fine whine

Well, things are starting to come together now at work. By "together" I of course mean "apart" as the efficiency consultants (none of whom are named Bob) and their important work with our work flow and whatnot is coming to an end and soon we will know who will leave and who will stay and what those lucky few will end up doing in the place of those who left.

Or something like that.

I'm just getting tired of waiting. More next week.

• Once upon a time in Mexico: I think I liked this. Tracking down the rest of Rodriguez's movies (at least the Mariachi ones) seems like a pretty good idea now.
• Bad taste: It's a good thing that I had absolutely no expectations going into this film, because it could not have met any of them any possible way. I was neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed, but entirely un-whelmed. The film's impressive for a student/independent film and the special effects show a lot of effort and ingenuity, but there was far too much that didn't grab me and far too little that did. I will agree with prevailing opinion that this is incredibly disgusting. That's about the only thing that stands out about it. The writing's unique but unoriginal, and I don't want to say anything more about the film. If you want to see it, you likely already have.
• Station agent: I added this to my list a while back and forgot why I'd done it. That in itself is unremarkable, and in fact the purpose of such a long list, more or less. What was interesting is that my Netflix ratings (going back several years and thousands of movies) also recommended that I see this DVD, so I picked it up from the library (I have bigger plans for my Netflix queue, after all). It was good, and utterly unexpected. I might even call it touching, in that New Jersey nutjob sort of way.
• Weird science and Short circuit: These films are classics in one way or another, though much of them hasn't aged very well. They aren't nearly as different as they might seem, either, as both involve inanimate objects and computers coming to life by way of technological expertise and lightning. Both have major characters with prominent accents. Both have a pair of geeks who through the course of the film grow and learn to be more extroverted (and better drivers). There isn't much else to say about these two either, as most people know enough already.
• Gattaca: I really like this movie, though I cannot fully explain why. It's slow of pace, dull of color, heavy of hand and dry of subject matter (eugenics, even), yet I find it very, very interesting. The leads (a young Jude Law, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, with not-so-young Ernest Borgnine and Xander Berkeley) shoulder the weight of some of Andrew Niccol's pessimism and misanthropy better than lesser actors would likely have. He wrote it to be a smart movie, and it succeeds well in that both with content and presentation. The look of the film is artfully timeless, contrasting clean, sleek architecture with the great and stylish retro cars such as the always classy Studebaker Avanti and the future-movie-staple Citroen DS. I did a cursory search of the imdb to find other 1997 future movies that haven't aged as well but couldn't find too many at all, let alone ones with untimely production design. Time, it would see, will tell.
• Sealab 2021: I'm not entirely familiar with the source material (some sort of mini-cartoon called Sealab 2020 (get it? They added 1 to the year, ha ha ha), and I'm not sure I'm completely 'in' on the joke, but I did find myself laughing at this Cartoon Network/AdultSwim hit on a couple occasions. I spent as much time scratching my head, though, and as such cannot say that I really liked watching this (any more than the Aqua Teens). This is anarchic and subversive, but it needs to have something more too or it comes across as just mean spirited and heartless. Just like most of the characters in this.
• Brainscan: This is quite possibly the worst horror movie I've ever seen. It is certainly among the worst movies, period, that I've ever seen. Edward Furlong deserves better... or at least he does now.

Sorry about yesterday's largely irrelevant babblings about an unannounced Gmail "feature" that apparently got released into the wild wholly untested and incomplete. I was merely trying to scoop the rest of the so-called blogosphere for once, for reasons that are a mystery to me even now.

Google has since removed the button and file in question and silently plods on, as though nothing had happened. Someday, though, I suspect it will reappear.

So, returning to your usually scheduled drivel...

I've been inadvertently using a pair of catchphrases lately, one (once fairly) common and the other a quote from Star wars: "Ye gods" and "Laugh it up, fur ball." I'm not sure where I picked up either of them (lately, that is) but I've found them slipping into more and more of my communication, on line and off.

Make of that what you will.

That's another one, I suppose. So it goes.

So I'm checking my Gmail today and I notice a little button that says "ATOM" down on the left side. Could it be, I wondered, that Google has created an aggregatable inbox? This could be really, really cool.

Except that it doesn't really work for me. I use Bloglines to read my feeds, and it cannot load the feed. Why not, you ask?

Because it's a https link. Presumably I need to have my newsreader/browser logged into Gmail at the time to be able to get the feed. Which means that I'd just as likely have my inbox open in the background, which automatically refreshes every so many minutes anyway.

So nice try, Google, but you're going to need to go back to the drawing board on this one. Why not give me an encrypted URL feed that I can use in a normal newsreader? Or am I being too picky?

October the fourth
Is tomorrow. Then the date
Is "Ten-Four". Get it?

I'm slowly sifting through the boxes and folders and binders that comprise my past, the detritus and artifacts portion of it at least. Somewhere in there I'm pretty sure I once wrote down an idea into which I put a lot of stock in high school: that being that I did not have a single personality, per se. My actions and reactions varied by the time of day and present company so much that at one point I had a list of some seven different Mikes (though it'd started out as nine or ten before I narrowed it down) in which I found myself, or bits thereof.

How was I to know that this was not a unique idea to me? Only now, when I flip through a book read on a whim (Tom Blass' The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram) about a brilliant social scientist, that I stumbled across this snippet from his past:

By means which I am far from understanding, different girls cause me to behave differently in their presence. It is not volition that mediates these changes in behavior, but the direct, almost automatic effect of the presence of one girl or another, and it is quite out of my power to alter the effect of the particular girl I am with. So that what I am, my personality if you will, does not exist apart from my present company.

Stan Milgram wrote that in a journal days before Valentine's Day of 1957, long before starting the experiments that would propel him to wild fame and mild infamy. You know, the ones wherein he'd try to get some poor sap to "electrocute" another "test subject" (actually a good actor and confederate) by ordering him to do so. An overwhelming majority of people did so, pushing the "victim" far beyond the apparent limits of comfortable electrical shock. There's a lot more to this story, but I'm not going to talk about it when Tom Blass has already done it so well.