Irrational thought

So hurricane Isaac may hit New Orleans on Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of hurricane Katrina hitting the city.

I heard that and thought about something like that – the hurricane not the level of disaster – happening again on the same date and part of my brain thought that I could get critically ill again at the same time.

Of course that’s irrational.  I mean, I was in the ICU during Katrina but I got sick in July.

Silly me.

The gold standard

Really?  Did they really put that in the platform?  Did they, I haven’t seen confirmation but they were considering it.

I can’t wait for the new wars of colonization (I’m sure they’ll be called something else) when nations try to secure gold production so they can protect their currency from international manipulation.

There are no valid excuses

If you are doing things to limit voting and not to expand it to every possible eligible voter than what you are doing is wrong and you are wrong.

Indiana Jones and your favorite movie

I read a blog post, over on tor.com, about which is the best Indiana Jones movie.

I’m not going to get into that here because I know which one is the best so I don’t really need to discuss it.  What I want to talk about is “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.  I know that a lot of people don’t want to talk about that movie, but that’s the point.

There are many complaints about that movie but not all of them are deserved.  It’s not a perfect movie; it certainly has its flaws.  But I think a lot of people missed some things about that movie.

Let’s take one complaint that I have seen several times: the refrigerator scene.  I’m not going to worry about spoilers since the movie has been out for years.  In this scene Indy survives a nuclear explosion by taking refuge inside a lead-lined refrigerator.  Yes, it’s silly.  It’s supposed to be.

The movie was deliberately set the same number of movie years after the last movie as had elapsed in real life.  You can see that it’s made to look like a movie from that time period.  “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is largely in the style of adventure movies of the ‘30s – not a perfect replica, but inspired by them.  In the same way Crystal Skull is made in the style of movies from the ‘50s.

So, yeah, the bad guys are Russian and there are aliens and psychic powers and even a lead-lined refrigerator.  Not everything was serious.  You did notice them drive by the Atomic Café in the beginning, right?  It was 1950s atom bomb levity, just like Mickey Rooney surviving by eating the right peanut butter.

We also got a reintroduction to an older Indiana Jones with some more history, a near miss at being reunited with the Ark of the Covenant and the actual return of Marion.  I’m not up on the series but I think there was also a nod to the Young Indiana Jones TV series in there.  It had been a long time since the last story and they did a decent job of getting things back up to speed and also giving us some idea of what had happened in those intervening years. 

Now they just need to do it again and go out on a high note.

Yes, I want another Indiana Jones movie.  I have no idea what he should be going after this time.  What sort of adventure movie was popular in the early ‘60s?

Going it alone

So Romney has a different approach to energy and the economy and his perspective about “…the power of individuals as opposed to government, individuals pursuing their interests and dreams.”.

Like those individuals who built the highways and bailed out the banks and fought WWII and sent men to the Moon and, well, you get the idea.

It’s kind of like when he said that honor students did it on their own, that it wasn’t the bus driver who did it.

I think honor students should be proud of and celebrated for their achievements, but the bus driver did get them to school, on public roads, where there were teachers who taught them and I imagine a good number of those kids had support from their parents and maybe did research at public libraries or used the Internet which, no matter what you may have heard, was developed by the Federal Government.

Sure there are people who are individually creative and get things done, but even they do it within the structure that our society built.

Of course there were also those rugged individuals who steered the banking industry, and along with it essentially the world economy, off a cliff.  But at least they did it on their own.

Gah.  It’s never as simple as the pseudo-individualists try to make it out to be. 

The whole we-built-this convention is going to be held in a convention center mostly paid for by tax dollars.

That man bugs me.

Olympic holdover post

They’ve been over for a while now, but I had this hanging around and it can apply to any sporting event.  A commentator on NBC said that the reason for the tension on the athlete’s face was because there were four women competing for three medals.  That time it was women’s pole vault but the same sort of thing was said more than once.

Can anyone tell me if there has ever been an event where there weren’t more people competing than there were medals?  Isn’t this always the case?  These people are trying to win – or at least do their best if they know they can’t win.  It’s the freaking Olympics in a gigantic stadium full of people from all over the world and so many cameras you practically trip over them and there are ten things happening at once.  Don’t you think that might be a reason why people are tense?

I mean really, have there ever been track events with only three people competing?

Except for that time Bill Cosby did the hammer throw.  So, besides that time.

You were warned

I did say it was going to be a torrent.  There's still more to come in no particular order.  I may slip some new posts in there as well.

I coulda been a contender

In my mind, anyway.  But it’s an Olympic year so I have to fantasize about how great an athlete I used to be.

To see me now you wouldn’t think that when I was young I was pretty athletic.  I played tennis almost every day, I cycled constantly and I helped form a fencing club in high school.  I sucked at middle distances but I was a good sprinter and long distance runner.

These days I’m a disabled old man.

To be honest I wasn’t in good shape even before I got this bad.

That I never pursued athletics is a major regret for me now.  I’m not saying that I would have made it to the Olympics.  I may never have amounted to much at all but I’ll never know.  I blame no one but myself and I realize that this is slightly delusional, but I’m human.  I think things like this from time to time.

I did have some athletic ability and I did not use my physical ability to its fullest.  But that isn’t really the point.  That is all in the past.  There’s a more important question.

What will I regret not doing 10 years from now?

Or to put that the way I mean it – what should I pursue now so I don’t regret not doing it 10 years from now?

That question is in no way limited to physical activity.

Where did that number come from?

I’m just speculating here, but something occurred to me after seeing yet another article about Romney saying that he paid at least 13% in taxes over the last few years.  When I put that together with several people observing that the claims from the Romneys have carefully omitted the word ‘income’ as in income tax, I had a thought.

It is quite possible that Romney paid 0% in income tax over the last few years and still paid 13% in taxes.  If you recall he made a little money (I’m paraphrasing here) from speaking engagements.  That was something in the neighborhood of $400k and Romney may have ways to shelter that from income tax.  But that money would be classified as earned income, as opposed to his investment income, and some of it would be taxable for Social Security and Medicare purposes.

As a self-employed person (he currently lists himself as a self-employed writer) Romney would be liable for the full tax.  By a strange coincidence, FICA is currently at 13.2%.

That’s the sort of thing that makes me go, hmm.

No one’s asked but…

Am I attacking Republicans?

I don’t think so.  Aside from that one post where I read Romney’s mind (correctly, I think) all I’m doing is posting facts.

I could post things against Democrats but I’ll let the media do that.

I will say that even with Republican obstruction I think the Democrats could have and should have gotten more done, a lot more.

But lest you think I want to engage in false equivalencies, while Democrats don’t always do the right thing and some do the wrong things, both parties aren’t the same.

Anecdotal answers to unasked questions

There’s all kinds of talk about fair pay and such these days, some of it coming up because of the Nuns on a Bus.

Here’s what I have to say about what people should be paid.  It uses an outdated example of a working class guy (guy because this is an old example), but I think you’ll get the point.

Our country used to be a place where a milkman didn’t need to work extra jobs to make ends meet and afford a house, a car, to support his wife and 2 or 3 kids and a dog and afford to go on vacation every year.

They also had good schools, clean and well maintained streets and could afford to pay for the doctor and for hospitalization insurance.

Come to think of it, a woman who was a manicurist or hair dresser could do pretty much the same thing.

Our country should still be the place where the average working person can do all these things.  It was once and many people think it still should be.

Why is that controversial?

So the Republican VP pick has been announced

His family fortune seems to be built on government spending on infrastructure, he used Social Security survivor benefits (even though he apparently didn’t need them and you have to apply to get them) and student loans to pay for college, he gets a tax subsidy from the Federal government for his house and his career has always been in government – being paid by the government and getting taxpayer subsidized benefits.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who better embodies the concept of ‘I’ve got mine screw you’.

My take on things

This is from a few weeks back, but…

I don’t think Mitt Romney was just saying that Israelis and Americans and Ecuadorians are superior to their neighbors because their countries are wealthier. 

I think it’s clear that he was inadvertently saying that he thinks he is better than other people because he is wealthy. 

For him money equals superiority.

Up next

Another torrent of posts I've been keeping dammed up is coming.

Not an Olympics post – Revolution

I keep seeing commercials for the series Revolution, a JJ Abrams show scheduled for the fall.  I may watch this thing just to see how hilarious it is because from what I’ve seen in the commercials by my standards it is going to be awful.

It may be a well made show with decent scripts and great acting, but I doubt that would be enough for me to get past the problems with the premise.

If you want to enjoy the show without my observations ruining things for you just skip the rest of this post.  It’s also pretty long so if you don’t want to bother you should just skip it.

So you’re still here.  Let’s rant.  This is based only on the commercials but I really can’t not comment on this thing.

Apparently the show takes place 15 years after electricity has stopped working.  OK, I’ll give them that one for free.  Something has stopped electricity from working without affecting anything else – such as bioelectric activity which I suppose it could be argued that animals create electricity more than they use it.  Yeah, well, I’ll give them that one anyway.

But to me it looks like someone wanted to set a show in a future post-apocalyptic world without technology so they could have athletic young people riding horses, using swords and bows and arrows and generally looking awesome.  I can understand that, but they seem to have grabbed an idea to cause it as opposed to having an idea for what happened and then extrapolating a future from that.

Why do I say this, you ask?  Let’s start with the beginning as seen in the commercial.  There’s a jet airliner in a flat spin that crashes.  Why didn’t it just nose in?  Why is it spinning?  If it is crashing because the electricity failed then Why Are The Running Lights Still On?

And what’s with the bows and arrows and swords and horses?  Guns will still work without electricity.  Then there’s the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution – steam.  Steampunk is a big thing right now and they can’t imagine a steam powered car?  Something that actually existed – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Motor_Carriage_Company.  Not to mention trains and trucks and all sorts of things.  I might even be able to make a diesel engine work.  Also, gas lighting.

Then there’s the scene of people walking past Wrigley Field all overgrown and vine covered.  Sure, because in fifteen years no one has figured out how to cut the grass without electricity and the actual last ball park to install lights would never again host a baseball game if it had to be played in the daytime.  But all the cities seem to have been abandoned for some reason so, that broke baseball?  Whatever.

What about the effects of loss of life after such a catastrophic event, you ask?  That’s a fair question and one that should be asked before imagining this world.  Let’s say that aircraft, traffic and other accidents, lost ships at sea, deaths due to failed life support in hospitals and due to excessive heat and cold and general mayhem add up.  I’d say there would be at most 20% max loss of world population in the immediate aftermath – almost exclusively in industrialized nations.  In the following years I would estimate 30% to a maximum of 50% loss of population.

What would that do to the US?  It would give us the population that existed in the 1950s.  Not colonial levels; 1950s levels.  The country was not exactly deserted in the 1950s.  Sure it would take some effort to restore a working infrastructure and distribute food and other goods, but this is supposed to be 15 years later.  If anything we’d have functionally full employment.  All industry would require more human involvement, not to mention the military.  Of course there would be increased death rates due to illness and injury and the population would be younger, but horses instead of cars?  Well, maybe, but not exclusively.  And deserted cities?  I doubt it – at least, there would be cities even if the large metropolises were deserted though I think they would be scavenged for material and rebuilt in a usable form.

The population would undoubtedly be younger because health care would take a major hit and seniors and the disabled and chronically ill would not live long in that world.  Though I really doubt that everyone would be in their twenties.

High speed communication would be much more difficult, but not impossible.  No more satellite communication, or transcontinental or transoceanic for a while at least.  But in the late 19^th century, when steam powered trains were the norm, you could get across this country in less than a week.  That slows down communication but it doesn’t leave people cut off.  And what about fiber optics?  Why not use that to reproduce a telegraph service? 

Sure there would be initial problems and violence and confusion and chaotic times, but it wouldn’t be permanent and it would take a lot less than 15 years for signs of recovery to be apparent.

Mass transportation, mass communication, major industry, industrial farming, densely populated cities with street lights and police and fire departments and mail delivery and hospitals and all that stuff, all of that existed before the revolution of electricity at the end of the 19^th century.  The end of the 19^th century, that’s how far back this would take us.  Think about that.  Compared to today the technology was much less advanced but it wasn’t non-existent.  There was even air conditioning.  Aside from the telegraph we could reproduce everything that was around then without electricity.

So you can see how I would have a problem with a show that wants to use the loss of electricity as the cause for anything really dramatic 15 years after the event.  It would be less post-apocalyptic and more historical drama. 

Then there is the fact that everyone is dressed in new looking clothes, which means that somehow people have managed to learn how to build and operate looms, tan leather, make boots and shoes and the like.  It also looks like there are enough bowyers and fletchers around, maybe also people making katana and najinata as well, to keep people in weapons.  Plus they can distribute all of this stuff.  Yet they can’t cut the vines that have taken over all of the cities.

I suppose they’re using cars as planters because – well, there really is no reason for that.

People are also wearing eyeglasses.  They figured that out but not the rest.

Is there any chance that people are going to be raiding libraries and hoarding books to learn what they need to know to survive and flourish?  I doubt it.

And now I just saw another commercial that asks the important ridiculous questions: what if there were no medicine, no law, no police?

Right, because we all know that none of those things existed before electricity was being used.

Good grief.  If that isn’t just hyperbole thrown into a commercial – and even then it is just stupid – then this show is going to be worse than I thought.  And as you can tell I already thought that it was going to be pretty bad.

What will be a problem is weather because forecasting will be severely limited.

And now another commercial where people are armed and wearing new clothes with well repaired houses but you can see through the damn fence around their compound because it is made of uneven and unmatched twigs with no chinking or wattle or daub.  A five year old could do a better job.  Apparently everyone also forgot how to make walls.

Can it possibly work as a guilty pleasure?  Maybe I could see if it manages to not live up to my expectations and has plots that I can’t predict right now.  Maybe someone can convince me that I’m wrong.

This is a long and convoluted post not a long and comprehensive post so I did not cover every possibility and maybe they explain all of this somehow, but I think my main points are legitimate.

And what about lightning?

A long and meandering post – no, not this one

Up next one is of those posts that I’ve been holding on to.

In part because it may potentially ruin the fun in an upcoming TV show for some, in part because it is really long and probably boring and could only possibly matter to me so why the heck am I posting it, right?

Well, it may be entertaining, so, yeah, I’m posting it for entertainment value.

On second thought

Or whichever thought this is, I am going to shift the blame for the lack of quality of Olympics coverage.

It’s not the money it’s the technology.

Back when instant replay was cutting edge and getting 5 or 6 hours of coverage a day was a major accomplishment there was no thought given to this kind of hack editing of things.  The focus had to be on just getting the event broadcast.

These days they can easily jump back and forth between events and between different recordings or between live and recorded if that comes up.  The temptation is probably too much to resist.

London 2012 TV coverage

Even with all the problems it’s still not quite as bad as Seoul where Bryant Gumbel seemed to care more about getting his own face on TV than showing the Olympic competition.

I’m pretty sure that was also the Games where they showed a pre-recorded feature on an athlete Instead of the Live Race that was Being Run at That Very Moment!

Then they came back and showed the recording of the race. 

I mean really, who the hell does that?

Is it really what they say it is?

I know I can’t trust the NBC commentary because they may already know the outcome of any event. 

So when they tell me it’s a four way race for the women’s gymnastics gold between the US and Russia how do I know that’s true and not someone reliving some Cold War fantasy?

About one of those commercials

As you might have guessed I’ve been watching the Olympics in spite of the horrendous coverage.  So of course I get to enjoy the many commercials, among which have been some political ads.

There’s one praising Romney for his work on the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.  Contrary to the commercial and popular belief, the 2002 Winter Olympics were never in danger of not being held.  Two of the people running it were dumped because of what was called a scandal (it was just business as usual for the Olympics in any city but it made the news so there had to be some outrage) and Romney was brought in to run things.

But the International Olympic Committee had already said that they were committed to holding the Games in Salt Lake City.  There was never any question that they would be held there and on time.

They did need some more money and Romney was good at getting that.  So good that he managed to get $1.3 billion in US tax dollars.  Of that, almost $1.1 billion went for development around Salt Lake City not directly related to the games.  In other words: $250 million for the Olympics, $1.1 billion for developers in the Salt Lake City area.

Romney may have done a good job running the games – where, by the way, he told the athletes that they were only there because of all of the support they got from other people in their lives.  He may have done a good job, and from what I can tell he did what he was hired to do, but the 2002 Winter Olympics were paid for by US taxpayers.

Mitt Romney did what he seems to be very good at – spending other people’s money and taking a lot of credit.

Yes, I know that the commercial is not from Romney’s campaign but is from his supporters.  That doesn’t change the facts.  He ran the Winter Olympics, great, it’s not like he invented water or something.

Also yes, I am very Olympics focused at the moment which is why the other political commercials haven’t even registered with me.

Further, at the time I thought he did a good job, but let’s not get too excited.

Another Olympic rant

I know that I am seeing this through the lens of my own bias.  Still, it seems to me that when I was young there were fewer commercials.  Quality of coverage aside there just seemed to be fewer breaks.  I know that even in the days of my youth when I liked the coverage the network was trying to make a profit, but honestly, they just didn’t seem to have as many commercials. 

Some time in the 80s it all seemed to change from wanting to show the Olympics to wanting to produce an event.  Personally I think when a different network got to cover the Games they tried to show that they could do it better than ABC and to them better meant flashier.  Money is also a problem.  Of course the whole point of a TV network is profit, just like any corporation.  That’s fine.  I’m not complaining about that – except where it damages the product.  Namely the TV show.

I’d also lay some of blame on the Olympic Committee as well as the network.  I have no evidence but it seems to be less the Olympics these days and more The Olympics ™©®$$$$.  And naturally when you have to bid outrageous amounts to get the TV rights you have to make up the money to show a profit.  So there are more commercials because you can only charge so much per minute.

But since there are only so many natural places for a commercial break you have to manufacture them.  You edit and cut out parts of the events; show most of the US and only a few of the other countries’ athletes; take a break in the middle of a match and come back after a few goals have been scored; cut out the parts you think are boring.  After all, real or perceived, you have to cater to the American short attention span and what better way than to make it all one big highlight reel where more commercials can be squeezed in.

Actually, to me it feels more like a lot of commercials with a few sporting events squeezed in.

You can edit for time, cut and paste parts of events to fit your artificial narrative and show things out of sequence and modified for whatever reason.  But you lose the spontaneity and the progression of events that builds the tension and leads naturally to the climax at the end.  There is no end because you have no idea what happened when because it’s all out of order.  There’s more flash and less substance.

Rather than being compelling it’s disorienting.

Maybe I’m being too critical.  It isn’t possible to show everything when so much happens at the same time and watching the Olympics in real time can be tedious and boring.  It’s the nature of an event like that where there is so much going on concurrently but there is also so much down time and repetition. 

I’ll relent.  It’s an overwhelming spectacle that needs to be managed to make it comprehensible.   Maybe the experience can be improved with judicious editing.

Except that isn’t what’s going on here.  The editing is choppy.  And it’s so obvious that someone who likes to look at the women gymnasts – not competing, just look at them – produced this thing it isn’t even funny.  You get more shots from the profiles than of competition.  They have a theme song for crying out loud.

So edit, but do it better.  What we’re getting now is crap.