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Friday, August 31, 2007
Rod Dreher is discussing movies for life, meaning "what five to ten movies I would recommend to a young adult to explain to them what life is all about. I'm not talking about the best movies, the most important movies in film history, or even the most morally edifying movies. I'm talking about the movies whose lessons offer crucial insight into what it means to live a fully human life." His list is impressive, but I think he overlooks a masterpiece. You simply have to include Terry Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen, because more than any other movie ever made, including Wizard of Oz, in my humble opinion, it comes the closest to truly portraying the wonder and terror of a child's nightmare. I say nightmare because, like all children, we all of us at one time or another dream of ourselves far from home and desperate to get back.... Steve Bailey is worth quoting in full on the
Your Friday dose of Krauthammer:
Thursday, August 30, 2007
David Pogue on iMovie 8: "What the [bleep]! What was Apple thinking?" I guess I won't be upgrading from iLife '06 anytime soon.... To the age old question (made most famous by Leibniz), why is there something rather than nothing, Sean Carroll wonders, well why not? Twenty years ago today, I started shooting my first big independent film project... Here are the first takes of a two-week shoot from Boston's Long Island on August 30th, 1987. The production was Richard the Second. Shot in 1-inch on an Ikegami ITC 730, and Sony portable 1-inch deck. Cast included in these shots, Kadina Delejalde, Deb Snyder, Ellen Zachos, Lisa Beth Kovetz, Daniel Maher, Craig Alan Edwards and Dai Kornberg. Robert F. McCafferty, also in the cast, was on sound with Videocraft engineer Joe Deighan. Because of the island fort's location in the harbor, we had to contend with jets descending to Logan, depending on the wind direction. Some days were a lot better than others. Ah, youth.... Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Jonathan Gottshall has a review of Frederic Crews' Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, which I've added to my Wish List. Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Have I mentioned lately how much I like James Wood?
Going to enjoy seeing more of Mr. Wood in the New Yorker. I like reading Telic Thoughts once in a while, but this post by Krauze leaves me scratching my head. If I understand him correctly, he is implying (by a rather tenuous association based on a book blurb) that Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross and E. O Wilson are Nazis. Or maybe the book blurb just sent him off on some free association? Or maybe the post is missing some crucial step in the reasoning? I'm still trying to figure it out. But I guess we can safely say he loathes Forrest and Gross and Wilson. Dan Rayburn looks at the new deal between Microsoft and Limelight Networks and wonders why analysts aren't seeing the big picture for the future of video delivery. Worth quoting at length:
What he said. Hitchens, always worth reading: On the second front, everything I hear by e-mail from soldiers in Anbar province and some well-attested other reports suggest (see my Slate column of Aug. 13) that the venomous rabble of foreign murderers and local psychopaths that goes to make up AQM has insanely overplayed its hand, lost all hope of local support, and is becoming even more vicious as its cadres are defeated. This means that there is also political separation and polarization within the Sunni Arab community. A recent wire-service report even suggested that the underground remnant of the Baath Party has broken off relations with AQM. It must say something when even Saddam's old goons find themselves repelled by anybody's tactics. One must not declare victory too soon, but if the United States has in fact succeeded in not only smashing but discrediting al-Qaida in a major Arab and Muslim country, that must count as a historic achievement. John Wilkins has another, eloquent, go at the 'angry atheist': But tolerance is a crucial facet of a civil society, as many wars have taught us. If a lab assistant is a Muslim, you may think that irrational, as irrational as supporting the wrong football team, but so long as she does good science and fails to launch a Jihad on infidel lab assistants, welcome her, don't attack her. Monday, August 27, 2007
Ben Stein in an anti-evolution movie? I thought better of him. The Expelled movie isn’t yet out so we can’t make fun of it in its entirety, but as everyone knows by now, the filmmakers started things off rather badly by lying to the pro-science people they interviewed, making them think that it was an entirely different film with a different name and a different premise. That’s a good taste of the kind of sleaze we’re dealing with.More evidence of what Jennifer Howard calls 'boneheaded conservatism'. Michael Barone points out some overlooked good news. How more and more US firms divesting Iran could bring pressure to bear on the
Saturday, August 18, 2007
I don't often come away from Harvard Book store with this good a haul. The good old days, as I've probably lamented here before, are long gone in Harvard Square. No more Wursthaus, no more Star Book Shop, no more Science/Fantasy Book Store, no more Macintyre and Moore book store; that great little diner where Matt Damon wooed Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting, gone; Elsie's Sandwich Shop, gone, etc. At least the Border Cafe is still going strong, and Cardullo's and Charlie's Kitchen, and Uno's, and even the Hong Kong, believe it or not. One of the bad side effects of the greed that took over real estate developers in Harvard Square and drove out the cool spots and left just one independent book store--is that it encouraged Harvard Book store to push prices up for their used books. Which is annoying. It further encourages people to go with Amazon rather than indulge in the pleasure of browsing and looking for treasures. I don't usually find much anymore, but last night I came away with a minor gold strike, particularly so since most of the books are relevant, one way or another, to what I'm writing now: a collection of essays on science and religion edited by Ian Barbour; Mankind Evolving by the late great Theodosius Dobzhansky; Galileo, A Philosophical Study by Dudley Shapere; and Thomas Becket, a biography by Frank Barlow; and to top it off, the collected short stories of V.S. Pritchett. Friday, August 17, 2007
Adam Gopnik makes a good point in his assessment of the work of Philip K. Dick (the best of which is now being issued in a nice volume by the Library of America): The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits, too, and he never really got over them. He has three, at most four, characters, whom he shuffles from hand to hand and novel to novel like a magician with the same mangy rabbits. There is the sexy young stoned girl; the wise or shrewish wife; the ordinary schlub who is his Everyman; and the Mad Engineer who is usually the Designated Explainer. He flogs these types into semi-life by means of Ellery Queen devices, including the depressing one of funny names. Then, there is the narrative falsely propelled by the one-sentence paragraph, the internal monologue that really isn’t, and sometimes both together....I loved Ubik and Man in the High Castle. But the Blade Runner book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is overrated. Ralph Alpher, one of the key contributors to the 'hot' big bang theory, the revised 1948 version of Lemaitre's l'atom primitif that led to a prediction of the cosmic microwave background, has passed away at age 86.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Well, here's a shocker. The global warming freak-out crowd has apparently been mistaking its data.
Two proof copies of the new edition of Doctor Janeway's Plague (see side panel) are in the mail from CreateSpace (aka CustomFlix, which handles my DVDs). One of the advantages of CreateSpace's new set-up is that there are no up front costs for the writer (see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's rule: "Money flows to the writer.") There are other POD services out there, but all of the reliable ones still require set-up costs and fees. In addition, I can determine layout, font-size and page count, which allows me to set the price of the book more competitively than other PODs, which have fixed layouts. (i.e., trade paperbacks of fiction really shouldn't be more than $12.95 if you look at the mainstream New York publishers). I'm hoping CreateSpace's books turn out to be as slick as their DVDs. The book will be available via Amazon. Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The limits of materialism. Scott Carson has the latest: The latest issue of Nature (08/16/2007) has an interesting cover headline: "Form Follows Function" introduces an article by Johannes Hermann called "Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function" that argues, in effect, that the function of a certain enzyme can be predicted on the basis of its underlying structure. This is an interesting finding to Aristotelians, who think that there are such things as essences in nature that do, in fact, determine the functions of things... I bet you didn't know PZ Myers is a literary critic: Try comparing LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy to Dan Brown's tripe, or to those horrid westerns by Louis L'Amour, or the Left Behind books, or anything by Tom Clancy. Which ones have the most depth, treat their readers as serious people who will think and learn, and actually exhibit some hint of good writing? When I see people walking out of airport bookstores that are stocked with the usual bestsellers — which are often little more than glorified Dick-and-Jane books with added sex and violence — I often feel like snatching it out of their hands and leading them to the juvenile literature and telling them they need to work on rebuilding their literary foundations from scratch.Not bad for a Godless liberal. When it's fun to be a Red Sox fan.... Red Sox win, read Red Sox Chick. Yankees lose, read Yankees Chick. What's not to like? Tuesday, August 14, 2007
What does it tell you that even Der Spiegel thinks the war is not lost? The Iraq war came within a hair of returning to Ramadi in early July. The attackers had already gathered four kilometers (about 2.5 miles) south of the city, on the banks of the Nasr canal. Between 40 and 50 men dressed in light uniforms were armed like soldiers and prepared to commit a series of suicide bombings. They had already strapped explosive vests to their bodies and loaded thousands of kilograms of explosives, missiles and grenades onto two old Mercedes trucks. But their plan was foiled when Iraqis intent on preserving peace in Ramadi betrayed them to the Americans. The dinosaurs in Iran are uneasy:
Friday, August 10, 2007
As if The New Republic's credibility was not already in tatters after the Glass scandal, now there's this:
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Monday, August 06, 2007
Mike Dunford, on why creationists are preferable to Intelligent Design promoters. (Hint: it has something to do with honesty.) Friday, August 03, 2007
I've been tagged by Scott Carson (and feel honored by the company he keeps). I can play that game! I will reply (in suitably garbled paraphrase) by falling back on one of my favorite passages from Chesterton, and leave it at that. There was a man once in the East long ago,This is another way of saying, Jesus ain't my buddy. And he ain't my pal. He's something else. Why it's fun to read a Yankees blog: You know, getting shut-out by the Royals is bad. Losing two in a row to the f--king Orioles is asinine. I had originally stated that if the Yankees could get to 4 games back or less of the Red Sox by August 28th, I felt we had a decent chance to take the division. Now, I'm about 95% certain there's no way in hell it's going to happen now. I'm even close to saying the Wild Card is out of the question. There's too many problems with this team, too many variables that aren't being dealt with properly. Johnny Damon is leading off, for God only knows what reason; our bullpen has gone to sh!t; our starting pitching has been off-kilter for the last month; our offense is spottier than a Rorschach Test; our manager is a buffoon. These are the things that get magnified right now, and even more so when the team can't win. If we were somehow able to keep our heads above water despite everything, I would be more optimistic or at the very least, less pessimistic about this team and where they stand. Because at least it would show they were trying. Some of these games....it just looks like they quit half-way through. Like when Jeter doesn't bother reaching for balls that go past his left side. Or when batters pop-up the first pitch they see or K on balls that are over their heads or dusting their shoetops. It doesn't look like effort. When the door slams shut, it'll be loud. I hope they are prepared for that.Chick, all I can say is, I hear you. What was it, a week ago I watched the Red Sox at home coughing up 2 out of three to the Royals and only splitting with the Blue Jays? Thankfully they pulled together against the ChiSox before starting a road trip that could've been a disaster. "This is just one of a billion plus examples of lazy Creationists taking advantage of the ignorance of their followers." Apparently there are a lot of scientific facts Michael Behe left out of his new book. We're shocked. (No, really. ) Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Where It's At: ExpoTV, the self-described “videopinions” site, has added DFJ Gotham Ventures to its roster of backers for its second funding round. The amount of the round was not disclosed. The company raised $6 million in a first round financing last December. DFJ Gotham joinsExpoTV’s previously announced investors Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks. With Friends Like These... It may be annoying when atheists use science to attack religion...but when physicists start using quantum mechanics and cosmology to 'explain' the Faith...you know you're entering the Twilight Zone. Copyright 2007 by Farrellmedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
