A Pitiful Attempt at Timeliness

The Virg reviews the Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" over at Movies Eat the Soul.

Christopher Hitchens RIP

He is frequently called a polemicist by a lot of people who don't know what that means, I suspect.  To me, he seemed like the very model of a British man of letters. Polite but abrupt, profane but distinguished (he gives a detailed account of his one experiment with Brazilian waxing), upper class but not unpleasant about it (I fondly remember MSNBC's Chris Matthews on TV referring to Hitchens as "Chris". Hitchens stopped immediately and said, "no, it's Christopher").

This Trotskyite turned knee-jerk liberal turned lord high prosecutor of the odious Clintons and Kissinger turned vigorous proponent of the religion of atheism turned supporter of the Iraq war turned gracious refuser of widespread Christian prayers for his recovery or salvation, just seemed to exude honesty. One could do worse than spend the holidays with his books. I made it through these:

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Why Orwell Matters
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family

I probably won't get around to his autobiography or endless collection of retrospectives. The story is over.

But his most enjoyable work, in my opinion, is in his rapid-response mode columns available everywhere. Slate has a running list of readers' favorites here. Editor June Thomas observes, "He could not bear the thought of banning words or ideas, and so he wrote powerfully in defense of the F word and N word, the free-speech rights of the Danish cartoonists, and the term Islamofascism, and against the impulse to obfuscate the horrors of the Armenian genocide."

Via Media - Walter Russell Mead's Blog

Walter Russell Mead is an amazingly prolific writer and thinker with a less than knee-jerk conservative bent. He casts a wider intellectual net than any serious blogger I've read. And, perhaps aside from the great Steyn, I can't find anyone who can string multi-syllabic words together in a more pleasing rhythm.

Here he contrasts physicists' response to the recent, doubtful, discovery of a particle traveling faster than light with the worshipers of climate change:

What’s interesting, of course, is how much more mature physicists seem to be than climatologists. Dissent from a scientific paradigm much more firmly established than anything in climate science isn’t greeted with howls of rage, fury and charges of heresy. Many physicists are skeptical, as well they should be, of evidence that seems contrary to decades of experiment and analysis, but the overwhelming mood seems to be one of curiosity rather than rage.

and

If physicists can control themselves while the most fundamental elements of their worldview are challenged by a handful of researchers with some interesting but quite tricky and potentially flawed results, then the climate world should be able to handle controversy with a little less venom as well. My guess is that the best climate scientists are more interested by the questions critics are asking rather than infuriated by their temerity in doing so. The orthodoxy enforcers and the heresy police tend not to be the finest scientific minds; skepticism and curiosity make for good science, not herd thinking and righteous rage.

Here he bloodies the New York Times editors for allowing what is essentially a press release, and an over-fawning one at that, from a Ft. Collins, CO green urban development plan to be published as news. He quotes,

"Democratized by necessity, the process led to goals that went beyond the predictable safe streets and commerce that planners might have otherwise emerged. In a departure from the old command-down process — planners proposing, residents disposing in public planning meetings — ideas bubbled up in new ferment."

The entire (lengthy) piece reads like this, full of obsequious adulation and namby-pamby greenthink cliches unthinkingly parroted. The article makes no mention of even the smallest criticisms of the new plan, nor does it provide even a hint of caution to leaven the overbearing optimism of the piece. Virtually the entire piece consists of process-worship; there is zero, correct, zero in the way of objective measures (population, productivity, traffic to new stores, employment growth, tax base) that would allow readers to assess how all this beautiful process produced or did not produce real world change. The planners like their project and speak well of it; that is enough to get a lengthy, heavy breathing puff job (hardened newspaper people would use a phrase in place of that one that is unsuitable in a family friendly blog like Via Meadia) in the New York Times. Only an idiot or a propagandist would write such a piece; it is hard to see how any editor would put it in print.

As something of a blog-taster myself, reading the paragraph above makes me want to take my keyboard and go home. It's not fair.

If Groceries Could Talk...

Been travelling waaay to much to post properly. This was the grisly scene outside the south Texas convention center hotel I'm inspecting.  Art and tragedy go hand in hand I guess.

A Swedish Vampire Movie - what else?- for Dia de los Muertos

My belated Halloween post over at Movies Eat The Soul got in just under the wire but it's perfectly in time for Dia de los Muertos, or un-muertos as the case may be.

Leavenworth Leaf Change

Oh well, why not? The cemeteries are nice this time of year, too.



The Limey

The virg is travelling today. Mark Steyn reviews a fairly obscure favorite of mine "The Limey" here: http://www.steynonline.com/4592/the-limey

I won't try to top it.

The non-linear bit is a little distracting but not a deal breaker. Terrence Stamp has one of the great glares, and as Steyn notes, he plays tough with a spring in his step.

Occupy Trophytown

Instapundit provides this brief quote about the Occupiers by Andy Kessler from behind the WSJ pay wall:

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.

Well, with that scattershot list of observations as a jumping off point, I might add a couple.

I haven’t seen the valid survey that confirms everyone’s suspicion that the Occupy Wherever crowd is made up of mostly disaffected art majors, but we’ll take it as broadly accurate.

So is it really all about the trophy generation? My daughters are part of the trophy generation and grew up in one of the trophiest suburbs in Texas. Both were competent athletes but not out of the ordinary. They had the good fortune of several fine volunteer coaches (me not among them) who were reasonably demanding but never unkind. I can still remember Coach Doug, one of the kindest most positive people you’ll ever meet, pleading from the sidelines, “come on girls, stop standing around killing my grass”. Yeah, they got trophies but they still got gentle prodding or at least feedback and a clear idea of expectations.

The thing is, smart kids are smart even when they’re young. They know the significance of a trophy when everyone gets one. They’re not fooled, but neither are they necessarily damaged. I clearly remember my oldest, when she was about 8, having done something mildly impressive, I said to her, “I’m proud of you, sug”. She replied, “Why?”

I don't think she was being self-deprecating, I think she was somewhat baffled. The BS detector sets itself if the signal isn’t jammed by constant chatter.

Anyway, in the case of the OccupySF chick above, I bet it’s not that she was given empty rewards, but that so little was actually demanded of her in the first place. They’re not the same thing.

So why don’t more go into hard science, when it’s clear that it is one of the shorter paths to creature comforts, if not riches? Don’t blame the trophy culture. Blame the culture that denigrates and devalues anything scientific. Popular TV and movies - and increasingly churches - portray scientists as hopelessly evil or hopelessly dweeby - never well-rounded, never competent. It’s cool to be a CSI detective, but not a doctor, and dear God, never an engineer.

When my oldest was in 6th grade, she attended a Sunday school session at our Methodist church where the teenagers in charge did a skit in which a humorously mad scientist espoused evolution. The message was clear enough. These were not hand-in-the-air evangelicals or scripture-spouting Baptists in the rural backwater of your liberal nightmare but Methodists, in a suburb built on the backs of energy exploration, genetics, and engineering. She rarely went back.

In 1988 or 89 I watched Bill Moyers interview Maxine Singer of the NIH. Thanks to the art history majors at Google and the gender studies majors at the National Library of Medicine, I can find the transcript. Many of the problems among the occupiers and their inability to find their passion in science were predicted here (emphasis mine). Remember, this is 1989.

MOYERS: What does it say to you that our society has such a negative image of scientists?

SINGER: It says that science was not an integral part of most people's upbringing and education. As they were growing up, they didn't come to understand that science was one of the grand human activities. It uses the same kind of talent and creativity as painting pictures and making sculptures. It's not really very different, except that you do it from a base of technical knowledge.

MOYERS: Given the negative image of scientists, why did you as a young woman decide to become one?

SINGER: I’ll give you the answer that, in fact, many, many scientists give when asked this question. I had one marvelous chemistry teacher in high school. She was an exciting teacher, interested in me because I was interested in what she taught, and very demanding.

SINGER: It would be difficult to give a good scientific education without being demanding. There's a certain amount of hard work, but the pay-off is marvelous, because when you do the hard work and come to understand something about the way the world works, then the satisfaction is so enormous that it makes you willing to do more demanding work. But if the hard, intellectual work to understand is not demanded of you, then you can't have the pleasure of it either.

Later she bites down on the brutally hard nut at the center of the issue…

“Let me tell you a story that goes back to the days when my now grown up children went to junior high school. Each of them in turn came into a biology class that was taught by a superb teacher. Within two weeks of the beginning of the school year, on each of those four occasions, I began to get calls from parents of other children in the class asking whether I would join a delegation to the principal, to complain about the amount of work that this biology teacher gave. The parents thought she gave too much homework. They also didn't think biology was that important. They were shocked to learn that I wouldn’t join the delegation. Now these parents were highly educated and had great expectations for their children, although none of those expectations included science. They just didn't feel that it was worth the effort that was being demanded of their children.”

MOYERS: This happened not just with one child of yours?

SINGER: It happened each time, four times in a row. The parents didn't see the opportunities in being a scientist…. I think their response also indicated that they thought there was a free lunch out there, which there isn't. It was a very depressing experience.”

Indeed.

So what about “follow your passion” being a bad idea? I think I would phrase it differently, that is, “don’t confuse your passion with that which comes easily”. Biology and insects came easily; biochemistry and organic chemistry did not. Had I demanded more of myself in those areas, I might have found a greater passion. And, “don’t confuse your passion with fun”. I love music, video games, movies, etc. Hell, I even take my family to art museums in any new city we visit. It never occurred to me that any of these might be my passion.

Clichéd as it must be by now; I’m forced to end with quote from a book I’ve never read – seeing the movie was easier:

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Machine Language

So the wife travels to Boulder, CO to visit family and maybe do a little purchasing for the retail co-op she’s part of. She ships 3 modest size boxes back by the United States Postal Service. Now, this woman knows how to pack cups and saucers and bric-a-brac. I have seen it. Two to three generations worth of crystal stemware and real china have followed us to the places where such things break, and yet none ever have. So with double reinforcing shipping tape all around, it entered “the machine”.

Somewhere between there and here the machine takes apart the box, tears it down the middle, removes much of the tape, oddly enough, unwraps the bubble-wrap around each piece and then breaks most of the contents. Evidence suggests that the machine then had a moment where it acted out its urge to become even more human by showing remorse. This manifested itself in the decision to take an assortment of toys, and a cheap candle and some other crap from someone else’s package and stuff it into my wife’s package, forget to re-wrap the individual items, throw some tape around the box and send it on. While it was stuffing it forgot to slip in the sheet of paper describing what happened. Finally, the machine delivered the package to our porch like this…

When the wife called the machine’s handlers at the local Post Office, they quite naturally blamed the machine. Darn technology. Without question, the machine will be fixed.

Rocking the Medieval World

The Virg returns to Movies Eat the Soul with reviews highlighting the obvious linkage between Robin Hood and Dinosaur Jr.

famous friends at A&M

The Virg's daughter emails...
"We just initiated this girl into Sigma Alpha. She gets one dollar for every three views on youtube and it's on tosh.0's blog thingy.


I KNOW THIS GIRL!"

So view away....

Actor Adam Baldwin, and co-contributor, on Firefly poster censorship

Somehow I think the University of Wisconsin-Stout police force could tolerate a staff reduction if they're down to policing posters from nine-year-old TV shows.

It ends with a script quote that helped make the series dear to the heart of libertarians and conservatives, "I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.”

... the Soul Nibbles Back

If one Googles "Movies Eat the Soul", one finds that it pops up on at least page 2 of the results, which is some kind of improvement, mostly due to my obsessive editing. In celebration, the Virg reviews a movie from this decade, Contagion, and even adds a rip-snortin' update to his Young Man's Guide to the Austen Movies pages slinking down the right side of the blog. I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more Pride & Prejudice.

9-11

As much as I would like to rant and rave, I can't imagine doing it any better than this.  "As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago....Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”


All else has been sanitized for your emotional protection.

I hope someday we can justify ourselves to this guy.

Movies Eat The Soul...

...limps back into view with a new name and old attitude and a couple short reviews of mediocre movies.

Movies Eat the Soul

Paranoia strikes deep...My other blog will re-emerge in a week or so as Movies Eat the Soul or something even less clever. If I want to continue filling the intertubes with my movie musings, it is probably time to genericize it a bit. This means I will have to learn to write a synopsis. That should be fun.