Wolf of Wall Street

I rate it slightly above average.

Susan and I saw this movie this afternoon. I think she liked it better than I did. It's long, and eventually for me tedious. Being subjected to three hours of depiction of boundless hedonism, gross consumption, and dishonesty maybe doesn't do it for me like it used to. Of course it's Scorsese, so you're going to have it in your face throughout. And there's a serious intent behind the film. I guess you can encapsulate the movie's plot by: "the rise and fall of an unscrupulous Wall Street trader." That would be Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, assisted by a whole bevy of talented actors.

I'm sure Scorsese's intention was to lance the boil of the corruption of the financial system and let it run all over the screen. Well, he succeeded for me. And I'm sure there must be some subtleties that escaped me. I never pretended to be an incisive movie critic, but I know what I like. And to tell the truth, I would have liked to have been able to like any of the people in this movie. But it's hard to cut through the opulence, booze, dope, sex, and orgies to get to the point where you care much for any of these people.

It was indeed a pleasure to watch DiCaprio and the rest of the cast, especially Jonah Hill, display their talent. It is amazing what these people can do, and it's amazing to see what Hollywood can do. For some, that would simply be enough. The spectacle, the verisimilitude reproduced. And I cannot deny some genuinely funny moments. But on the whole, it didn't work for me. I give it about a 5 1/2. 

Captain America

Susan I saw a pretty good movie this afternoon – "Captain Phillips." If you keep up with movies in the least, if probably seen reviews of this one, about a huge American cargo ship being seized by four heavily armed Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. Movie is based on a true story that happened in 2009. It's really a tense film, and the anxiety you feel for the crew and the dread about what is going to happen keeps building. After some pretty tense times on the boat, the American military arrives with its awesome might, and you know how this story is going to end.

In the hallway after the movie, one of the ladies who accompanied Susan said "Thank God for the SEALS." That's what she got out of it, one supposes. How did she miss the desperation of these pirates, the desperate homeland they come from, the desperate straits they were in under the thumb of cruel vicious warlords? The humanity of these four guys, even though they were pirates? The last emotions that I felt coming out of the movie were elation that we have SEALs who can go kill guys on the high seas all in a days work, and destroyers and aircraft carriers, and high tech everything. Go see the movie. See what you think.

Go See It

Go see Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's latest movie. It's a treat, and unlike Hollywood's usual performance with history, this time it gets it down pretty close to accurate. I saw it again yesterday for the second time, and to tell the truth, I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie more than once in a theater (DVDs not counting). Here's what I had to say about it to a gaggle of LSU historians I've stayed in contact with over the years when I first saw it, about ten days ago:

This is another of Spielberg's masterpieces. There was so much that was right about the movie, that nit-picking its faults seems somehow unimportant, although we historians are to do it anyway. The film's meticulous attention to the tiniest details is something that characterizes it and can't possibly be appreciated with just one viewing. (I'm definitely going to see this again.) And the excellence in the portrayal of lesser characters in the story such as Alex Stephens, Gideon Welles, and U. S. Grant simply underscores the overall mastery of how he has caught the people, places, and the time in a narrative that rings consistently accurate. If there's been a better depiction of the American political process on screen, I don't know of it. I don't know which guys are going to be competing with Daniel Day-Lewis for the best actor Oscar, but I would not want to be one of them. He will win in a walk. And finally a Lincoln much more likely to reflect what the reality was will displace all those semi-deified cinematic images we've been carrying around in our heads all these years.

There are certainly enough historical inaccuracies for people familiar with the period to wag the familiar scolding finger at Hollywood for not being more careful. But, truth be told, historians are almost always displeased with the way the movies depict a subject they are expert about. So you won't be surprised if I make the following critical observations.

--Events depicted that never happened, some of them hokey, others just invented

1. Lincoln's conversation with a couple of black soldiers in the beginning of the movie. Never happened. Plus one of them claimed to be from the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry. This unit existed and was black, but never left the Trans-Mississippi theater. 2nd Kansas did fight at battle of Jenkins Ferry in Louisiana in 1864, but absurd that hand-to-hand combat was depicted. Never happened, much less the wholesale slaughter of the Confederates (no prisoners) by the black troops.
2. Singing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" after passage of the amendment in the House. Gimme a break.
3. Vast public celebration in Washington after passage of the amendment. Never happened.
4. The matters discussed at the Hampton Roads Conference between Lincoln-Seward and the three Confederate commissioners.

 But there were enough excellencies to outweigh the problems by far. I've already mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. But Sally Fields was excellent, as was Tommy Lee Jones as Thad Stevens, and David Strathairn as William Seward. James Spader did an excellent job as Democrat opponent of the amendment in the House, Ohioan W. N. Bilbo. Everything else from cinematography to score was excellent. The best Spielberg flick to come down the pike for a while.
 
Here's the IMDb page.
Here's the Rotten Tomato page.

Coriolanus

This looks pretty damn good . . .

It'll Only Take a Minute

Well, just a little bit over a minute to be purely precise. That is, to watch this short movie. I was just talking recently about the wonders of the Internet and the great stuff you can find there. This fits into that category. It's becoming ever more apparent to me that technology is just becoming totally impenetrable for me. When I was a kid, you could understand the basics of things like the internal combustion engine, the movie camera, light bulb, stereo record, and with a little research perhaps could make these things understandable to somebody else. No longer. I have no idea how this little movie does its tricks, much less how things get put on the Internet, transferred everywhere, etc.). All I can say is, the tricks are fascinating.

   

Source: Here

A Pox on Netflix

David Pogue has a great column today on what was once my, and apparently millions of other people's, favorite company, Netflix. For about $15 a month they would provide as many DVDs as you wanted to watch, just so long you didn't have more than three DVDs out at any one time. I'm not sure exactly when they went into business, but it's been a while back, and I've been with them for a long time. Later the company developed a streaming movie function, too. Different price structures depending on how many DVDs you had out at a time, but you got both services. But recently Netflix, without any warning or preparation of its customers,changed the rules of the game in a big way. They split the two functions, you could have either streaming or physical DVD, but if you wanted to have the two together, they jacked the price way up.

People were pissed. I dropped DVD service altogether. Reportedly over a million customers just left. Now the company has made matters worse. The CEO came out with an "apology" that just made people madder. I won't go into details. You can read the Pogue article. Suffice it to say, people are going to have to deal with two different outfits--Netflix for streaming video, and a new company called "Quixster" for DVDs. Two bills, two web sites. More than twice the headache.

Hell, if I weren't in the middle of "Mad Men"--an HBO TV series Susan and I are watching--I'd be inclined to drop the company too. I am paying $8 a month for streaming, and most the movies offered are distinctly second tier. Just like the company now. They are going to have to reverse field pretty quickly are they are, I think, cooked.

Related articles

• Netflix Plan to Spin off DVD Business as 'Qwikster' Sparks Furious Backlash (techland.time.com)

Are You a Netflix Person?

And are you pissed off? Well, join the club. The Net today is full of articles like this one recounting the overwhelmingly negative reaction of hundreds of thousands of Netflix customers, by all accounts among the most loyal of all, to a substantial across-the-board price hike. You can read the actual amount of the price increases--in some cases an up to 60 percent bump, but suffice it to say, people are not happy. About the only "bargain" left is unlimited streaming of the movies and TV shows for $7.99 a month. The minute you add a DVD to this capability, you're talking twice as much. And DVD only options are up too. And with the streaming only option, there's a catch there too. You could safely characterize what's available for streaming as mostly second-rate with an occasional exception. The TV shows available are passable.

I'm as angry as all the rest. Netflix was the one company among the few that I actually have kind words for. Not any more. They look like just any other corporate shark now, the same reaction everybody else is having. I have already changed my plan to streaming only. I'll give it a whirl for some months and see what happens, especially to see if Netflix increases the quality of what it's got available for streaming. If it doesn't improve, I'm gone. And I suspect many are gone already, as we speak.

Related articles

• Netflix's 60% Price Hike: You've Gotta Be Kidding Me! (pcworld.com)
• Thinking about Netflix Pricing (laf.ee)
• Netflix Gets Greedy, Boosts Price Of Unlimited DVD + Streaming By 60% (reelseo.com)

Not So Much

I just stumbled upon this piece.

I must confess that I'm not an accomplished movie critic. But I do know more than a little about the American Civil War. So let me say this about the following list. It is seriously flawed. Seriously, folks. It it were me, I'd include only two movies on this list, Glory and Gettysburg. Ken Burns' Civil War series is excellent, but it ain't a movie. Shouldn't even be on this list. Gods and Generals is a truly awful movie. How can anybody that saw it think otherwise? My recollection is that I could not wait for it to be over. It was that painful. I agree that Robert Duvall is a fabulous actor, but ten Robert Duvalls could not save this turkey.

The 5 best American Civil War movies capture the essence of our country's bloodiest war. The American Civil War is a filmmaker's gold mine. Bloody battles, families torn apart, gruesome medical scenes, and famous political figures. Plus, hoopskirts. What's not to love? 

1. "Glory" - Stellar performances by Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, Cary Elwes, and Denzel Washington make this historic flick about heroism and racial tension within the country's first black volunteer regiment a home run. The 1989 movie nabbed three Oscars, including a Best Supporting Actor award for Washington.  
2. "Gods and Generals" – Made as a prequel to the wildly successful "Gettysburg", this movie trails General Stonewall Jackson. Jeff Daniels returns to reprise his role of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain alongside Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee. Duvall's performance as Lee is the only thing that outshines the original "Gettysburg."  
3. "Gone with the Wind" – You can't write a top American Civil War movie list and not include "Gone with the Wind". Fiddle-dee-dee! While the movie centers around feisty Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara instead of battlefields, the movie still provides an intimate look at the war-torn lives of those left behind.  
4. Ken Burns' "The Civil War" – While this may not be a fictional movie, this documentary film provides the best and most fascinating historical account of the Civil War. Burns masterfully makes the wealth of historical documents seem riveting. A must-see for any history buff.  
5. "Gettysburg" – In addition to being a moving account of the turning point of the American Civil War, the movie delivers some of the best monologues in film history. Don't let the movie's 261-minute length scare you away from one of the best war movies ever made.

Gone with the Wind is a kind of special case. As a movie, it's pretty damn good. But as history it's terrible. The moonlight and magnolias South that Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara inhabit never existed except in the minds of people who had to explain to the world and most of all to themselves that slavery was OK. There are more erroneous stereotypes in this movie than Carter has liver pills: happy darkies, evil carpetbaggers, malevolent Yankee drifters with naught but rapine on their minds, heroic Confederates, heroic Klansmen, etc., etc.

Bottom line: there aren't a whole bunch of good Civil War movies.

Give Peace a Chance

I watched a movie today about John Lennon: "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," a Dutch-produced documentary about Lennon in his immediate post-Beatle phase, roughly 1969-75. It was a period in his life marked highly visible activism promoting peace, most notably the famous "bed-in's" in Amsterdam and Montreal. I can remember the reaction of people such as my parents and many people like them who if they ever gave John Lennon a thought, it was to lump him in with the incomprehensible collection of nut cases who were, in their minds, destroying the very fabric of the United States. I doubt if many of them could have identified Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as coming from him. What they would say, though, is that it was a subversive song, and that radicals like John Lennon, a damned foreigner anyway, should be thrown out of the country. These were core supporters of the Nixon-instigated proceedings by the Immigration Department to deport Lennon using as a trumped up cause his conviction for marijuana possession back in England.

I cannot help but recall the polarization of the country during the Nixon administration. I was still in the Air Force when Lennon and Ono were staging these protests, and to tell the truth, I don't recall even hearing about them at the time. I was in Turkey, a crucial formative experience for me. It was there, I'm sorry to admit it, that I first realized what "poor" really meant. It was there that I saw with my own eyes how truly ugly Americans could be in the behavior and attitudes of my fellow servicemen. My experience there profoundly changed my outlook about everything: morality, politics, civil and human rights, war. So in some way, even if indirectly, Lennon, too, helped change me from the complacent, somewhat smug, unthinking U.S. occupant I was into the thoroughly engaged, and more often than not outraged, citizen I've become.

Fact is, we, the United States, have not given peace a chance. We don't believe in it; we don't revere it; we don't practice it. Peace is the furthest thing from our minds. Our persistence in the always-fruitless venture of war and destruction is, as I'm sure John Lennon would say, insanity. He wondered then, in the midst of the murderous disaster of the Vietnam war, what it was that the governments of the world actually wanted. It was a good question then, and now in the midst of our murderous disaster in the Middle East, it's a good question now.

These sentiments are of course dangerously radical, as dangerously radical as John Lennon or anyone else who challenges us to imagine a world without war.

Capitalism

It's certainly not a love story between me and capitalism, so I will probably approve of Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism--A Love Story. Right here, you can read a favorable review of the movie. Even with warts, the movie's heart is in the right place. I'm waiting to see if any theater in Oklahoma is gutsy enough to show this movie. If one is, it's practically a lead-pipe cinch that it's not the kind of movie your average Oklahoma bubba is going to go to. But I'll be going. Seating shouldn't be a problem.

USA! (<===irony)

I was at a wedding today. Yes, I know, it's July 4th. Odd time for a wedding. But there it is. Some holiday observations:

• It's a terrible burden for me to be somewhere in a crowd of people whom I don't know. I'm not the least concerned about this in crowds at games, concerts, church, movies. It's not the crowd part that's uncomfortable for me. Not at all. It's the socializing part. A wedding reception is a social event. You sit at tables with people, and you have to talk to them. I have little or nothing to say to strangers, especially if . . .
  
• . . . the wedding reception has not one discernible drop of alcohol, save the champagne the bride and groom sipped oh so delicately as part of the severely scripted event. Everything was on a schedule. Let me say this about that: I come from south Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge. You don't have a gathering of more than three people down there without alcohol. And you would risk social ostracism and perhaps a visit from a shrink if you threw a wedding celebration without alcohol. Wedding receptions? Hell, these are over when they're over. It's certainly most unnatural to have a wedding reception on some kind of schedule: this special dance, cake cutting, toasts, another special dance, now we're going to have the bouquet toss . . . give me a break! Wedding receptions are supposed to be spontaneous and noisy. Loud music, loud people. At times today, you could have mistaken the gathering for a funeral.
• There are 84 houses in the little corner of suburbia I live in. A number of these are flying the flag today, of course. As you know, or might have guessed. I don't fly the flag. I think the flag is flown and waved way too much in this country. It's what defines our patriotism: waving the flag. I don't regard waving the flag, flying the flag, worshiping the flag, treating the flag like it was the Eucharist, as patriotism. Flags are symbols of the globe's national states. The national state is useless as a way of organizing people. By definition, it makes your nation superior to other nations. No one would think of saying that your race makes you superior to another, so why does another accident of birth make you superior? Patriotism has other unfortunate tendencies. It almost always stokes "love of country" to the point where you will kill somebody just because "your country" tells you to. But the point of this bullet is that of all the houses I could be residing next to, I reside next to a dude that's got a frigging flag pole that flies the flag every day. Every day. Today there are a slew of red, white, and blue decorations all over the yard in addition to the obligatory flag. USA! USA! USA!
• Ended the day watching a DVD of Richard Wagner's Sigfried--that's four hours to end the day. I don't know which is more compelling: the magnificent music or the desire you feel to have the story move along a lot faster than it does. Nothing is slower to happen than something substantial in a Wagnerian opera. And Sigfried is notoriously slow to get off the runway.
  

Search Me

I'm going to take a break from what has become maybe a little common for me, I guess--some degree of dissatisfaction about the direction of the country, the state of politics, the perfidy of the Right, the general deterioration of just about everything--except, dare I say it, not the Texas Rangers' season at this point: my team has won 8 of the last 10 on the wings of simply great pitching for this team. They won another tonight, beating Seattle 7-1, down in Arlington. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me when my baseball team is going great!

But back to the point: a break from the usual focus to talk about technology. Specifically the search engine that's become a verb. Google.* How many times today did you google something? Did you know you can find out? Yep: www.google.com/history. You might have to enter your Google password, but you only have to do that once. And then you'll have a whole world of information open up to you. All your searches--images, maps, web sites, etc.--when, if you clicked on any results, etc., etc., etc. Try it. By the way, as of this moment, I've performed 7,357 total Google searches.

And while you're at it, check out the new features that are now on just the regular ole search. You can read about them here and here. I cannot let these enhancements to everyone's searching life pass by without just a few words. But check it out yourself. We're talking about just a plain old garden-variety Google search. You can specialize searches in a whole bunch of ways. Look in forums, videos, reviews. Think how easy this makes finding out about that new book, movie, CD you just heard about. Think about how effortlessly you can find Van Morrison videos. You can isolate the time frame for searches--yesterday? last week? in the last 30 days? And there are some other helpful and fun bells and whistles: a time line feature. I tried "Vicksburg" and found search hits with material back to 1860. (Chicago Trib archive site.) You can also view search results with your term the hub of a spoke of related search subdivisions.

Did you know there's a whole bunch of other things you can do just right in the normal Google search window? Get definitions, do math, convert currency, get the weather, get the time at other places in the world, get sports scores, and more, more, more. Okay. I'll be the first to admit it. I love all this stuff. I've been an information junkie all my life. I'm a historian by profession. I eat research up, and anything that helps me ferret out the useful but obscure source . . . well, I'm for it! So Google's always been fun for me, as well as useful. So new features? Bring 'em on.

(How do you like the Oklahoma Google logo above that I found with "Google logo" as the search term for an image search?)

*There's a ton, a TON, of other Google specialized tools besides the standard search. Ones that I find particularly helpful are: news, bookmarks, Earth, books, scholar, archive--this one searches news archives.

God Talk

It somehow seems fitting that at the milestone of my 300th blog entry on Powderfinger, the subject that intrigues me today is God, religion, spirituality. For two reasons. The first, a movie--the first I've been to in a while--my spouse and I saw last evening, The Soloist with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr. I won't dilate on the story any; you can look it up in IMDB. Wasn't all that great a movie, actually, but that's not the point. What was striking to me was the vivid reminder of how intertwined human beings are with artistic expression. The music of the movie was heavily Beethoven. There was a sizeable chunk of Symphony No. 3, part of the "Emperor Concerto," some Beethoven cello music, and also some Bach, from the unaccompanied cello suites. Which is to say the music was gorgeous. Out of this world.
And that's my point here: to say that music is gorgeous doesn't fully plumb what the music is to us. Music as transfixing as Beethoven's says something about who we are as human beings. What is this power of music over us? Indeed, why is it that art exerts such a powerful influence over us? People will pay millions for a single painting or sculpture. Why does it grip us, hold us, ensnare us? Why are we driven to create it? Why do we visit great art again and again? Who thinks a single view of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel or "Winged Victory" is enough? I've heard Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 at least a hundred times. But its power is not diminished in the slightest by that, in fact, the symphony becomes more entrancing the more it's heard. Examples could be strung out endlessly. Quite simply, although the assertion requires book-length exploration, art opens a window on our origins, our destiny, the shaper of our souls. It shows us who we are--this need to create the beautiful, this drive to drink it all in.

We are spiritual creatures, fashioned in some way, I believe, by a power far beyond our ability to grasp. We try to do explain and probe this mysterious ever-present power in our holy books, our many religious expressions, even our creedal formuations and rituals. But in the end, it's only art that comes close to shutting our mouths in the sheer awe of this power. We know, we sense how subtle, yet how strong, it is, how transformative in its beauty, how awesome in its mystery. It's that power, I believe, that's revealed to us in the arts, and in music especially, that finest of the arts. And it's that power that resides in us that drives humans to make art, to crave art. It's not something they choose, like being an engineer. It's something humans have to do. Like breathing.

Oh, and the second reason for the God talk I mentioned up above? Well, that will have to wait till tomorrow.

Lists: I Love 'Em

It's that time of year for lists of stuff from the past year. You know, bests of, worsts of. That kind of thing. If I had any kind of memory at all, I'd construct my own list of stuff. But I'm doing good to remember last week, much less the whole year. So I have to rely on others to post decent lists for me. I've found a few, and I'll share:

The best list I've seen so far is Arianna Huffington's list of things she wants to forget about 2008. Most, as you might suspect, are politcally connected--several about McCain and Palin. I'm in broad general agreement with everything she lists, and thankfully, I can report that several items there I didn't have the foggiest idea about: Tricia Walsh-Smith, Josef Fritzl in Holland (mein Gott im Himmel!), Levi Johnston (whom I should have remembered, but why would anybody want to remember this nobody?), and Ashley Dupre (ditto).

I like movies, so I searched out a few lists of these: Rotten Tomatoes critics' picks for best and worst movies of 2008. Also Newsday's list, and the nice article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Then I discovered something that can only be described as a treasure trove for list lovers, trivia nuts, and information junkies: Fimoculous.com's concatenation of list of best-of lists for everything from ads to books to gadgets to music to websites and words. Be forewarned: you could sink into this and never surface. Random samples: Slate's best books, Ten Pretty Obvious Video Favorites, and last but hardly least, The Top 60 Japanese Words/Phrases for 2008.

Knock yourself out.

Tears

The other night my wife for life Susan and I watched the latest movie we got from Netflix. I'm terrible about remembering these things. I had to look it up just now to see exactly what the title of it was. I'm thinking it was a movie called Rosenstrasse--although it could have been Ladies in Lavender with Dame Judy Dench. I don't remember. Rossenstrasse a German movie about the resistance of righteous gentiles to the rounding up of the Jews. In this case, it was a fair-sized group of spouses of Jews in Berlin in 1943. But that's beside the point I was going to make. Which is: the movie made me cry.

Tears are on my mind today. For a couple of reasons. We're headed to a funeral next Monday--see my last couple of entries--and I'm sure there will be tears. I don't know if any of them will be mine, although I'm often moved to tears by the tears of others. But what really makes me think of tears is the plethora of them I shed yesterday when for about an hour I thought I had lost my little dog. Some nice people found and returned her, but for a while there I thought she was really gone. Yes, I know it seems ridiculous looking at it on the page now, but I couldn't help it. This raises all kinds of questions, such as how can one get so attached to an animal? And how can one be so devastated by the loss of a pet? And the really big question that occurs to me: why am I making such a big deal about this?

Because it's on my mind. My little granddaughter saw me cry, and my daughter, although it's not the first time for her. Men are not supposed to cry. That's why. Despite all the inroads that have been made in our understanding of men thanks to the ongoing liberation of women, men are still not supposed to cry. And especially at something as inconsequential as the momentary loss of a dog. Yeah, yeah . . . I know about all the dismissals you could make of such a statement, but that doesn't change the fact that this is what I think about it. And I even know why. Like bazillions of others, I was brought up not cry. Men, make that boys, the world over are socialized to stuff their emotions, especially those emotions that bring on tears. This strikes me as bizarre and unnatural, but who am I do try and undo millenia of male formation that whipers in our psyches "crying is for sissies and weaklings"?

This can't be right. But there it is.

A Few Good Billions

Is anybody else bothered by the fact that we taxpayers spend untold millions, if not billions of dollars, for the armed forces to advertise? What made me think of this was the slick ad that appeared on the screen before the movie the other day. "Army Strong" is the current Madison Avenue theme to entice young people into the ranks, where they will be taught to say, grunt, shout "hooah" at all occasions--esprit, ya know--and not incidentally, of course, be fed as human fodder into the maw of whatever war whatever commander-in-chief, even a dangerously deluded one like Bush, wants to send them. These campaigns are devised by the most talented ad agencies money can buy. And why not? Money is never an object to the military. It gushes from an unending spigot since neither Congress nor the American people, not to mention a president, have the intelligence or courage to question the billions upon billions upon hundreds of billions this country spends on "defense," one of the best examples of Orwellian speech our government has devised. The American military hasn't defended anything since the end of World War II except the right of corporations to operate without hinderence anywhere on the globe they choose.

We're such a bunch of unreflecting morons! Spineless sheep! We citizens who have it within our power (still, but maybe not for long) to determine the course this country takes. But we've gotten so dumb, so uninformed, so addicted to the consumption drug, we bow to the Defense Department god and give it everything it wants, we internalize its adverstising slogans, and we break out the flags at any and all military adventures the US launches. Meanwhile the country is falling down around us.

It's difficult to find out exactly what military advertising costs us. I tried the standard Google searches but couldn't turn anything up. Why shouldn't this be an easy number to come by? I did discover this interesting tidbit reporting that the Air Force is spending our money simply on advertising for itself. Got that? Not for recruits, simply for PR, so we, through our elected agents of capitalism, will give them even more millions. Well, somebody might object to this, but don't go betting a court anywhere is going to find anything wrong with it. We already live in a military state.

[And then there's recruiting in high schools, ROTC, and other intrusions of the military into the fabric of our lives. But that's for another day.]

"Why So Serious?"

Went to the movie yesterday with my grandson--the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight. It was fun, disturbing, thrilling, and Heath Ledger should get another Oscar for his portrayal of a really evil Joker. I wouldn't mind seeing this one again, it's that good. The top critics are almost unanimous in their praise. Dark. The darkest of the Batman movies. With a magnificent bad guy: The Joker. The Joker is a murderous psychotic, who enjoys killing and sows chaos wherever he goes, all the while behind a hideous clown face. And he's clever: he does have plans (despite his line to Batman at one point, "Do I look like a man with a plan?")--fiendish ones that always result in people dying. He brings out the worst in people. And he relishes it. Whereas Jack Nicholson's Joker of almost 20 years ago was actually amusing at times, it's only accidental when the present manifestation is. He's a killer.

But when the Joker is on the screen, he's mesmerizing. Here's what he says to one of his hapless victims, a Gotham City mobster who's had the temerity to oppose the Joker's takeover. He's got a knife inside the guy's mouth and he's saying . . .

Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was....a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. Turns to me and he says "Why so serious?" Comes at me with the knife,"Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth. "Lets put a smile on that face!" And..... Why so serious?

You can guess what happens next.

Why so serious indeed. Because at bottom the movie is serious and far from a mindless escape flick. In a strange and unsettling way the mayhem and wholesale destruction and killing at the hands of a guy who has no rules reminded me of the reason I protest the same thing our country is doing. Not only overtly in our merciless disregard for the rights of others in foreign policy and our murderous invasion of Iraq, but covertly in our voracious, destructive consumption, which is as without compunction as any of the Joker's evil antics. No, ultimately The Dark Knight is about us.

It's del.icio.us!

It struck me earlier today when I was adding yet another URL to my del.icio.us listing just how useful this community here's-a-site-I-thought-interesting-or-useful-enough-to-save tool (actually, I think the the shorter term is "bookmarks") is to me. And who knows how many other people might have benefited from my tagged sites?

I use de.licio.us and a number of other of these community collections of bookmarks for research all the time. Like any good idea on the Net, and I think del.icio.us was the first in this genre, there have been a number of imitators: Digg, Furl, reddit, and StumbleUpon to mention only the most popular alternatives. There's a fairly useful list right here.

Anyway, I got to thinking about what I've accumulated on the site over the 2-3 years I've been adding to it. So in my demented compulsion to dig into totally useless accumulations of data I discovered the following about the del.icio.us listing for "baysage". As of today, there's a total of 1,052 entries and 120 separate tags. It's quite likely that some of these sites have been taken down already. It's also likely that I'll never again go to many more of them. But I use del.icio.us frequently and in the meantime just perusing the list provides an excellent little guide to what I'm interested in, and in many cases the intensity of that interest. Of course only a tiny number of my interests would have just one tag. The whole point of del.icio.us is to cross-reference with the tags so that you can find that site again even if you have only the vaguest of memories, which naturally is a great feature for me. So here are all my del.icio.us tags, bundled under large descriptors and showing how many of my entries have a particular tag, all the way from "reference" with 258 sites to "WWII," "WWI," and "Oklahoma" with only one. Some of these are quirky. The ones labeled "most-popular," for example, are sites that over 1,000 other people also have on their tag list.

Click away. You might find something interesting.

• Arts&Humanities

  • 175 history
  • 86 music
  • 72 art
  • 55 books
  • 53 reviews
  • 44 poetry
  • 41 literature
  • 39 writing
  • 28 humanities
  • 25 museum
  • 24 language
  • 19 classical
  • 18 philosophy
  • 15 reggae
  • 14 biography
  • 12 architecture
  • 7 artists
  • 7 stories

• Computer&Net

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Computer&Net

  • 129 tools
  • 87 images
  • 86 internet
  • 72 computer
  • 67 search
  • 58 blog
  • 52 software
  • 26 bookmark
  • 24 graphics
  • 18 Google
  • 13 microsoft
  • 7 iPod
  • 6 hoaxes

• Culture&Society

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Culture&Society

  • 114 news
  • 86 music
  • 65 baseball
  • 57 shopping
  • 56 food+drink
  • 55 stats
  • 54 culture
  • 54 fun
  • 46 entertainment
  • 33 sports
  • 32 recipes
  • 32 TV
  • 30 games
  • 29 travel
  • 24 bargains
  • 21 how-to
  • 21 radio
  • 19 newspaper
  • 17 movies
  • 17 mp3
  • 15 finance
  • 15 reggae
  • 15 wine
  • 14 forum
  • 14 rock
  • 10 interviews
  • 7 iPod
  • 7 satire
  • 6 beer
  • 6 Germany
  • 6 real-estate
  • 5 community
  • 4 awards
  • 3 gifts

• CurrentEvents

  
  
  
  
  
  

• CurrentEvents

  • 114 news
  • 80 commentary
  • 80 politics
  • 53 progressive
  • 52 magazine
  • 27 article
  • 19 newspaper
  • 4 awards

• Entertainment

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Entertainment

  • 86 music
  • 65 baseball
  • 46 entertainment
  • 40 chess
  • 32 TV
  • 30 games
  • 29 travel
  • 21 radio
  • 7 iPod
  • 7 satire
  • 7 stories

• History

  
  
  
  
  
  

• History

  • 175 history
  • 23 CivilWar
  • 14 biography
  • 10 military
  • 6 Iraq
  • 2 Vietnam
  • 1 medieval
  • 1 WWII

• Miscellany

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Miscellany

  • 56 food+drink
  • 54 fun
  • 31 miscellany
  • 27 article
  • 21 how-to
  • 12 humor
  • 7 iPod
  • 7 stories
  • 6 real-estate
  • 4 awards
  • 3 gifts
  • 2 future

• Research&Reference

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Research&Reference

  • 298 reference
  • 192 portal
  • 114 news
  • 79 sources
  • 70 research
  • 67 search
  • 45 maps
  • 45 teaching
  • 38 UOP
  • 31 government
  • 24 health
  • 21 how-to
  • 21 legal
  • 19 newspaper
  • 13 ebooks

• Science

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Science

  • 55 science
  • 41 geography
  • 33 economics
  • 9 astronomy
  • 5 biology
  • 4 physics
  • 2 ecology
  • 2 psychology

• Spirituality

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Spirituality

  • 103 religion
  • 41 Catholicism
  • 38 Christianity
  • 18 philosophy
  • 16 Scripture
  • 16 spirituality
  • 15 Islam
  • 12 Hinduism
  • 10 Judaism
  • 9 mythology
  • 8 Buddhism
  • 5 homiletics

• unbundled tags

  
  
  
  
  
  

• unbundled tags

  • 108 most-popular
  • 10 Neil
  • 8 theology
  • 7 Rangers
  • 6 peace&justice
  • 4 football
  • 3 pens
  • 3 Taoism
  • 1 bridge
  • 1 databases
  • 1 identity-theft

Lay Your Money Down

There's a report today that a U.S. Appeals Court has ruled that the U.S. discriminates against the blind by the way it designs its paper money. Well, it's about time. It's been apparent to me ever since living in Europe and seeing how the rest of the world does money that the U.S. is once again provincial to the point of ridiculousness. I don't know of any other country whose paper bills are all of the same size and color. One of the things I wondered about while I was watching the movie "Ray" a few years ago was how Ray Charles knew he was being paid enough in those early days before he could afford to hire people to take care of things like that. I'm sure it's the same problem for every other blind person. (Of course, in the middle class world, credit cards are the thing. That's because the middle class is borrowed to the eyeballs supporting the country and their overstreched consumption since the moneyed classes don't pay anywhere near what they ought to.) The story says this decision could force the U.S. to redesign its paper money, either making bills of different sizes or raising the numbers and lettering on them. Good idea.

While I'm on the subject, where in the hell are the dollar U.S. coins? These things should be circulating freely and helping us all out. But they don't; they get hoarded. And why don't they circulate more freely? Well, apparently as long as the dollar bill stays in circulation, the coins are doomed. Moreover, there's all kinds of ambivalence about the coins among Americans. Check out the comments here.

Wind-Up Toy Soldiers

The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism.

So begins a piece by Arianna Huffington in today's Huffington Post. She decries the lack of media attention to the revelation by the New York Times Sunday a week ago about what can be described only as collusion between the Defense Dept and the tribe of so-called "military analysts" who beguiled us with their charts, maps, and expertise during the early days of the Iraq war. It seems these retired brass guys were specially schmoozed by Rumsfeld and cronies with special briefings and provided talking points on the Iraq situation. In other words, all these guys were primed and prompted by the Defense establishment to say exactly what it wanted them to say. So these guys dutifully trotted out Bush administration propaganda under the guise of unbiased expertise on military matters. Wind-up toy soldiers marching to their pre-programmed beat. This comes as no surprise to me. I was around the US military long enough to know what a duplicitous organization it is. I can remember how TV was full of testosterone chest-beating about the glorious US march to victory in the early days of the war. "Mission Accomplished" was right around the corner.

It also turns out that a large percentage of these mouthpieces are also lobbyists for various and sundry defense contractors, the bloated bastards who have and are still making obscene profits from the death and destruction in Iraq. Not to mention the billions upon billions they're getting for weapons systems still in development.

All of this dovetails with a very good movie I watched with my wife last night: "Lions for Lambs", a Robert Redford-directed flick (also with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep) about Afghanistan conflict. Streep a TV reporter gets and exclusive one hour interview with Cruise, a high-flying GOP senator with his eye on the White House. Long story short: he advocates a "new" strategy to win the war, one that in Streep's eyes, seems destined to the same futile and bloody failure as all the previous strategies. The movie seems to bear this out. But . . . Streep's boss refuses to frame the story through her eyes, but rather insists that being a shill for the senator's views is the only correct way to go.

By the way, a lot of critics didn't like the movie . . . some explicitly damned it because it was more about ideas than characters. Well, there you go. Maybe that's why I liked it.