fine whine

I'm on vacation all this week, so Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and so forth, to all, and watch out for some new posts, and maybe even some photos, next week sometime.

It began snowing here more than it had so far, this winter, and all told we've got about about four inches. Now that it's all on the ground the snowplows and shovels can appear and the highways and byways can be cleared.

However, as it was falling, there was the usual trouble.

Ohio drivers are incapable, as an aggregate, of handling even the slightest precipitation. I'm not saying caution isn't a good idea, but some of these people go well beyond cautious driving and veer into dangerous territory. They become menaces to themselves and everyone else on the road.

Case in point: Shamrock Taxi number 734 (I believe, but I could be off by one or two), whose driver wasn't aware of the problems with an empty trunk, rear wheel drive, and excessive speed. The driver spun out twice on the highway in front of me, and it was fortunate for me at the others on the road that we all noticed what he was doing and were able to slow down and stop to let him get turned back around.

Twice.

So, if you're in the winter side of the world, and drive a rear-wheel-drive car or truck, get something in your trunk with all speed. Bags of salt and icebreakers work great. Sand, too. But even if you need to get cases of oil, or washer fluid, or rocks or bricks or anything. Just get some weight over those back wheels!

To the other drivers in the winter climes, watch out for rear-wheel-drive vehicles. Most pickup truck drivers probably know what they are doing driving, but the sedans might not. Pay attention to Crown Victorias! Decommissioned police cars pop up as taxi cabs and also in the private sector, and the people who get them don't always know how to handle them. Be ready with your brakes, and remember not to slam on them.

Be safe in your car this winter*!

* Here is a good link about winter driving.

One of these days I need to update my resume again*.

SkillsLunch. Both with co-workers and vendor representatives.

Paradigm Shifting.

AccomplishmentsShifted a record number of paradigms enabling spectacular Q3 returns. Needed to think back inside the box afterward to cool down.

Ended forward transmission of at least one forwarded email every week, if not more often.

* 'Again' may be too strong a word. I've generally entirely redone it every time, since I never seem to send it for the same sort of jobs more than once or twice.

I've been doing some thinking. My earlier dismissal of the recent War of the worlds may have been a disservice to a $200 million grossing film with A-listers on both sides of the camera. A movie that bad deserves far greater attention.

I haven't changed my mind. It's most likely the worst movie made this year that I've seen so far. What we need to ask ourselves is: what went wrong?

Was it Tom Cruise's off-screen antics and the whole Scientology debacle that distracted me? Nope. While he may be a raving loon in his personal life that hasn't impaired his acting abilities too much. His agent might need to brush up on his skills though, as Tom makes a very, very unconvincing blue-collar New Jersey native, let alone a card-carrying stevedore.

Moreover, he's the person the latter two thirds of the movie shows. Of all the people to care about... him? And two kids, and Tim Robbins?

While I harbor no ill will toward any of them (though his son's character played by Justin Chatwin isn't particularly interesting, or fleshed-out convincingly) I find the need to wonder why, with an entire planet in turmoil, we only see the briefest glances at what the rest of the population is experiencing. Such a small focus works when you've got a smaller-scale situation, like, oh, three guys on a boat and the giant shark trying to eat them, but when an unknown number of giant alien machines is tearing up cities willy-nilly (I believe we know there are at least four, based on how many are shown at any one time) there's literally a world of possibilities for people to follow and scenes to show.

Perhaps screenwriters David Koepp & Josh Friedman wanted to make sure Spielberg didn't repeat his 1941 mistake of too many characters and too much bloat*. But they took away too much. Spielberg knows how to handle reasonable groups of people in horrifically dramatic situations (like the Holocaust, though the Nazis and the aliens in this film are at once very similar and yet so different) but here he seems unable to juggle more than three people at a time.

At one point our protagonists are running to get onto a ferry, along with a throng of several hundred other people. Somewhere in the chaos they meet "Sheryl" and a child with her, though no explanation is give as to who she is other than someone Tom's character knows. She disappears from the action quickly enough, though, and isn't mentioned thereafter. Extra characters in Saving private Ryan were treated much better.

In Ryan we can find a much better example of following a small group of people against the backdrop of a larger evil, but in this case they're all believable soldiers, not a pretty-boy dockworker, an overprecocious little girl, fifteen stereotypes wrapped up into a fifteen year old, and a survivalist who might have just gone a bit over the line. All the time I watched it I was aware that these people were actors acting, and never bought into the suspension of disbelief at their characters, let alone the special effects behind them.

Some of the CGI was painfully obvious, too. Physical sets looked pretty good, and however the rich neighborhood/jet crash was put together it looked quite convincing, but far too much of the movie looked much too fake.

And I feel the need to point out that the back windows of a mid-90s Dodge Caravan do not slide down like that. They just don't. They can't. I realize that it was probably necessary for filmmakers to fake so they could fly a camera around, inside and outside of the minivan, but it was all the more distracting, and equally pointless.

Some of the effects sequences were pretty impressive, but almost all of them ran on as long as a painful Saturday Night Live sketch, well past making the point. The emergence of the tripod creature from the ground is one such scene. Likewise the eyeball tentacles late in the film, seemingly a cross between the water tentacle from The Abyss and something much more sinister.

I won't even address the jarring discrepancies in the aliens' technologies, other than to mention that they've mastered intergalactic travel and an incredible form of personal transportation, yet they rely on inefficient designs and needlessly complex solutions to easy problems. Want to clear out a bunch of people from a planet? Why zap them individually when you could just pulverize the buildings and wipe out the people en masse? Or why not build bigger death rays, say, the size of more than one person at a time?

The fact that at least once 'terrorists' were mentioned shows that everyone's still well aware of the whole 9/11 thing, but was this really necessary? I suppose I'd need to find an overprecocious ten-year-old and ask him or her what the first guess at a big attack would be, terrorists or space aliens.

Maybe I should read the book. I'd bet that ol' H.G. had New Jersey in mind when he wrote it a century ago. You should read the book too, or watch the old movie, or listen to the radio adaptation. Just skip this one.

* And not enough entertainment. If you haven't yet watched 1941, don't. It's a disaster/war/comedy/farce with a cast numbering in the 50s and jokes numbering in the low 10s.

First off, let me apologize for addressing you three readers directly. I tell people that this site and its posts are primarily for me and my failing memory, but today is all about you, and whatever state your memory and other mental facilities might be in.

Let me then apologize for yesterday's potentially adult-oriented post, hilarious though it may have been. It may have come as something of a shock to what few of you still drop by, potentially a funny shock.

To others, it might have just been funny. And I hold out that little bit of hope that somebody, somewhere, has decided to cancel his or her subscription (as it were) over it*.

To those other people, I apologize for apologizing. It's just a sorry situation, I suppose. What I would like to point out to anybody still reading this that actually visiting this site probably isn't the best way to read it, based on the slipshod way that I write these things.

The conecpt for this site is 'one entry per day' but the reality is one draft per day. Some time during any given day I'll jot half an idea down in a draft, and then I'll abandon it for hours, days or even some weeks, after which time I'll finally update it.

On an unrelated note, I still intend to write something for December 14th of 2004. I've still got over a week before I'm an entire year late on that one.

So anyway, the best way to catch up the way I do it is to subscribe to my feed with your aggregator of choice. I've been more or less happy with Bloglines, myself, and if you use it you can . If you use something else, well, I'm sure it's pretty easy to do it your way too.

Anyway, whichever way you do so, thanks for reading, and drop me a line some time.

* For that matter I haven't even received any angry letters to the editor. Which is probably fine, since I have no editor anyway.

So we were up later than usual this evening, and things were already getting silly when Jessica found the following thread on the nest.

Before I continue, I think should warn you, the reader, that what follows below could be considered of an adult nature (yet it is totally immature) and I cannot in good conscience recommend that you read it. Feel free to scroll past all of this, and continue reading the more highbrow stuff I've written.

If you're still reading, that thread began with '410bride' writing:

Admittedly I have only played this drunk, but basically you take any movie title and substitute "vagina" for one of the words. Sometimes we end up cracking ourselves up, but like I said, usually alcohol is involved.

and then a list of many a clever title, including Three men and a vagina, My best friend's vagina, and The hunt for Red Vagina.

For a good ten minutes Jessica and I drew upon our reserves of silliness and my large movie collection* and came up with many a funny title. Then she went to bed and I thought the whole thing was over, but my brain kept coming up with more titles. Here follows a list of many of them, in the hopes that they stop bouncing around my head.

• Rosemary's vagina, or better yet, Joe Gould's vagina**
• Dirty rotten vaginas
• The discreet charm of the vagina
• Big deal on Vagina Street
• Vaginas in the mist
• Vagina on the moon
• A vagina in the sun or A place in the vagina
• Vaginabusters
• Wag the vagina
• All the president's vagina
• Two by Michael Douglas: Romancing the vagina and The perfect vagina
• The vaginas down under
• Some like vagina hot
• Vagina on the river Kwai
• Deep blue vagina
• Close encounters of the vagina kind
• Big trouble in little vagina
• Attack of the 50-foot vagina
• The incredible shrinking vagina
• Three by Pacino: Scent of a vagina, And vagina for all and Dog vagina afternoon
• The secret lives of vaginas
• The Spanish vagina or The vagina prisoner
• Vagina of the living dead
• Vaginas from a mall or Scenes from a vagina
• Clash of the vaginas or Vagina of the titans
• A boy and his vagina, or maybe Johnny got his vagina
• A fistful of vaginas
• The cook, the thief, his wife & her vagina
• The vagina that wouldn't die
• Vagina without a face or Fiend without a vagina
• The incredible 2-headed vagina
• The big red vagina
• In the heat of the vagina and its sequel, They call me Mister Vagina
• Joe versus the vagina

Having typed those up I'm certain still others will come to me, so mayble I'll add more in the comments. Feel free to join in, though bear in mind it's rather addictive.

* Which contains Snatch and The Abyss, among others.

** My favorite, I think.