Sleeping Hollywood

From Roger L. Simon via Instapundit

I do have something to say here. I looked, and I looked hard for a movie to take my kids to see this summer. The kids and I talked about it, the only thing that we all wanted to go see with any small degree of passion is Episode III. Note that I said a small degree of passion. There’s only one other movie we want to go see this year. I think you can guess what that is, but if not, I’ll tell you. It’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We MIGHT go see the Fantastic Four, but that’s a real big maybe. For the most part, we’d rather stay home and watch anime if we’re not playing video games.

To make a point, I’m a 30 something mom. I’ve been a gamer since I was 16. I started playing video games on my boyfriend’s sega genesis in high school, and then when I moved in with my hubby.. well.. we’ve always had a game console. Currently, we own two, an xbox and a PS2. I also have a PSP that I port around with me for various reasons, and because we have kids there are a variety of gameboys in the house. My plans for this summer include, the summer reading list you see on the sidebar. Finishing Xenosaga 2, .hack//quarantine, and Jade Empire for my console games, and finishing Myst: Revelation, and Syberia for the PC games, and cleaning my house. Note that movie going is not on the list.

There was a time when my husband and I would go see a movie once or twice a month, even to the point of hiring a babysitter so that we could go see movies that didn’t start with “Walt Disney Presents”. I loved that time. It was great to be able to see a film like “Event Horizon” that pushed the envelope in the minds of the viewers. And man.. that flick gave me nightmares for a month after we saw it. The horror movie that does that to me is rare, and only one since “Event Horizon” has had me looking around doors for a few days after I watched it, and that was “Ju-On: The Grudge”. I love the scene where the face of the ghost biting at “Karen” in the movie is reflected in the window of the bus they are riding on. That really got me.

These days, I’d rather sit at home and watch the cool movies that I really love on our home theater screen. And since we’re on the subject of movies at home, here’s my recommended list for you to sit down and watch with your tweens.

“Spirited Away”. Miyazaki’s best in my mind, but a possible second to
“Laputa” or “Castle in the Sky”.
“The Star Wars Trilogy”
“The Lord of the Rings”
“The Iron Giant” (cause it’s cool, who doesn’t remember him saying “Superman…”).
“Secondhand Lions” (“That lion is defective!” *giggle*)
“Big Fish”
“The Hunt for Red October” (the tweens can handle it, and they need to understand the coolness that is Sean Connery)
“Indiana Jones and..” (Watch them all with your kids, widescreen in surround.)

And there we have it. Positive proof that a home DVD collection is filled with far better movies than your average movie theater is showing right now.

Update: Bill@Reason’s Edge has more on this. I agree with what he has to say on this for the most part. It doesn’t make sense to cycle movies into the video stores so quickly. A family of four can watch movies for an entire evening and spend maybe 15$ at the video store, and on popcorn. The expensive snacks at the movie theaters actually make sense. The theater itself makes very little off ticket sales, this information comes to me from Taralon an employee at a large theater chain, most of their income comes from concessions sold at the theater. I agree that expensive popcorn and soda can be very daunting, but I also think that to be honest, since the tickets themselves are so expensive, families have to decide very carefully which movies they want to see. The question becomes one of: “Do I really want to spend 50$ on going out to a movie, that probably won’t be very good with my family, or would I rather spend that 50$ on something that they will get more value out of?”

Something to think about.

Wow.. this isn’t a surprise..

I imagine this will come as a shock to no one I know either..

hat tip Reason’s Edge

You Are From Mercury

You are talkative, clever, and knowledgeable – and it shows. You probably never leave home without your cell phone! You’re witty, expressive, and aware of everything going on around you. You love learning, playing, and taking in all of what life has to offer. Be careful not to talk your friends’ ears off, and temper your need to know everything.

Quashed Nagasaki Report

George Weller’s 1945 report of the Devastation of Nagasaki

This report was censored by General MacArthur (according to this report on /.). Some things should be told. The horror of Nagasaki is one of them. I still think that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do at the time. I firmly believe, that we would not have used those weapons if there had been an alternative that would have saved more lives, both Japanese and American. But, in dropping those bombs we took on a responsibility that remains with us until our Empire falls. We have a duty to understand what it was that we did that day in August 1945, and a responsibility to make sure that no one ever finds a need to use such a weapon ever again. Weller’s report serves as a reminder to us of that duty.

In fall, I read a beautiful poem on the bombing of Hiroshima that moved me to tears. I imagine that most of my friends look at my love of poetry and either laugh, or chuckle, but like this story by Weller, poetry has a power to inspire us, awe us and humble us in the face of things that we were not able to experience first hand. In my mind, reading poetry is just as important as reading books, in some ways, even more so.

Below is the aforementioned poem by Ronald Wallace (via this site, reposted here for reader convenience).

“The Hell Mural: Panel I”

Iri and Toshi Maruki are “painting the bomb.”
Their painting, they say, will comfort the souls of the dead.
“It’s a dreadful cruel scene of great beauty,”
Toshi says. “The face may be deformed but there’s kindness
in a finger or a breast, even in hell.”
The Hell Mural spreads over the floor.

Iri stretches naked on the floor,
painting. He remembers Hiroshima after the bomb–
the bodies stacked up, arms outstretched toward hell,
nothing he could see that was not dead,
nothing that cared at all for human kindness,
nothing that wept at such terror, such beauty.

Now a brush stroke here, a thick wash there, and beauty
writhes and stretches from the canvas floor.
He wants his art to “collaborate with kindness,”
he wants his art to “uncover the bomb.”
But no lifetime’s enough to paint all the dead
or put all those who belong there in hell.

“Hitler and Truman,” he says, “of course are in hell.”
But even those of us who live for beauty
are in hell, no less so than the dead.”
(He paints himself and Toshi on the floor.)
“All of us who cannot stop the bomb
are now in hell. It’s no kindness

to say different. It’s no kindness
to insist on heaven; there’s only hell.”
Toshi adds bees and maggots to the bomb,
and birds, cats, her pregnant niece, the beauty
of severed breast and torn limb on the killing floor.
“In Hiroshima,” she says, “we crossed a river on the dead

bodies stacked up like a bridge. Now the dead
souls must be comforted with kindness.
Come walk in your socks across our floor,
walk on the canvas. (A little dirt in hell
almost improves it.) Can you see the beauty
of this torso, that ear lobe, this hip bone of the bomb?”

Iri and Toshi Maruki, in “Hell,” are painting the bomb,
the mural on their floor alive with the thriving dead.
Come walk on their kindness, walk on their troublesome beauty.

The PSP has gone.. “global”

Porn for your PSP!

Portable porn! Wow! Now everyone under the age of 70 will have to have a PSP! W00t! Good job Sony!

Summer Reading

I’ve posted my summer reading list to the sidebar. As I finish books on the list, they’ll be struck through, as more get piled on, I’ll add more to the bottom.

Thanks to Dave for my birthday gifts of “The Lovely Bones”, “Strike Sparks” and “A Room of One’s Own”.

I just finished “The Lovely Bones”. This is an absolutely wonderful book. I nearly cried at the end of it. It’s a really great story of hope, oddly enough, told from the perspective of a dead girl who’s looking down on her family from heaven. The storytelling aspect is really interesting, you spend a lot of the book wondering about the dead girl and whether her family will ever find the man who murdered her, but in the end, that part of the story is just a backdrop. It’s about family and warmth and love and how it carries on, even long after you’re in your grave.

A worthy read, I recommend it.

Shuttles Will Be Unable to Complete Space Station

How sad…

But at the same time, it’s to be expected given the age of the shuttles and the recent problems with their design. The time to take these vehicles out of service is long overdue. I’m not sure how long they’ve been in service, and I can’t find a number for it but to use a good guideline here.. I’m in my 30’s and I can’t remember a time when the space shuttle wasn’t in service. Most cars made that long ago haven’t lasted this long.

It’s a testament to NASA engineering that these vehicles have accomplished everything that they have to date, but I think that now is the time for a new vehicle designed for space travel. With current technology available, imagine what we could do up there… just imagine it. How cool is that thought?

For as long as I live, I’ll be a strong supporter of the space program. Everything that we learn about the universe teaches us more about ourselves because we came from the universe, (the mass in your body right now existed at the moment of the big bang. How neat is that to think about?). Study of the universe and space, and what we can do in space to advance medical treatment, crops and technologies… all of these things are beneficial to the whole of the human race.

I can’t imagine us sitting around, letting that chance for discovery simply slip through our fingers.

Watch Those Accounts!

40 Million Visa and Mastercard numbers have been breached.

Keep an eye on your accounts, though visa claims it will know a fraudulent charge on your account before you do. In truth, I doubt this, so watch your accounts closely. Vendors are more likely to notice fradulent use of credit cards and call them in to your card company, before your card company even has a clue.

Educational Concerns

In response to this post which I linked to on a mailing list I’m on, I recieved this reponse from a public high school teacher.

I looked over your reading list and chuckled. I had to read most of these
same things in college. The irony of this is that NOW, my high school kids
have these same selections in our anthology and are expected to handle this
material just as I did in college. I think sometimes we are pushing our
kids too far, too fast. This is a problem with states where testing is the
end all, be all marker for education. Now it’s hard to get my kids to read
at all because they were so burnt out in middle school.

I understand where this teacher is coming from. The class that I took this quarter was marked as a sophmore level college course for a reason. You have to have some understanding of literature and how to interpret older language style into modern day terms just to be able to understand it. Expecting high school juniors and seniors to read this material is just insane.

Standarized testing is not something that I am overly fond of. I think that it has its place and its purpose as a guide for how well students are retaining what they are learning, but they cannot be the end all be all measure of how well they are performing. Testing places a large amount of pressure on students. It pushes them beyond their boundaries and out of their comfort zone. A student that knows the material well in the classroom setting will often hear the word “test”, and everything that you wanted to know about that student to use as an indicator of teacher performance just goes right out the window.

There has to be a better way.

Even more than that I am concerned that high school students are being pushed too hard in some cases, and not enough in others. My local school district is not at the top of my list for being well-thought out in terms of what they teach the children.

Your ISP is Watching?

Your ISP as Net watchdog | CNET News.com

Okay, so let me get this straight. I’m sitting around on IM, having netsex with my husband and the federal government thinks they have some kind of right to force my ISP to hold copies of log files of this and let them look at them whenever they want? Why in the heck would I want the FBI or anyone else looking through my windows unless they’ve got a court order to do it?

Where’s the provision to have these records available to the government bodies, only by order of a court?

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution States: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

So.. where in this does the government have the right to read log files of my IM conversations? Sure, it’s not like I have anything to hide in the first place, but that’s not the point. The point is that what I do in my IM conversations is none of anyone’s business unless a court has reason to believe that I am doing something illegal via those conversations. That means, you gotta have a court order bucko.

This thought, that being able to peruse anyone’s IM conversations without a court order is perfectly okay, is something I heartily disagree with. It’s a very specific violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Terri’s Autopsy Report Released.

And it says what we thought pretty much all along.

It’s all here.

There was irreparable damage to her brain. Her vision centers were dead, so she could not see to track that mystical ballon that she supposedly watched. Her brain weighed approximately as much as the brain of a Giraffe. It was also impossible for her to recover. The massive loss of neurons was impossible to recover.