This article in the New Jersey Real-Time News shows that a director of a preschool that serves 350 children and has $4.3 million in annual revenues makes $300,000 in annual salary. Something is not right here. You can get very qualified people for a third of that or less to be a director of a preschool. I wonder if this director ever plays with the children? Wearing a 3-piece suit to work in that environment makes me doubt that.
Month: April 2010
Speaking at Toastmasters
I gave a speech at the San Diego “Voyagers” Toastmasters Club this morning. The Voyagers are the most vibrant and active Toastmasters Club I have ever visited. Many small clubs are struggling to attract enough members to hold meaningful meetings. The Voyagers seem to have people standing in line to give speeches.
I was honored to get a slot as a guest speaker. My title was “I am a Bookstore Mooch,” and the theme was loosely based on the content of this blog entry in the past.
Toastmasters is a great way to improve your public speaking skills, boost your confidence in standing in front of a crowd, train your ability to think on your feet and most importantly, learn how to think before you speak. — And it is a fun social activity.
Find out everything you need to know at the Toastmasters Website.
Movie Review: The Hurt Locker
There is no point in my reviewing a motion picture that won the Oscar for Best Picture. Who am I to add to this honor? Here is Ebert’s review written long before the Oscar was awarded.
The clip below shows where the odd title “The Hurt Locker” came from:
This is a film, like many others before, that made me think about the insanity of war. The movie starts out stating that “war is a drug.” When watching this story, we are overwhelmed with suspense. The hero, Sgt. James, is addicted to the adrenaline that comes from having, most likely, the most dangerous job in the world. He puts on a protective bomb suit and walks up to bombs, booby traps and suicide bombers and, with the steady hand of a surgeon and nerves as thick as the steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, methodically and carefully, ever so carefully, disarms them. He takes the trigger devices that could have taken his life and collects them in a box under his bed.
The bombs he takes apart are so strong they would obliterate an entire city block. He knows that, and still his hands, with wire cutters, clip the right wires, racing against the clock, in case the bombs are timed, or the finger of some insurgent watching from a remote window with his cell phone rigged as the detonator trigger. He knows if he makes a mistake, he is vaporized instantly and he won’t even know it happened.
I cannot help but question how our leaders can put young Americans into harm’s way, Hurt Locker harm’s way. Thousands of soldiers have died in Iraq, tens of thousands have been maimed, and even more than that are emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. And we did this so Iraqi citizens no longer have to live under Hussein. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no connections to Al Qaida. We have no more oil or wealth now. I venture to say we have less. Tell that to the soldier that lost his life in that meaningless war of no consequence but Hurt.
Watching war movies leads me to step onto soap boxes….
The Hurt Locker is a movie you must see as a responsible American.
Rating: ****
Movie Review: Primer
This 2004 movie came to my attention through an email from Chelsea:
Okay, if you rent the movie “Primer” and can tell me exactly what happens in the last 10 minutes, you are a Sci Fi God. Haha.. but really.. you should Netflix it. I think you’d enjoy trying to figure it out.
Ah, a challenge. Science Fiction, love it. So I got the movie and watched it. Here goes:
Per Roger Ebert: Carruth wrote, directed and edited the movie, composed the score, and starred in it. The budget was reportedly around $7,000, but that was enough: The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look. In a New York Times interview, Carruth said he filmed largely in his own garage, and at times he was no more sure what he was creating than his characters were. Primer won the award for best drama at Sundance 2004.
Two propeller-heads, Aaron and Abe, invent a device in Aaron’s garage, apparently after their regular jobs. They wear white shirts and ties through the entire movie. I wondered why they wouldn’t change into jeans and T-shirts for their moonlighting. The dialog is difficult to understand, since most of it is mumbled, sort of like engineers would talk to each other while working in their garage. The topics are highly scientific and engineering laden, and we understand very little, if anything at all. The device they come up with, cobbled together from copper tubing, sheet metal and circuit boards, ends up being a sort of a time machine. They don’t understand what they got, but before long they find themselves performing human experiments by subjecting themselves to the machine, while they really don’t know how it works, what exactly it does and what the dangers might be.
Things quickly get out of hand and the experiment runs away from them. They try to recover, but as in most if not all time travel stories, paradoxes create impossible situations, and we, the viewers, have an impossible time following along, keeping all the threads of reality in line and tied together.
I must warn you: this is a complicated movie to watch. It’s very difficult to make sense of and follow, and I do not claim I have figured it all out. It was slow and boring, and the music got in the way. But I stuck with it just to give Chelsea her answer and earn my title as Sci Fi God. So here is the answer:
When you travel into the past, as the two guys do, if just by a few hours, you can go and hide behind a bush or a car, and see yourself walk into the building where the time machine is before you went into the time machine. So there is one of you going in, and one of you watching yourself going in. If the one that traveled into the past does not go back to the present (or his future), there are now two copies of the same person walking around, albeit separated in age by a few hours. One can go home to the wife, or the other. What happens if both do?
Both of these guys started messing with the machine on their own, without telling the other, so things quickly became confusing. Which was which? How many are there? Two? Three? More? Once it gets confused, there is no way to clear it up again. That’s what was going on in the last 10 minutes of the movie. Utter confusion of reality.
An okay movie, but by far not the best time travel story I have read or seen.
Rating: **
Movie Review: Wild at Heart
Wild at Heart is a Nicolas Cage / Laura Dern movie of 1990. Nicolas Cage was always a good actor of weird characters, so I caught this when flipping through the channels and I stopped to see a few minutes of it. Mistake. I watched the whole thing, and if you skip forward to the end of this review and see my rating of one star, you may ask me why I bothered?
Why did I bother watching a twenty-year-old so-so movie all the way through?
Because it shocked me into it.
In the opening scene, a thug pulls a knife on Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a young Elvis-like misfit. Sailer goes into rage, disarms the thug, and beats him to a pulp, literally, by smashing his head against the floor so hard and repeatedly until, I surmise, his skull cracks, and blood literally oozes out of the hapless attacker. Then sailer gets up, leans against the railing of the stairs, and still out of breath, lights a cigarette.
The violence is graphic, overkill for the situation, powerful and very shocking. I didn’t move on after the first few minutes and I stayed with the movie.
The story is a simple one. Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), two young people come from battered childhoods of rape, abuse and neglect somehow find each other and fall deeply in love. Lula’s mother Mariette (Diane Ladd) does not approve of the liaison and contracts a hit man to kill Sailor, hence the opening scene. Sailor and Lula elope on a road trip in a 1960 vintage convertible like in Selma and Louise. We follow along.
The movie’s story is weak, and it has to move us along with lots of shock. This is the movie where you can see Laura Dern topless, not once, but a lot. Sex scenes between Sailor and Lula abound, mostly heavy, brute couplings, generally silhouetted in pink, green or blue pastel light. I am not sure what the colors were doing for it. Women are degraded throughout the movie. In a Texas shit-town motel somebody asks about the bright lights in one of the rooms. We find out somebody is shooting a porn movie. Eventually, three naked and extremely obese actresses are dancing outside by the pool area for the benefit of the alcohol-lubed thugs assembled there. Why, I can’t figure out. There is a lot of evil brutality in this movie, and one of the evil doers is Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe). Bobby is a loser and small-town bully with terribly bad teeth. The acting of Willem Dafoe, who is usually a very good bad guy, is superb here and we truly hate the character he portrays. When he blows his own head off with a shotgun (spoiler, spoiler) at the end, and the head literally flies through the air and lands on the ground with a slither and squish, like a huge gob of phlegm, we don’t mind. By then we are so revved up for the violence and so numb to the shock, anything goes.
This is not much of a story. The shock keeps you watching. And Laura Dern naked helps.
Rating: *
The State of the Publishing Business
One of the best summaries I have ever seen – enlightening, challenging.
Book Review: The Lunatic Express – by Carl Hoffman
The Lunatic Express is a book about travel that jarred me to the core and made me think hard about myself and my place in the world. It ought to be required reading for every human being in the Western World. Go to the bookstore and buy the book. It will do you good.
After my recent review of the movie Up In The Air you know that I am a business traveler equipped with credit cards and memberships to airline, hotel and rental car clubs that make travel more comfortable. I have minimum hotel standards, which include not staying in hotels where the room door opens to the outside, be it a parking lot or a passage way. As travelers go, I probably float around in the upper tenth of the upper one percent of travelers. I stay in the nice, warm suites twenty stories up downtown and I look down on the cold streets of whatever city I am in and I wonder how the homeless make it.
There are about 6.815 billion people in the world, and I am guessing that about 815 million of those go home to a house where they actually have a bed to themselves, where there is a faucet with clean water, maybe even hot water, where there is at least one toilet and you can push a lever after doing your business and make it all go away, like magic.
The other 6 billion people, mostly in South America, Africa and Asia, do not have such luxuries. They have to go to a well to get their water and carry it home in buckets. They have no access to a toilet of any sort. They live in 10 by 10 foot concrete rooms with dirt floors, several families sharing the space. They have to risk their lives in horrendous commutes on the roofs of trains for hours just to go to their jobs, those that are lucky enough to have jobs.
When those 6 billion people travel, they are in 3rd class in the bowels of ferries, below the water level with no circulation, no toilets, no food, no beds, only linoleum platforms at best, and steel floors most likely. They risk their lives on death roads along mountain sides in Peru in rickety buses with bald tires and no windows, in driving rain and mud, where the ride from one city to the next takes 28 hours under those conditions. They travel on overloaded trains across the African deserts in 120 degree heat for days on end. They are packed like sardines, no personal space, no space to even stretch or breathe.
Carl Hoffman, the author of Lunatic Express, is a travel journalist who decided to travel around the world in the most dangerous, cheapest and challenging conveyances. He always bought the lowest class ticket for any stretch he traveled, and the Lunatic Express is his story. Vivid pictures of the people he met, who make 1000 Indian rupees a month (US $20) who will buy him a cup of tea and do not allow him to pay. He tells stories of hellish adventures deep in the Amazon jungle, underground in Afghanistan, waiting in an unheated railroad station in Mongolia with minus 42 degrees F outside. In matter-of-fact language, Carl Hoffman takes us along, and the world comes alive in front of us. Here is a passage describing a pit stop on a bus trip within India:
In the end, though, I had no complaints about my journey to Patna. The bus was full, the aisles taken by fifty-kilo bags of rice. The knife was unnecessary. I was, as usual, in a cocoon of generosity and watching eyes. Ranjit handed me a down pillow covered in red velvet; the wind (and dust) streamed in from the open window at my shoulder; we stopped every three hours for a break – twenty-five men standing (or squatting) in a line like some grotesque Roman fountain. The first stop almost made me retch. We stood in a line next to roadside stalls, a trillion insects flying and buzzing in the lights, pissing into a trench that had years of plastic water bottles, plastic wrappers, toilet paper, and reeked of shit and piss. Then I remembered doing the same thing in Peru, in the rain as we descended toward Puerto Maldonado, and I laughed; around the globe right at this very minute, probably, were lines of men and women pissing in the mountains and on highways and in jungles next to battered buses.
After traveling with Carl Hoffman for 280 pages on the Lunatic Express, I sit at my desk typing out this review, overwhelmed by my unspeakable luxury of a safe place, a full stomach, electric light, listening to the neighborhood children playing in the cul-de-sac outside, a car sitting in my driveway ready for me, unlocked – why would I lock it? If there is heaven, I am in it. 6 billion people or more would give everything they have to trade places with me. I knew it all along, intellectually, but The Lunatic Express drove it home, and deep inside myself it will not quite be the same ever again.
Movie Review: Pirate Radio
In the 1960-ies, pop rock was banned in the U.K. (surprisingly, the place where The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who emerged) and the BBC broadcast only about 30 minutes a day of pop music. Powerful radio stations operated from ships safely anchored in the North Sea outside of British territorial waters. Whether the authorities liked it or not, half the listinging population was latched onto those stations. One of the most prominent ones was Radio Caroline.
Pirate Radio is loosely based on the this ship and its occupants.
It’s a comedy, one where I smiled and chuckled at times, but really didn’t laugh all that much. It started slowly and almost lost me a few times. I would call the movie and its various subplots cute, no more, no less.
What movie about renegades broadcasting rock from a ship in 1966 could exist without a powerful soundtrack of songs from the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix and many other icons? The music, the endless classic rock, the stuff my generation grew up with, saturated the film for all its 116 minutes of runtime, and that alone is what kept me watching. A trip back to my youth. What sells in movies? Violence, sex — and trips down memory lane.
Rating: **
Movie Review: Cold Souls
I should have been suspicious when I read the cover credits on the box:
- Wildly imaginative and clever – People
- Flat-out funny – The New York Times
- You’ll laugh till it hurts – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
- Darkly funny, twisty-cool – Entertainment Weekly
What do they pay these people to say this stuff?
If a movie has to tell me that I am supposed to laugh because it’s funny, it’s not funny. Maybe it was missing a laugh track and I didn’t know when to laugh. But I didn’t laugh once. I was bored all the time. It was so bad, so boring, so flat-out uninteresting, that I stayed with it just so I could sit down afterwards and write about it.
Paul Giamatti plays himself and David Strathairn plays Dr. Flintstein. Giamatti is an actor who rehearses for Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, when he finds his soul so heavy, his entire life as well as the play begin to suffer. He finds the good Dr. Flintstein, has his soul extracted – 95% of it anyway – and stored in a test tube in a vault. Eventually it gets stolen by a Russian mule that carries souls (mules are the people who carry drugs inside their body across the border).
This film is a colossal waste of money. It fits Giamatti, it’s like a very bad Woody Allen movie, there is nothing pretty, good or funny about it.
Try to watch this and see if you can make it all the way through!
Rating: zero
Book Review: Earth Abides – by George R. Stewart
Men go and come, but earth abides.
It is the year 1949. Isherwood Williams, called Ish by his friends, is a graduate student in “ecology” in the Berkeley area in Northern California. He is out in the woods, staying in a cabin, when he pulls himself up on a ledge and is accidentally bitten in his hand by a rattlesnake. With a makeshift tourniquet he makes his way back to his cabin where he is delirious for a few days. When he is well again, coming out of the mountains, he eventually realizes that a pandemic has apparently killed off almost everyone in the world. It takes weeks before he finds the first other survivor.
To overcome the shock, he packs up a car and travels across the United States, making it all the way to New York City, only to discover that nobody is left, but a few odd people in every city. Dejected, he finds his way back to Berkeley and starts pulling his life back together. Within the first year, he finds a woman, Emma, Em for short, and they decide to have children. Eventually another young man named Ezra and two women he picked as wives, as well as an older couple, George and Maureen, form a small community they call The Tribe. They live off the scraps of the “old world,” scavenging from grocery stores what is not eaten by rats and ants, which is anything in cans, glass jars or bottles.
The book is organized in several main sections. First we follow Ish and The Tribe through the formative first few years. They have children, they create a new order, and they survive. Then we fast forward through about 20 years. In the year 22 after the great plague, we spend another year with the Tribe, now many dozens of people, all the offspring of the original seven. Then we fast forward once again for another 20 or more years. The Tribe is now several hundred people, most if not all are illiterate, the scraps of the old world are used up, and society has reverted to hunter and gatherer practices.
This is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in a long time. The story started in the 1940-ies, but it could easily start in 2010. Take all the people of the world away. The infrastructure would rapidly deteriorate. Cell phone service would probably stop within a few days, perhaps weeks. Power might last for a few months, depending on the location and the type of power-plant serving the area. The same with water. Groceries would spoil quickly after refrigeration stopped. All modern skills, like management, finance and computer programming would be completely useless. Gardening, construction, chemistry and medicine would be valuable. All our experience and knowledge would be useless, and we’d be thrown back to the stone age within a few years.
Earth Abides is a timeless masterpiece, inspiring and terrifying at the same time. I will never think about human civilization the same way again.
Rating: ****
Movie Review: District 9
A massive alien spaceship arrives on Earth and hovers, apparently weightless and effortless, over Johannesburg, South Africa. When nothing further happens, humans, with the aid of helicopters, fly up and cut their way into the ship with blow torches. They find aliens helpless and starving. The ship is huge, as large as a city. There are millions of aliens. They look insectoid, about seven feet tall, two arms with claws, a head with two eyes, feelers around the mouth orifice and antennae on top of the head. The legs have several additional joints, making the creatures look very unhuman. The humans call the aliens Prawns, due to their similarity to giant shrimp or lobster.
The humans bring the aliens down to a concentration camp, or rather a slum, called District 9, where the aliens live in squalor. Decades go by. The ship hangs over the city and becomes a permanent fixture, abandoned, unchanged, apparently without power. The aliens have children, go about their business surprisingly like human slum dwellers would live outside Calcutta or Rio. They are forbidden to have weapons, technology or open commerce. The humans have confiscated their weapons, which appear far superior to human weapons, but are connected to alien DNA, rendering them useless to humans, authorities and thugs alike.
Decades go by. The humans learn to sort of understand the language (clicking and chirping) of the aliens, and the aliens understand English. The South African authorities are trying to get the aliens to move from District 9 further out to District 10. The hapless hero Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is put in charge of this operation, and he seems not quite ready for the job. In addition, the aliens don’t really want to move. Conflicts arise and things escalate.
Here are credible, believable aliens. Humans see them, but do not understand them. Communication is difficult. Understanding of motives is almost impossible. Aliens stranded on Earth are helpless, just like humans would be on some other planet. Living conditions are miserable, just like human living conditions on some other planet would likely be. The aliens can breathe our air — well, that was necessary for the movie to work.
Watching District 9 took me back to watching 1950ies science fiction thrillers with aliens. But these were realistic, not at all humanoid, and the conditions as well as the human responses were credible. After a while, no matter how disgusting and revolting the aliens looked at the beginning, I started getting used to them and sympathizing with them. I wanted them to succeed and I wanted the human profit apparatus, organized crime and government ineptness to be defeated. I rooted for the aliens.
Rating: **
Movie Review: Moon
I love science fiction movies. Show me pictures of space ships or people in space suits, and I am in. As a science fiction buff, I know a lot about space exploration. This story plays in the undetermined near future. A private company called Lunar Industries has a mining station on the far side of the moon. They are mining Helium-3 from the lunar soil. The product gets shot back to Earth in capsules where it is used for nuclear fusion, which means clean and safe energy in abundance. 75% of the world’s energy is supplied by Lunar Industries this way. Apparently it’s a very profitable business.
The station is almost completely automated. There is only one human astronaut stationed there named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who does not actually do any mining work, but performs maintenance and monitoring functions to keep all the big machinery going. His only ‘companion’ is Gerty, a robotic artificial intelligence that roams the station and controls and monitors all functions. Kevin Spacey supplies Gerty’s voice, and the whole experience of listening to Gerty conjures up images of HAL-9000 in the old 2001, A Space Odyssey movie.
In my smart-alecky way, within the first 5 minutes of the movie, I noticed two things blatantly wrong with the story.
First I said that I didn’t understand why in the world any agency or private company would put a single human being in a sealed station on the far side of the moon, for a three-year contract, without any human companion, alone with a creepy artificial intelligence. How expensive could it be to put a cool female there, or a family, to make things more bearable. The station seemed to be well outfitted, comfortable and safe enough. What human would not start hallucinating after 3 years of solitary confinement? It just seemed wrong.
Second I noticed that Sam had to watch pre-recorded videos from his wife, sort of like electronic mail, as if he was in an interstellar spaceship many light-months away from Earth. Why didn’t Lunar Industries install a simple geostatic satellite on the far side of the moon that could be used to relay a comm link to earth? With that they could use the Internet protocol to have a good two-way phone conversation, albeit with a one-second lag, which would be no worse that seeing MSNBC correspondents in Iraq or Europe on live TV. It just seemed odd.
But I was willing to give the story the benefit of the doubt, and I kept watching, trying to find more errors. And I did: Running on a treadmill in the lunar station, or using a jump rope looked like it would on earth. In reality, in 1/6th gravity, running on a treadmill or using a jump rope would look entirely different – but I recognize that it would be forbiddingly expensive to simulate those effects for a movie so I let it go.
It turns out, the plot required, very definitely, that Sam was stationed alone and that there was no two-way comm link. Both of those curiosities were due to the story that unfolded – and I had to chuckle at myself for jumping to conclusions too quickly.
This movie builds as the story unravels, and life in the peaceful space station, all governed by Gerty’s soothing and accommodating voice, is not quite what it seems at first sight. And I will stop here so I do not spoil anything.
For any science fiction buff, this is a must-watch-movie, with unexpected twists and surprises, and good realistic footage of a not so distant future. Where can I apply for the job?
Rating: **
Movie Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
A movie about army programs studying the paranormal, dating back to Vietnam, going forward to Iraq. Supposedly, the military has been interested in paranormal activities and capabilities. The most important area is known as Remote Viewing. By concentrating on a subject, the viewer transports himself in spirit to another location and views what’s going on. He can see buildings, layouts, activities, people, weapons and weapons programs under way. That’s why the military might be interested in the stuff. It didn’t work so well in detecting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As with all military programs, we mere mortals will never know what is real and what is only imagined. We don’t know the truth.
About five years ago I read a few books on Remote Viewing. Most notably, Russell Targ’s Limitless Mind has been impressive and I learned a lot. I actually have read several more books on the subject, but this one was the most informative.
The Men Who Stare at Goats is about a few odd characters in the military who are involved in these paranormal research activities. It’s a movie where I chuckled a few times. Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and George Clooney do a good job acting here. Without these masterful actors, this would have been a horrible film to watch. However, these guys got me laughing and chuckling at times, so it was entertaining.
In the beginning, since I am genuinely interested in the subject, I paid attention and stayed with it. As the movie wore on, I realized there really wasn’t anything happening and most of what was going on was either dumb or flat-out boring, interrupted by an occasional slap-stick joke or funny scene to keep us going.
My take: read Limitless Mind and be enlightened. Don’t watch The Men Who Stare at Goats. It’s a mindless bore.
Rating: *
Book Review: Renegade – by Richard Wolffe
Richard Wolffe was with the Obama campaign from the beginning. He had exclusive and direct access to the candidate, his inner circle and the campaign in general. The book is based on interviews with Obama and the people around him.
It is a sober and well-told description of Obama’s worldview, both professionally, politically and personally.
For me, it was a quick read. I had read Obama’s two books, so I feel like I know much about him already from that. As I read Renegade, I found myself skimming over sections giving background of the candidate’s childhood and formative years, since I already knew many of the facts. Renegade is a perfect introduction to Obama, the man, if you have not read Obama’s books. For me, there was repetition.
But that aside, it was fascinating to see how the Obama campaign created the engine that drove it all, from a whole new way of fundraising, to an entirely different way of looking at politics. Nobody had ever put together a more powerful and effective campaign, and reading the Renegade provides excellent views behind the curtain into a fascinating man and his inner circle.
I read the Kindle edition, and I was surprised how poor the proofreading was. There were at least 30 places in the book where periods after sentences were missing. I am puzzled about this. Do they actually have to retype the books for the Kindle? How can you miss that many periods? I can write a computer program to detect this condition and highlight it. Amazon should pay more attention to the quality of the Kindle editions.
Rating: **
Grand Central Freeze
Living art….