaaaah

(Product: 720P 32″ HDTV, says it right on the label and the freakin’ BOX)

After my Best Buy nightmare, which I will defy conventional wisdom by not retelling in agonizing detail, I took a flyer on a refurbished Sony BDP-S280 Blu-ray player at the local outlet mall. My thought was that since Sony, you know, invented Blu-ray maybe they have a clue how to make a reliable player.

Hey! They do!

Unsolicited Praise for COD: Modern Warfare 3

Yes, I know I am not 14, and have a job, and don’t live in my parents’ basement, but for some reason my MO has been to have one shoot-em-up game in my inventory. For the longest time that was a PC game (back when I used Windows for my operating system) called Dark Forces. It was a Star Wars game and the cartoony violence was fun while it lasted.

These days, I have a Wii (yeah, yeah, talk to the hand) and my shoot-em-up game was, hmmm, the tank game on the “Wii Play” disc. Eventually it became the Lego® Star Wars game, and thanks to kid-sitting my (now) ex-neighbor’s son, it evolved into Call of Duty: Black Ops.

All things considered, I liked Black Ops on the Wii mostly because I hadn’t seen it on a high-def console like the Sony Playstation or the X-Box. The kid across the hall preferred to play Modern Warfare 2 so that’s how we partitioned off the user experience between consoles.

One day, I saw Black Ops on the Playstation and it ruined my Wii experience forever. Not enough to buy a Playstation, as I really am not a gamer and my paltry Wii game collection keeps things nicely balanced.

This past Tuesday, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (MW3 from now on) was released and it’s like this, yo:

OH MY GOD.

Occupy Sesame Street

I was checking out YouTube videos recently, and was pleased to discover that the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) appears to have relented in their quest to ban all Sesame Street snippets from the site, and instead posted the items with their official branding. Bravo.

However, I was troubled by the following video:

(Click here if video is not displayed)

On the surface, it seems like a harmless PSA for smoke detectors, by way of the Twiddlebugs who live in Ernie’s flower box.

But look closer, and see why the 99% of us who grew up watching Sesame Street should be outraged about this 1% of the branded offerings on YouTube:

Julia, Avis, and I

On January 1, 2010, I wrote the following:

I suppose I should not have let curiosity get the better of me and seek out the source material for the “Julie” half of Julie & Julia, but what can I say, I’m a process nerd. If any good came of this experience, it was coming to a place in my life where I could look upon the work of Julia Child and receive her message.

And receive it I did, although I must admit I have a long way to go on the path of slavish devotion to Julia Child, forsaking all other cooks.

Then again, she never did that either.

My discipleship inched along since writing the aforementioned article. I moved to Kenosha WI later that year and in my efforts to acclimate to the area I found a small independent bookshop just before it went out of business. Despite being so tiny, I held a spark of hope that maybe it would have some cookbooks for sale, and maybe, just maybe, a well-worn copy of From Julia Child’s Kitchen would be in stock.

Well, yes and no.

The store had a copy, but not a well-worn one. Instead I snapped up a near-mint (!!!) copy for – and I am not making this up – $7.95 USD. I’m supposed to be wearing down my copy with countless hours of love and adoration but frankly I am afraid to gunk up the book. This is how hoarding starts, I know. I really do need to crack the cover more often and revel in Julia’s voice – and she has a voice, even in print – but for now it is sitting closed and at the ready.

My serendipitous find took a further back seat to another bookstore treasure: As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. The New York Times book review pretty much nailed the target audience: