Recent viewings
Idiocracy. I wanted to like this movie. I really did. It's the work of Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, and it has a premise that's tailor-made to his satirical view of the human race.
Like C.M. Kornbluth's famous tale The Marching Morons, Idiocracy explores what might happen if stupid people reproduce faster than smart people. Unfortunately, the subtle wit and humanity that characterize King of the Hill (if not necessarily Beavis or Butthead) seem to have been jettisoned in favor of broad, blatant lampooning of human stupidity. The jokes in Idiocracy land with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Even worse, an obsequious, overbearing and totally unnecessary voiceover tells us the plot instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves.
The protagonist, an average fellow who works in an unchallenging job in a military library, is drafted into a human-hibernation experiment which goes awry. Along with a prostitute drafted as a female subject, he wakes up in the 26th century.
Meanwhile, as our narrator has explained in a fruity baritone voice, the human race has become dramatically stupid due to the difference between the reproductive rates of intelligent people, who use contraception and wait until they're economically ready for children, and ignorant idiots, who don't, and consequently multiply like rabbits "in the absence of any natural predators". This is dramatized through a series of vignettes featuring a high-achieving yuppie couple, who finally fail to produce any offspring at all, and "Clevon, IQ 84", a trailer-park lothario who impregnates every dimwitted female within reach, and consequently produces a family tree that looks like the old Prell shampoo ad. ("And so on, and so on....") The vignettes would have been sufficient to convey the premise, unless of course the film's producers thought their audience was too stupid to figure out the implications. If so, this would be a whole new level of irony.
The dystopia into which our hero awakes in 2505 is a no-holds barred depiction of a society that is collapsing due to a lack of common sense. Grunting morons spend their lives dimly masturbating to 24-hour sex broadcasts or burbling idiotically at one-joke shows like "Ow, My Balls!", which consists entirely of a man getting racked in different ways. Meanwhile, uncollected trash piles up to the second and third story of the dismal housing projects in which most people appear to live, and the trash that is collected is piled into comically absurd mountains of garbage that tower over the landscape and occasionally collapse, pouring avalanches of junk that swirl around the teetering foundations of decrepit skyscrapers and cascade through the streets of the cities. Crops die because their water supplies have been replaced with sports drinks in a bid to boost consumption and boost the manufacturer's stock price.
There are some clever sight gags buried in the background. If you look closely, you'll notice things like leaning skyscrapers "reinforced" with what appear to be giant rubber bands binding them to each other. Various catastrophes occur in the background, and are duly ignored by all. Fuddruckers finally achieves what its name has always aspired to be. And there is a certain amount of subtle irony in the fact that many of the problems of this "stupid society" -- ever-growing mountains of trash accumulated with "no plan at all for disposing of it", and environmental contamination justified because it "creates jobs", for example -- are in fact policies that our present society is pursuing by default.
Unfortunately, most of the characters which Judge places in this dystopia are so repellent that it's difficult to care whether they live or die. The protagonist is tolerable in a bland, everyman kind of way, but his female counterpart, while attractive, gets practically no help from the script or the director, and everyone else is so obnoxious that by the time I was halfway through the movie I literally hoped they would all die. Perhaps anticipating that any normal human being would have the same reaction, the movie concocts a way to force Our Hero into attempting to save the dimwitted descendents of humanity from themselves in order to save himself. But to say anything more would be to spoil the surprises (such as they are).
Perhaps my standards are too high. Idiocracy does at least have one or two provocative ideas lurking under its vulgarity, and I did laugh with it, although more often at a minor sight gag in the background than in the vulgar excesses going on in the foreground. Recommended with reservations.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Recent reads
The New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad, by Robert E. Mohowski. The NYS&W is one of those railroads whose mythic stature among railfans far outweighs its economic importance. This is no doubt partially because its main line ran near the editorial headquarters of Railroad Model Craftsman and Railroad & Railfan magazines, prompting an unusual number of articles about the “Susie-Q” or “Suskie-Hannah” in those publications. But it does deserve much of the attention it receives. Its role in the Great Game between railroad empires vying for control of traffic entering and leaving New York City via northern New Jersey was as complex and tension-provoking as any high-stakes poker game, and its latter day visibility as a commuter route kept it in the forefront of public attention in its local area. It also passed through some extraordinarily striking scenery, especially on its western end, and made use of some unusual motive power including a dizzying variety of rail motor cars, ranging from early Brills with mechanical transmissions to EMC gas-electrics to streamlined ACF Motorailers to stainless-steel Budd Rail Diesel Cars, some of which remain in operation today on commuter railways such as the Trinity Rail Express in Texas.
Mohowski’s book concentrates on two periods of the railroad’s tumultuous history. The first few chapters detail its early business history, in which it was a pawn in the Great Game between established routes, like the Erie and the Lackawanna, and rambunctious latecomers like the New York, Oswego & Midland. The NYS&W’s predecessor, the New Jersey Midland, was cobbled together from railroads intended to serve purely local purposes, but it possessed one great advantage: a route connecting the ferries on the west side of the Hudson River, across from New York City, with the countryside to the west, and to the larger railroads which carried traffic from points further west. The NYO&M captured the NJM in order to use it as the final link in its bid to capture traffic between the Great Lakes and New York City. When the NYO&M’s high-stakes gamble collapsed in bankruptcy, the Susquehanna diverted its corporate attention westward, toward the lucrative anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Here, once again, it found itself an undercapitalized newcomer, attempting to use less-desirable routes over rough topography to siphon traffic away from established railroads, but its aggressive rate cutting won support from independent mine operators. In 1897 J.P. Morgan engineered a takeover by its competitor the Erie Railroad, which for the next forty years operated it as a secondary branchline and thereby eliminated its rate-cutting competition.
This era in the railroads’ history ended with bankruptcy and retrenchment in the late 1930s. The Pennsylvania extensions were abandoned, along with the declining market in anthracite, but the road was freed from Erie control. Mohowski’s coverage of the subsequent decades in the road’s history concentrates on its commuter operations, with particular attention to the variety of unorthodox self-propelled passenger equipment which it used for this service.
My only complaint: I would have liked to see more detailed coverage of the railroad’s freight operations, including employee timetables and description of day-to-day operating practices, and more photographs and specifications of the road’s equipment and facilities.
The New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad, by Robert E. Mohowski. The NYS&W is one of those railroads whose mythic stature among railfans far outweighs its economic importance. This is no doubt partially because its main line ran near the editorial headquarters of Railroad Model Craftsman and Railroad & Railfan magazines, prompting an unusual number of articles about the “Susie-Q” or “Suskie-Hannah” in those publications. But it does deserve much of the attention it receives. Its role in the Great Game between railroad empires vying for control of traffic entering and leaving New York City via northern New Jersey was as complex and tension-provoking as any high-stakes poker game, and its latter day visibility as a commuter route kept it in the forefront of public attention in its local area. It also passed through some extraordinarily striking scenery, especially on its western end, and made use of some unusual motive power including a dizzying variety of rail motor cars, ranging from early Brills with mechanical transmissions to EMC gas-electrics to streamlined ACF Motorailers to stainless-steel Budd Rail Diesel Cars, some of which remain in operation today on commuter railways such as the Trinity Rail Express in Texas.
Mohowski’s book concentrates on two periods of the railroad’s tumultuous history. The first few chapters detail its early business history, in which it was a pawn in the Great Game between established routes, like the Erie and the Lackawanna, and rambunctious latecomers like the New York, Oswego & Midland. The NYS&W’s predecessor, the New Jersey Midland, was cobbled together from railroads intended to serve purely local purposes, but it possessed one great advantage: a route connecting the ferries on the west side of the Hudson River, across from New York City, with the countryside to the west, and to the larger railroads which carried traffic from points further west. The NYO&M captured the NJM in order to use it as the final link in its bid to capture traffic between the Great Lakes and New York City. When the NYO&M’s high-stakes gamble collapsed in bankruptcy, the Susquehanna diverted its corporate attention westward, toward the lucrative anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Here, once again, it found itself an undercapitalized newcomer, attempting to use less-desirable routes over rough topography to siphon traffic away from established railroads, but its aggressive rate cutting won support from independent mine operators. In 1897 J.P. Morgan engineered a takeover by its competitor the Erie Railroad, which for the next forty years operated it as a secondary branchline and thereby eliminated its rate-cutting competition.
This era in the railroads’ history ended with bankruptcy and retrenchment in the late 1930s. The Pennsylvania extensions were abandoned, along with the declining market in anthracite, but the road was freed from Erie control. Mohowski’s coverage of the subsequent decades in the road’s history concentrates on its commuter operations, with particular attention to the variety of unorthodox self-propelled passenger equipment which it used for this service.
My only complaint: I would have liked to see more detailed coverage of the railroad’s freight operations, including employee timetables and description of day-to-day operating practices, and more photographs and specifications of the road’s equipment and facilities.
Recent reads
The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie, by Sandra Sabatini. This collection of short stories by a Canadian author was recommended to me by Fiend, and I find that the two stories she particularly mentioned – the first and last ones in the book – are the ones that stick in my mind also.
The first, the title story of the collection, relates the thoughts of a young girl who eagerly anticipates a school trip to Marineland, an aquatic-life theme park that features performing dolphins. She’s also approaching adulthood in an environment that bodes ill for the expectations of childhood, and Sabatini effectively plays off the parallels between the two. The last story, “Maternal Instinct”, seems more muddled. The story of a suburban couple’s attempts to get rid of an unwelcome pair of nesting raccoons – and of the tragic outcome – is interspersed with a running account of the troubles encountered by the wife and the children at school and at home. Logic would suggest that Sabatini intends for there to be a link or parallel between the two, but it eluded me.
Many of the other stories, mostly set in rural Ontario’s cottage country, deal with the problems that beset children on the verge of adolescence, particularly teenage girls whose developing sexuality puts them in situations that they are not prepared to deal with. Sabatini has a brisk but emotive writing style that puts the reader inside the heads of her (mostly) adolescent protagonists. Her stories are best enjoyed, I think, in single doses. Her writing style is enjoyable, but reading a half dozen of these stories at once tends to emphasize the degree to which she frequently dwells on similar themes.
The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie, by Sandra Sabatini. This collection of short stories by a Canadian author was recommended to me by Fiend, and I find that the two stories she particularly mentioned – the first and last ones in the book – are the ones that stick in my mind also.
The first, the title story of the collection, relates the thoughts of a young girl who eagerly anticipates a school trip to Marineland, an aquatic-life theme park that features performing dolphins. She’s also approaching adulthood in an environment that bodes ill for the expectations of childhood, and Sabatini effectively plays off the parallels between the two. The last story, “Maternal Instinct”, seems more muddled. The story of a suburban couple’s attempts to get rid of an unwelcome pair of nesting raccoons – and of the tragic outcome – is interspersed with a running account of the troubles encountered by the wife and the children at school and at home. Logic would suggest that Sabatini intends for there to be a link or parallel between the two, but it eluded me.
Many of the other stories, mostly set in rural Ontario’s cottage country, deal with the problems that beset children on the verge of adolescence, particularly teenage girls whose developing sexuality puts them in situations that they are not prepared to deal with. Sabatini has a brisk but emotive writing style that puts the reader inside the heads of her (mostly) adolescent protagonists. Her stories are best enjoyed, I think, in single doses. Her writing style is enjoyable, but reading a half dozen of these stories at once tends to emphasize the degree to which she frequently dwells on similar themes.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Recent reads
Wolf Tower, by Tanith Lee. A fast-paced young-adult novel from a veteran fantasy and SF author. Claidi is a serving-girl in The House, an immense castle ruled by a cruel, decadent, self-absorbed aristocracy. There are distinct hints of Gormenghast here, although Lee does not imitate Peake's gnarled, baroque prose. The story we read is made up of Claidi's diary entries, and as such are in her own narrative voice. It's a rather modern-sounding voice, full of sarcasm and adolescent humor as well as occasional adolescent angst and self-doubt, but it's internally consistent throughout the story. The story moves quickly as Claidi's life is radically altered by an unprecedented visitor to The House. Adventures, danger, and deception follow, along with romantic longings and confusion. The cultures encountered are entertainingly strange, although Lee is clearly not aiming at the same level of anthropological sophistication as Ursula LeGuin. It's an entertaining story for YAs and others who enjoy light fantasy, and a promising start to a series.
Wolf Tower, by Tanith Lee. A fast-paced young-adult novel from a veteran fantasy and SF author. Claidi is a serving-girl in The House, an immense castle ruled by a cruel, decadent, self-absorbed aristocracy. There are distinct hints of Gormenghast here, although Lee does not imitate Peake's gnarled, baroque prose. The story we read is made up of Claidi's diary entries, and as such are in her own narrative voice. It's a rather modern-sounding voice, full of sarcasm and adolescent humor as well as occasional adolescent angst and self-doubt, but it's internally consistent throughout the story. The story moves quickly as Claidi's life is radically altered by an unprecedented visitor to The House. Adventures, danger, and deception follow, along with romantic longings and confusion. The cultures encountered are entertainingly strange, although Lee is clearly not aiming at the same level of anthropological sophistication as Ursula LeGuin. It's an entertaining story for YAs and others who enjoy light fantasy, and a promising start to a series.
Recent Reads
The Long Truce : How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A.J. Conyers. Conyers, a professor at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, examines the development of the western doctrine of religious toleration. He seems predisposed to find pragmatic, if not wholly cynical, reasons underlying this doctrine, and bemoans the creation of a so-called "bi-polar society in which the isolated citizen confronts the unmediated power of the state."
I will admit to skimming large portions of the book, as I found his ideas both unconvincing and unappealing. Would the prospects of an individual "confronting the unmediated power of the state" be helped or harmed by adding religious persecution to the weapons which the latter brings to bear against him?
The Long Truce : How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A.J. Conyers. Conyers, a professor at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, examines the development of the western doctrine of religious toleration. He seems predisposed to find pragmatic, if not wholly cynical, reasons underlying this doctrine, and bemoans the creation of a so-called "bi-polar society in which the isolated citizen confronts the unmediated power of the state."
I will admit to skimming large portions of the book, as I found his ideas both unconvincing and unappealing. Would the prospects of an individual "confronting the unmediated power of the state" be helped or harmed by adding religious persecution to the weapons which the latter brings to bear against him?
Recent Reads
SPV's Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. An amazing and essential resource for any railfan or railroad historian. Each volume covers a different part of the country, which is then broken down into smaller sections for detailed coverage. The atlas attempts to show the route of every rail line constructed, with its original builder and current (or last) operator identified. Railroads currently in operation are designated by solid lines; abandoned railroads, with dashed lines. Indexes help identify specific railroads and guide the user to the pages depicting particular locations. I've noticed a few minor mistakes and omissions of minor and ephemeral operations such as logging railroads, but on the whole it's still a great source of information that can be very difficult to find elsewhere. Any library with any measurable degree of interest in railroad history or local history should consider getting a copy of the volume relevant to its area.
SPV's Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. An amazing and essential resource for any railfan or railroad historian. Each volume covers a different part of the country, which is then broken down into smaller sections for detailed coverage. The atlas attempts to show the route of every rail line constructed, with its original builder and current (or last) operator identified. Railroads currently in operation are designated by solid lines; abandoned railroads, with dashed lines. Indexes help identify specific railroads and guide the user to the pages depicting particular locations. I've noticed a few minor mistakes and omissions of minor and ephemeral operations such as logging railroads, but on the whole it's still a great source of information that can be very difficult to find elsewhere. Any library with any measurable degree of interest in railroad history or local history should consider getting a copy of the volume relevant to its area.
To film the unfilmable book....
The Guardian reports that Atlas Shrugged is headed for a big screen near you, with Angelina Jolie as railroad boss Dagny Taggart. No word yet on whether John Galt's 60-page speech will be edited.
The Guardian reports that Atlas Shrugged is headed for a big screen near you, with Angelina Jolie as railroad boss Dagny Taggart. No word yet on whether John Galt's 60-page speech will be edited.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Patent law and life (or, who owns your genes?)
The New York Times discusses the patentability of human genes and other aspects of genomic medicine.
I wouldn't be surprised any day to see a heavily-funded bribery/lobbying push to make patent protection "harmonize" with copyright protection, so that biotech and pharmaceutical corporations can stop depending on new research and instead, like Disney and the rest of the copyright barons, kick back and enjoy eternal monopoly profits from the works of the dead.
The New York Times discusses the patentability of human genes and other aspects of genomic medicine.
... From the moment the first biotech patents were granted in 1980, the industry was hailed as a new frontier — uncharted territory where a new generation of scientist-inventors could reap the traditional rewards of innovation.There is a silver lining, in the long term: the monopolies conferred by patent law, rightly or wrongly, last for a far shorter term than the eternally extensible copyrights granted by our current system. A U.S. patent with a term of "20 years from the earliest claimed filing date or 17 years from the issue date", will become void within one generation. Will this last?
But even as the gold rush began, critics as varied as scientists and human rights advocates declared that biotech’s new intellectual property frontier was already occupied. Claims of novelty and innovation as the basis for life patents, they said, disregarded the realities of not only nature, but also of research practices, democratic decision-making and global governance....
I wouldn't be surprised any day to see a heavily-funded bribery/lobbying push to make patent protection "harmonize" with copyright protection, so that biotech and pharmaceutical corporations can stop depending on new research and instead, like Disney and the rest of the copyright barons, kick back and enjoy eternal monopoly profits from the works of the dead.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
A place to live?
Business cars for sale. Starting at only $95000!
I might need a boxcar or two to store books, though.
Business cars for sale. Starting at only $95000!
I might need a boxcar or two to store books, though.
Adjuncts and graduation rates (and other measures of educational quality)
This article from InsideHigherEd strikes me as being applicable not just to teaching positions, but to all those professions where fulltime jobs, and the ability to devote full time attention to those jobs, are being abolished in favor of part time peonage.
This article from InsideHigherEd strikes me as being applicable not just to teaching positions, but to all those professions where fulltime jobs, and the ability to devote full time attention to those jobs, are being abolished in favor of part time peonage.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
How interesting, in an otherworldly kind of way
The October 15 issue of Library Journal has eventually made its way down the pecking order to the level of peons like me. The cover story:
The October 15 issue of Library Journal has eventually made its way down the pecking order to the level of peons like me. The cover story:
Bring on the party hats and noisemakers; library and information science (LIS) graduates have a milestone to celebrate. While it took almost ten years since the last significant salary breakthrough in 1997, starting salaries for American Library Association (ALA)–accredited master’s degree graduates breached the $40,000 barrier. In 2005, the average annual starting salary for new LIS grads was $40,118. Additionally, it was a stellar year for minority graduates, with average starting salaries increasing a full 6%, to $42,333.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Poetry Tuesday
Slow Freight, by Karen Fiser
(from her collection Words Like Fate and Pain)
Swelling bone my boxcars
jolt down the steep track
of night. They click and sway
around the long deep curve
of the thirsty hours, then far
across pale rumpled sheets
of desert and slowly up into the aching
mountains, silvered face of rock
slanting away to the empty lairs
of animals who spend their nights
outside awake. The dry stars observe
from their freezing distances.
Slow Freight, by Karen Fiser
(from her collection Words Like Fate and Pain)
Swelling bone my boxcars
jolt down the steep track
of night. They click and sway
around the long deep curve
of the thirsty hours, then far
across pale rumpled sheets
of desert and slowly up into the aching
mountains, silvered face of rock
slanting away to the empty lairs
of animals who spend their nights
outside awake. The dry stars observe
from their freezing distances.
Recent viewings
The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines. The previous installment in this series of TV movies was ineptly amusing. This one's just inept. Why are there Dead Sea Scrolls, produced in the first century AD, in King Solomon's super-secret treasure hoard from circa 1000 BC? How do two men on horseback survive a three-story plunge into five-foot-deep water? (And how do they avoid being sued by the makers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?)
Bah. Who cares.
The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines. The previous installment in this series of TV movies was ineptly amusing. This one's just inept. Why are there Dead Sea Scrolls, produced in the first century AD, in King Solomon's super-secret treasure hoard from circa 1000 BC? How do two men on horseback survive a three-story plunge into five-foot-deep water? (And how do they avoid being sued by the makers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?)
Bah. Who cares.
The Decider Speaks
Since I can't hear tonight's epic state-of-the-union speech, I Decided to enjoy posting a link to Roddy Mccorley's sarcastically Seussian summary of Bushisms.
Since I can't hear tonight's epic state-of-the-union speech, I Decided to enjoy posting a link to Roddy Mccorley's sarcastically Seussian summary of Bushisms.
An unusual case in IP law
Unabomber Wages Legal Battle to Halt the Sale of Papers (NY Times)
Unabomber Wages Legal Battle to Halt the Sale of Papers (NY Times)
Nine years after he began serving a life sentence for the Unabomber crimes, Theodore J. Kaczynski is fighting to reclaim more than 40,000 pages of his writings and correspondence so he can preserve them in their rawest form for the public to read....
The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski’s victims....
In the spirit of the Bulwer-Lytton award....
The Lionel Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest
Sadly, it seems that the Flint Public Library has discontinued its annual Julia A. Moore Festival, which for many years .... honored.... the Sweet Singer of Michigan. A pity. I coulda beena contendah.
The Lionel Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest
Sadly, it seems that the Flint Public Library has discontinued its annual Julia A. Moore Festival, which for many years .... honored.... the Sweet Singer of Michigan. A pity. I coulda beena contendah.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Recent reads
Cripple Creek! A quick history of the world's greatest gold camp, by Leland Feitz.
Of course my eyes turned first to the photographs depicting the fantastically convoluted tangle of railroad and interurban lines that once snaked through the hills between Cripple Creek and the nearby mining towns and linked the whole district to mainline connections at Colorado Springs and Florence. However, the author's anecdotes about Cripple Creek's early days also make interesting reading. There are the usual accounts of unlikely discoveries, such as the miner who located a rich lode by throwing his hat in the air and digging where it landed. There are tales of lucky/unlucky prospectors who discovered fantastic caches of gold only to lose it all to big-city sharpers and die in miserable poverty. And there's the story of Pearl DeVere, the notorious madame of the "Old Homestead Parlor House", whose body was accompanied to the cemetary by a solemnly respectful procession of town officials and police. Yep, things were different in those days. But I find it interesting that anecdotes about old mining towns seem to follow similar patterns, whether they take place in Colorado, Nevada, California or Alaska.
Cripple Creek! A quick history of the world's greatest gold camp, by Leland Feitz.
Of course my eyes turned first to the photographs depicting the fantastically convoluted tangle of railroad and interurban lines that once snaked through the hills between Cripple Creek and the nearby mining towns and linked the whole district to mainline connections at Colorado Springs and Florence. However, the author's anecdotes about Cripple Creek's early days also make interesting reading. There are the usual accounts of unlikely discoveries, such as the miner who located a rich lode by throwing his hat in the air and digging where it landed. There are tales of lucky/unlucky prospectors who discovered fantastic caches of gold only to lose it all to big-city sharpers and die in miserable poverty. And there's the story of Pearl DeVere, the notorious madame of the "Old Homestead Parlor House", whose body was accompanied to the cemetary by a solemnly respectful procession of town officials and police. Yep, things were different in those days. But I find it interesting that anecdotes about old mining towns seem to follow similar patterns, whether they take place in Colorado, Nevada, California or Alaska.
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