As always, just because I argue a point doesn't necessarily mean I "support" the point because as mentioned previously I still find the function of advocatus diabolito be of monumental importance.
For this essay, the question in play was whether or not Morgan Spurlock was being a charlatan during his creation of the documentary "Super Size Me".I said yes, the opposition disagreed with me (it happens a lot, trust me.I don't stray into places where people agree with me because there is nothing to learn there).Since my consistency was called into question, I took the opportunity to explain my position, not only on the topic at hand, but in a much larger sense it explains what I, as a non-apologetic ethical existential atheist, consider a proper way of life.Namely, how we as human beings handle the idea of the "authentic choice" that is discussed by many of the established philosophers in the Existential umbrella.To be sure, it is a minor detail to the defense of my position, so quickly I pivot back into the topic with small detours into ideas like the nerdy concepts of mind/body duality and the relationship between a legal entity know as a "corporation" and a "natural" entity known as a Human Being.So, in just under 2 pages you get to see me touch on just about every subject I find fascinating in life, namely Ontology, Epistemology, Existentialism AND Economics, Business, Contract Law and Governmental regulations.Hits all my high points except math and religion, so obviously my work is not done here.Anywho, read it you want…I know this nerdy nonsense doesn't float all boats, otherwise I suspect I'd still be married, but I digress….
The Challenge Question:"I don't get that at all, I see that (documentarian Morgan Spurlock) ate McDonalds the way most people do and the way that McDonalds surely hopes people will eat, their food is terribly unhealthy and full of fat, what will you defend next.(I'm) sorry, not trying to be unnecessarily confrontational here but I just don't get you sometimes..."
My Retort-in C sharp…or is that B minor?I forget
I don't know why this is so hard for you (challenger).My position on these matters is incredibly consistent.Perhaps it is my fault for not possessing the right words to express myself.Let me try a quick plagiarism from one of my betters:
"...Man is condemned to be free.Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
I repeat: [S]he is RESPONSIBLE for everything [S]he does.
It makes no difference if you are talking about Spurlock and ignoring his "freedom" to order salads and yogurt for 30 days or a sub-prime borrower who decides to throw caution to the wind and accept a loan that was beyond their ability to repay, or if a person decides to go get a slew of credit cards and run them up to max in a month and then claim bankruptcy...
In all cases...ALL CASES...I agree with Sartre (*)."[S]he is responsible for everything [s]he does".
It really is that simple.
There is a remarkable propensity for many on the left to always blame the mean and evil corporations when in fact, the corporations are not at fault.Spurlock knew the ONLY way to convey his message that corporations are bad was to make every single choice he made strictly to maximize his predetermined unhealthy goal.It's not hard to ruin your body at McDonald's (trust me, I am the poster child on this one).But don't think for one second you can't do 10X worse in the comfort of your own kitchen.The individual is at fault for ordering like an idiot, not McDonald's for providing options to their customers which provide very minor negative consequences when enjoyed sparingly.
Again, many here (on a decidedly left-slanting political community) wring their hands at the sub-prime foreclosures and hey, everyone can agree that eviction sucks.But so long as they are borrowing in the United States and the Truth-in-Lending (TIL) laws are still in play, there is not a person on this planet that is going to convince me that the mortgage lenders duped them into anything.Not when they signed the contract AFTER they initialed the TIL disclosures which completely spell out the borrowers RIGHTS and OBLIGATIONS under the terms of the contract.It's not the corporations' fault that an individual accepted a loan they couldn't afford.
It really is a simple concept.Corporations are a tool just like a shovel or a dump truck or a history textbook or a Heckler & Koch MP5.The tool ONLY does what the human beings in charge make it do...good or bad.
Now, make no mistake about this:Employees of the corporation, from BOD to CEO and down to line workers are PEOPLE.People can be held liable for both criminal and civil penalties arising from their status as 'agents of the corporation'.
An excellent example of this would be the pet food nightmare.Who ever winds up being the responsible party for the introduction of the melamine into the product, understand that the "corporation", lacking arms (res extensa) and consciousness (res cogitans), was physically unable to cause the damage.Rather, it was a PERSON (or, persons) who, in fact, introduced the poison into the product (either knowingly or accidentally).Those people (agents) need to be held (again) responsible for their actions.An accident makes it negligence; it is a tort that can be litigated in civil court. If it was intentional, it becomes fraud, conspiracy, willful destruction of property (animals are still considered chattel in the US) and so on and that can be litigated in both Civil and Criminal court.
Now, when you get to a situation like Enron or better yet, WorldCom, you can see a very clear line of culpability from the overbearing senior execs all the way down to the lowest of AR clerks who were forced to take actions that they knew were unsound at best, illegal at worst.Is that a "fault" of the corporate structure?Tell you what, you prove to me without any doubt that a partnership or even a sole proprietorship is 'unable' to orchestrate fraud and I'll listen.You won't find it, again, because the business formation is merely a tool and the dictates of evil deeds all belong to the realm of human beings.period.
(*) Now, I did not want to break the quote or lose the flow.But, this quote alone does not fully explain Sartre's (or my) position.There is a key phrase that needs to be added to make it complete.
"...he is responsible for everything he does FROM FREE CHOICE".
The distinction should be obvious and I suspect that is why Sartre did not put it in the section to begin with.Obviously, if a person for any reason does not have "freedom" of choice, then there is not a defensible position to force them to be responsible for the choice (even though that rarely matters when they pay the consequences anyway).The issue which remains is this:What makes it a free choice?
Some ideas are quick and easy.If the sub-prime lender did not follow the TIL laws of full disclosure, then the borrower cannot make a free choice unless they know the full extent of the TIL laws in advance.Again, when they belly up the loan, the borrower will suffer the same consequences as the "free choice" borrower with one KEY difference, the first borrower has legal recourse, namely to sue the lender.Person 2 could sue as well, but when the signed TIL notifications are produced, the will get bounced from the court immediately.Sartre's examples are all much more stark since he was working in the face of Nazi occupation of his native France but the situation is analogous.
Whenever a "free choice" is made no matter what it is, it is the individual that MUST bear the consequences of their actions.Spurlock chose to eat in a manner that has been documented for half a century to cause health problems. He knew that ahead of time which is why he went through the trouble of consulting with the doctor prior to the stunt.He did it anyway.That is a free choice.That is on Spurlock, not MickeyD's.
I know a few of you have seen this privately. The response was encouraging enough to compel me into wider distribution.
Eventually I will find something to encourage people to comment…Get's lonely out here, ass-checks akimbo, waiting for the light to shine, exploring the bleeding edge of satirical larceny.
In the original book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman was transformed from a normal man into the Tin Woodman due to a series of industrial accidents with his enchanted axe. The axe was enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the East (heretofor: WWotE) to prevent the Woodsman (previously named: Nick Chopper) from marrying the girl that he loved. As limbs were fell by the enchanted axe, Nick would replace them with tin appendages he got from the local tinsmith (where else would you get tin limbs?). Sadly, the tinsmith was only able to replace that which he saw, so limbs and trunk are there, but nothing inside. It is important that the WWotE did NOT make Nick Chopper into anything…she merely enchanted an axe and Nick's transformation was all due to his decisions on how to replace that which he had lost. As I'm sure you will recall, Nick was one of the 3 that accompanied young Dorothy Gale on her trip to the Wizard, for what was best described as a quest to get a new heart. Except, just like the Scarecrow and the Lion and that scared little girl Dorthy found out…..The Wiz Was Not….
The Tin Man, in thanks for his part in taking out the Wicked Witch of the West (heretofor: WWotW), the Wizard gave him, not a real heart…but a velvet heart.
And you know what? Even without a real heart, everyone knew that the Tin Woodsman had more heart than anyone else in the story…In a way, the Tin Woodsman (ney, all of the supporting cast of lion and scarecrow) should be considered existential heroes because they clearly demonstrated that they did not need any artificial constructs to live the noble life. Without a heart to be forgiven, the Tin Man had to act in a manner consistent with the noble idea that he cannot allow himself to commit an act for which forgiveness would be required. You see this in a scene where the TinMan is very upset for his accidentally squashing a bug and remarking how he really needs to be more careful. The brainless Scarecrow proved to be the most intelligent of the group of 4 specifically because he had no brain and therefore could not be impeded by pre-conceived notions. He saw the world as it truly is, not as the rest of us do: coloured by our own pasts and present motivations, including (certainly) our own prejudices. Finally, the "cowardly" Lion proved to be the bravest member of the group, partly because he reserved his ferocity until it was truly needed to protect his friends (i.e. not a bully) but mostly because he exhibited the only true form of bravery that exists in the kosmos…putting the safety of his family before his own. A truly selfless act is the highest form of bravery.
You do not need a god to love. You only need the wisdom and the courage to love, and be loved, every moment of everyday.
You do not need a god to be wise. Wisdom is nothing more than possessing the courage to ardently trust the convictions of your heart to guide your way.
You do not need a god to be brave. You only need to allow your mind and your heart to work together to push yourself down the path that leads all souls to a better world.
But most importantly, you need a mission, led by a scared little girl, in a time and place wholly unfamiliar to her to remind us that the true path to wisdom, to love and to courage lies in helping those who most need our unique talents so that they too will have a chance to help others when their time is called.
Developing Obsession II - The Mobius Transformation
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Life
f(z) = (az+b) / (cz+d)
In the not so recent past, someone asked me why I would have put myself through the torture of getting a degree in Mathematics, especially given the fact that I never wanted to be a mathematician. After thinking about it for some time, I realized that it is not something that I can explain to anyone. I can take strafing runs at the answer, but in order to truly understand the power that math has over my mind, you would need to see things in my head that cannot be translated into words...at least, not by me.
Still, there are times when I can show people something that makes a pretty good approximation of the beauty I see in mathematics. This short video about the Mobius Transformation is one of those things. It's not important to understand how the equation works to understand its beauty (in fact, it might be better to NOT understand the equation). Still, if you can relate it to something you've already been exposed to, it makes it much more breathtaking than otherwise...This one starts with simple geometry.
In my junior year of high school, I took a class on analytic geometry. In essence, the class was focused on taking geometry (loosely, the study of shapes) and describing the shapes using algebraic tools. For instance, in geometry, a circle is a polygon of infinite sides with every point on the curve being an equal distance from a fixed point, namely a center. What analytic geometry does is introduce the notion that a circle is NOT a polygon of infinite sides where every point on the circle is an equidistance from the center point, rather a circle is the set of all known solutions to the equation: x-squared plus y-squared = r-squared. The effect of this change is that prior to analytic geometry, there really was no way to verify that the shape you are looking at is, in fact, a circle. However, with the introduction of the equation, you can be 100% positive that you are dealing with a circle, even when there is not a physical circle that you are looking at.
From there, you eventually get to a place where you have learned all of the "equations" of geometric shapes (a parabola is ==> Ax-squared +Bxy+Cy-square+Dx +Ey+F=0), each model shape is centered at the (0,0) location (known as the Origin) on a standard xy-plane with a constant orientation (The parabola is centered at the origin and opens upward which each segment from the y-axis to the parabola being equidistant from both the right and left hand direction).
One day, the instructor (Mr. Mike Schultz, god love that magnificent SOB) tells the class that the fun is over and its now time to learn what happens when our happy little shapes move off of the origin and, gulp, rotate away from the standard orientation. As luck would have it, there is a mathematical process we can use to help establish the equations for these new problems...the bad news is that it takes about 4 pages of dense equation manipulation to get to that place. I do not know if it is the proper definition, but we called this process "Translations and Rotations". Translations are what move the origin around and the Rotations are what flip the shapes around.
I remember this feeling of satisfaction when I could spend 2 hours on a problem and get to the bottom line (4 pages later) and be exactly correct.
Like all things, this was relegated to the past for a long time. 5 years to be exact. In my last semester in math school, we were shown the Mobius Transformation. To be sure, the math behind the formula is very technical involving complex numbers and bijective conformal mapping (a bijective function is where every item in set A is mapped to a unique item in set B with no overlap and no extra elements left unmapped. Conformal mapping is a function the transfers elements from one system into a new system while preserving the angularity and orientation of the original set.) Much like the translations and rotations from Analytic Geometry, these problems could take up a whole ream of paper to do the mathematics...except, maybe not.
It turns out that these little problems all but go away if you look at them from a different perspective. If, rather than thinking in terms of shapes on the xy-plane, you think of them as points mapped onto a sphere that hovers above the xy-plane on the z-axis (up in 3-dimensional space) with an intense light source above the sphere that projects the points in the shape on the sphere back down onto the xy-plane (kind of like a movie projector shines the film image onto a flat screen), then the problems go from pages and pages of work to just a few short lines of work. This is very hard to visualize (even when you do understand the math behind it) so here is a short video to show you what this thing does:
Now for the part that I can't explain so well. Almost all tricky problem in mathematics can be solved quickly, accurately and with very little effort, IF YOU KNOW THE PROPER TOOL TO USE. A problem that might take pages and pages of detailed manipulation using differential equations could be explained by a few simple techniques using Eigenvectors from Linear Algebra. A punishing topological construct might take days to explain using Euclidean geometry, but if you switch to, say, abstract modern algebra, the problem magically becomes a series of straight lines.
The thing that always kept me going back for more math instruction (yes, even after I failed Calculus twice) was that I instinctively knew that there was something fundamentally profound amongst the odd words and diligent notations. I knew that there was a secret world hidden behind these things that I worked with and I knew that if I stuck with it, eventually I would find it. I would find a form of Satori which would be impossible to find in any other context. In short, it became my Windmill.
Then, as some of you might recall (ok, none of you would probably recall) that once I found that place, I had to abandon my passion or risk permanent damage to my ability to relate to the real world. It's sad, but true, that there is a very good reason why higher level mathematicians are all insane. When you get to that defining moment and have to honestly answer the question of what comes next, there are only two choices. The question became, "now that I've found that all of the mathematics I've been taught over the last 20 years is NOT a series of unrelated ideas all lumped together under the banner of Mathematics, but rather 20 different ways to approach the exact same problem, what ELSE could be shrouding in blinding mystery for no better reason than I do not yet have the proper tool that would allow me to break through the dense equations and find the simple truth." Either you commit to spending your living days trying to figure out a better set of tools or concede math's power over you and walk away.
I had to walk away...Shortly after I turned in my senior thesis entitled: "The Effects of Urban Migration Patterns from the Perspective of the Lottka-Volterra Predator-Prey Models". I took the idea of people moving from centralized areas (urban areas) to decentralized areas (suburbs) and then back to the centralized area and modeled that movement based on equations that explain how the population of Bunnies and Foxes change over time as foxes eat bunnies so they grow in numbers which means more foxes who start to eat bunnies faster than they can reproduce. As the bunnies start to die off, the fox population does not have enough food and the foxes start to die out. Eventually, the number of foxes goes below their ability to eat the rabbits, so the rabbit population starts to swell, which in turns leads to increased foxes as the food supply grows. It's a big circular event. I noticed similar patters in how the suburbs (foxes) were gobbling up people from the urban center (the bunnies). At some point, the foxes (again, the suburbs) cannot gobble up enough resources from the center, so the people begin to migrate back to the urban locations and the cycle continues. So long as you know enough "facts" about the system, you can predict with a very high degree of accuracy the rate at which the populations change over time. Most of the ground work has been laid out by a PhD. at the University of Kansas. My work mostly introduced a sensitivity analysis to initial conditions that relied heavily on non-deterministic systems from Chaos Theory. Yeah, I had to quit.
...anyway, the point of the whole thing is that the beauty that I find in mathematics comes from an understanding that the most difficult of problems often have the most simple of solutions so long as you know what tools work best on which problems. That is the value of a degree in Math, as I see it. To teach you to break problems into smaller, more understandable concepts and to build your tool box with as many tools as you can so that you will always have a better shot at grabbing the right tool.
Developing Obsession
Current mood: aroused
Category: Music
It seems like my living days are spent in one of exactly four different places these days: sleeping, commuting, taxing, and playing the xylophone. I call this piece:
Developing Obsession - part 13 of an anticipated 7 part series concerning the infrastructure of a descended Hunan warrior.
Rig:
Given the stifling limitations of apartment living, I've had to make certain concessions to unit cohesion. Out goes all aKit options…so we roll with Roland….the TD-3…Now we get to peak behind the curtain to see how little Timmy utilizes all the tools of deception to shortcut all those hours of 'shedding….
Please note the extremely organized clutter in my playing space…Sheet music on the floor to my right and to the left is my collection of late 90's computer programming books that I hold on to for that pesky Y2K part II meltdown we anticipate any day now…
The white circle would be the Snare and it is triple-triggered. The Crash cymbal is top left (dual triggered and chokeable) and the Ride is to the top right (also dual and chokeable). The hi-hat is just below the Crash and Toms 1, 2 and 3 stretch to the right of that. The hi-hat is dual triggered and peddle rigged (so at least four separate sounds it can make). All three toms are not triggered.
The far left peddle is the hi-hat controller and it is pressure sensitive. The far right peddle is for the bass drum attached to a second peddle next to the hi-hat controller for all those tricky double-bass needs. No, I can't play it yet. I try and try but I just can't.
Next is my assortment of sticks (one set of 7A's and one set of 5A's) and my best-quality-for-the-price headphones from Audio-technica. Since this is vKit, you have to plug in something to get the sound. I use headphones because if I could get away with a PA in the apartment, I would have just bought an aKit and thumbed my nose at the neighbors.
The brains of the outfit is the sound module:
No need to bore with the details on this…mostly because I don't know them myself (who reads instructions?). I can tell you that the 10 is one of the pre-set drum kits (called Disco Beat) which I use most of the time because one of the triggers is a hand-clap which I need for something or other(it will come up again, trust me)…I also like the tuning on the snare with this one…
The silver thing in the bottom left is the headphone attachment and the cables on top are all attached to the cymbal/drum/peddles shown earlier. In addition, there is a LINE IN connection which I used to full advantage….
…to plug into my laptop computer so I can pipe iTunes trax from the Laptop into the Roland processor which gets passed through to the headphones were it is combined with my drumming so I can hear how close I am to the original song. Since iTunes has a volume control and the TD3 has a volume control, I can control the level of the music-to-drums that hits the headphones. I typically try to leave the iTunes as loud as I can to match my drums, but that doesn't always work out so well. Sometimes I have to turn the music down real low just to be able to hear myself playing…I blame iTunes….
Gig:
I have a whole playlist set up with the songs that I like to practice with…From slower melodic pieces like Don't Stop Believing to thundering songs like The Sickness (which, to be sure, is painfully easy to play) to my most frenetic limits like Josie or Toxicity (John Dolmayan is a frickin' animal).
But, that's not really cheating, right? I still have to figure out what they are doing and mimic their movements…
But what happens when I can't figure out how they are doing a particular rhythm? I go to the sheet music. To anyone familiar with sheet music, you probably know that clefts don't really mean a whole lot to a percussionist. No, all we need is something to show us what to hit and when to hit it. To be sure, two hands and two feet pretty much limits you to 4 things at a time…piece of cake, right? Here is a sample tab for "Josie" by Blink-182 (pre-Travis Barker, I might add):
CC is the crash cymbal while HH is the hi-hat. T1 is first tom (the one with the highest pitch) while SD is snare drum and BD is bass drum. Inside of that, the "o" is a regular note, the "d" is a light roll stroke while the "r" is a full roll stroke. So, in 3 short measures (about 5 second in real time) there are 64 separate strikes that need to be played. Maybe I am just slow in the head foot, but there is no way I can sight read 64 notes in under 5 seconds.
...so, I cheat…
Enter the D'Accord Virtual Drum Player….
So, I go out to the little Internet and Google me up a Josie MIDI file. Everyone remembers what MIDI files are, right? They are like the Atari 2600 of the Musical Formats…Been around for eons and have such low quality that it is good mostly for Ringtones and Silly video game sound effects. You can tell the song being played, but its not good listening…The reason we like MIDI is because the file separates all sounds into channels and are standardized. What the Virtual Drummer does is take the drum trax out of the MIDI file and plays it on a Drum Kit….
You've got cartoon left and right feet (hi-hat controller peddle and bass peddle) and two sticks (in yellow) that shows you what has to be hit to make the sound on your kit. While this is good, clean fun the most important part of the software is that little slider in the middle called "SPEED". I can slow the MIDI down to creeping molasses while I learn the sequence of strokes and then kick up the speed as I get better. When I finally get back to real time, I flip back to iTunes and play along with the real song. Pure genius.
For those that know me real well, you've probably figured out why I put "Take the Money and Run" from The Steve Miller band on my front page recently. It was the very first song I ever heard where the drum line just blew me away…The whole intro is drum-only and the pattern of snare-open high/bass-open high/bass-snare-crash is easily my favorite 2 seconds of drumming in recorded history. The tab looks like this:
Far less note than on "Josie" (which I can play pretty well) but for some reason, not so easy. Measure 1 is cake. Two double-stroke rolls (a four note roll over 1/8th of the measure) followed by 6 straight snare strikes followed by two strikes on the Floor Tom (the one with the lowest pitch). Measure two starts out decent enough: Strike the ride cymbal and bass drum on 1.00 then at 1.25 you throw down a light snare ("g" is a ghost stroke which means it is played very softly) and then at 1.5 you have your second bass kick with the move to a closed Hi-hat. It's a fairly typical rock grove sound (dum-chee-chee-chee-chee-dum). All is going fine and as fit as a fiddle until we get to the genius. At 3.00, we lay down the last of the closed hi/bass strokes to 3.25 for another ghost snare strike and then at 3.5 to a full snare strike (which together sounds like a quick double roll where the intensity from first strike to second strike is increased dramatically as opposed to a normal roll which plays each strike with roughly the equivalent intensity). From there, all hell breaks lose.
At 3.75 we have a right foot bass drum kick and an OPEN hi-hat strike, a short break at 4.00 and then repeat the OPEN hi-hat/bass drum kick at 4.25. Rest on 4.5 and then a double-stoke roll at 4.75 and finish with the drum kick/Crash cymbal on 1.00 of the next measure. That doesn't sound hard, right?
Yeah, except what the tab doesn't show you is that the OPEN high-rest-OPEN high is not really what happens. It is really OPEN high-SILENCE-OPEN high…and that is pickle.
Interlude:
Back to drum skewl. "Triggered" means that the thing that you strike will make a different sound depending on where you strike it (in proximity to the sensor...er, trigger). Like a real cymbal, the rim strike and the bell strike (The raised part in the center of the cymbal where you attach it to the stand) sound different. My crash sounds like a standard crash on the rim but is triggered as a hand-clap on the bell (why, yes, I do believe there are two places in "Take the Money and Run" where you hear hand-clapping. Quirky). My ride cymbal is triggered to normal rim/bell sounds to match a normal cymbal. The hi-hat is triggered as a normal rim/bell sound with the peddle on open or closed (up to four different sounds on that one piece). The snare has one sound in the center of the snare head (typical snare hit) and a different sound towards the edges (kind of like a hollow-kettle sound) while the rim (the white ring with the screw heads and/or the black ring around that) delivers a typical rim shot (used a lot in my jazz pieces). The three toms are not triggered so it doesn't really matter where you strike them. All of the various parts are pressure sensitive so, just like aKits, the harder you hit, the louder it sounds….
The three cymbals are all chokeable. Normally, when you hit the cymbal it makes a sharp noise on impact and then continues to make a sound for a time after the strike as the sound intensity diminishes. If you need to stop the sound before it would naturally play itself out, you grab the cymbal and it stops the vibration to kill the sound. That's called choking. You accomplish the same thing on the hi-hat by closing the cymbals together by pressing down on the hi-hat peddle controller.
So, why does that short section of the song vex me so?
At 3.75, your right foot presses down on the bass peddle while the left foot is in the up position on the hi-hat peddle as your right hand strikes the OPEN hi-hat. (Yeah, one foot up, one foot down, and the right hand plays across the body to strike the hi-hat). At 4.0, there is total silence so the LEFT foot has to play DOWN on the hi-hat peddle (to choke) and then at 4.25, the left foot goes back UP with the right hand cross body strike on the OPEN hi-hat while the right foot goes DOWN to make the simultaneous bass drum strike. At 4.5, again you choke the hi-hat with a left peddle down followed by a double left-hand roll on the snare at 4.75 and then end the line at 1.00 in the next measure with another right-foot down kick and a right-hand cross to the crash.
…and it all needs to happen in about ¾ of a second.
Right foot down-left foot up-right hand cross-left foot down-left foot up-right-foot down-right hand cross-left foot down-left hand roll-right foot down-right hand cross.
I've played those 5 measures about 245 times in the last two weeks. As soon as it get to the part where one foot goes up while the other goes down, my body lurches like its snagged in a grand mal seizure and I become worthless for the rest of the song. Frustrating as all hell…but so very satisfying at the same time.
Take the Money and Run - The Steve Miller Band
And one last point…if you are struggling with any form of New Years Resolution involving a workout plan, trust me here…After playing 20 minutes of 128th-double bass strikes, you've run the equivalent of 450 miles. Shin-splints and all.
{POST SCRIPT}
Since I know at least one of you will look at the picture of the vKit and dismiss it as a toy based on how terrible these kits played back in the 1980's you should know that the technology has come a long, long way. I only considered it myself after reading about how the good Dr. Peart uses vKits in some of his live shows.Here is a video of a guy playing an identical TD-3 to what I have. Since I haven't figured out how to record my sorry arse, this will at least give you an idea of what it sounds like inside of the headphones…He shows the dual-triggers (bells to rims) and the choking of the crash cymbal too. This ain't your granny's vKit…
Currently
listening
:
Greatest Hits
By
blink-182
Release date: 01 November, 2005
Surrealism is the name given to a major art movement from the 1920's and 1930's. Perhaps the most famous piece to emanate from this movement is "The Persistence of Time" by Anthrax….
Wait…I meant, "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali. That is the one where the clocks are melted over tree limbs as other such oddities. The name Surrealism derives from the French word "surréalisme" which translates thusly: sur - "beyond" + réalisme "realism". Well, I've used that Surrealist and light bulb joke for years. It almost always gets a laugh (sometimes greater than others) but it ALWAYS requires that the listener know at least a little about Surrealism to get the joke. Truth be told, the joke is funny so long as the answer is anything other than a number or a discourse on the use of team work in routine maintenance operations. "Fish" works because it is a very short word and this joke works best if you get the punch line out before rational thought creeps in and restores Realism to our Surrealistic frame work.
But what happens when the listener has never heard of this odd little movement that was largely European to begin with? Well, I think I can explain this now using a story from my very own life…and it all happened on Saturday, 26 January 2008 at 4:15 pm in the sleepy little hamlet of Hurst, Texas. I shall give you all the tools you need to follow this little story, even if it gives the public enough information to track me down in the middle of a D/FW traffic party and squirt odd smelling blue liquor at the passenger side window of the Maserati that I don't own. It's a risk worth taking.
The license plate on my car is a specialty plate that gives a percentage of my extra fees to the Texan's Conquer Cancer group who provides money and support for family members of Cancer patients so that they may accompany their loved ones to out of town hospital stays. They help pay for hotels and such. It is a tremendous organization and I think very highly of the work they do. My license plate, on top of being a specialized Texan's Conquer Cancer plate, is also personalized with the word: "CURED". (because, well, yeah. 'prolly not too hard to figure that one out) I am employed as a senior technical income tax specialist. This basically means that whenever some has a question about anything related to taxation, they ask me…because I already know 100% of everything to know about any and all matters of taxation. (don't tell anyone how untrue that is…It's this or I can sell popsicles at the baseball games for a living). Only reason why this is important is because I am rather busy this time of year, working Monday through Saturday from early till late each day. To be anywhere other than work on a Saturday in late January at 4:15 pm just feels very odd to me…I digress.
I think that should be enough of the back ground on this…now:
Surrealism in Texas - Act II
I am in dire need of an oil change for my little go-go machine and being that I have been a Saturn owner for most of the last 11 years (yes, the globalist lobby buys American cars…deal with it), I always go to the dealership for my service since back in the day, nobody COULD service a Saturn except for Saturn. Durn proprietary cars….
I rolled up to the Saturn dealership at 3:15 to get said oil change. From the hop the girl is nervous that I am requesting service so close to closing time, but she smiled and wrote copious notes about what I needed her and her team to do for me and my car (change the oil and fix my left blinker, which seemed to be out of blinker fluid). She said the oil change is no problem but the light might be tricky if it is anything other than a burned out bulb. Fine I say…
After a good 45 minute wait, while I am reading excepts of the US Tax Code related to the deductibility of health insurance premiums paid on behalf of a greater-than-2%-shareholder of a subchapter S corporation (if you care, the S corporation has to add the health insurance to the wages of the greater-than-2%-shareholder as a fringe benefit and treat it in the same manner as a guaranteed payment to a partner in a partnership…which means it is gross income to the partner/shareholder BUT they are allowed to deduct the cost as a self-employed health insurance deduction)…anywho, she comes back to tell me its all done, it was a bulb so my blinker fluid is restored…all is well….
On the 35 foot walk from the cashier to my car, the girl rather sheepishly asks if she can ask me a question. I said, "OK, what's your second question?" Stunned for a moment, she recovered and said she wanted to ask me about my license plate. OK, so she does. I tell her about the program and how I must have been the first person to apply for the plate to get lucky enough to get CURED as my plate. She said she thought it was a good omen. I asked her why she would think that since if I was NOT CURED I probably wouldn't have requested that exact tag number. I would have kept my old tag number which was, I kid you not, XXX-03H. Never forget that one. So, she tells me the story of her Dad who has cancer and is undergoing treatments as we spoke. His oncologist said that they would know whether or not he is expected to live much longer by the middle of the week. Well, since I do happen to know a little about Cancer and the treatment therein, I calmly give her all of the wisdom that I gleamed from my 7 months as a cancer patient. Then, at the end of it, I told her that no one was ever worse off by hoping for the best…and she won't be either. Then I tell her that as a sign of my hope for her father, once he beats this cancer, I will give him my personalized CURED plate. She got a little teary and gave me a hug…then explained how to get my car out of their service shop.
You get in your car, drive forward VERY slowly and the garage door will rise up automatically and let you out. Fair enough….
So I get in the car and inch forward. The door did not open. I almost bump into the door thinking it would spring any moment…but it didn't. I figure maybe they pulled it too far forward and now the sensor can't see my car. I back up and try again…still nothing. I look over at her and she looks up at the door and nods as if to fix it. So she is running from panel to panel and nothing is happening. She runs inside and out she pops with her boss and a key. He unlocked the door and then the sensor kicks on and the door rises up…
And, so does my car. Slowly at first, but then it becomes unmistakable, my car is somehow caught on this door and it is lifting the front end of my car off of the ground. Not wanting to flip over (yeah, like YOU would have processed differently in that 1/234th of a second between life and flipped over Saturn), I throw the car into reverse and hit the gas…Now, to be sure, the Saturn is a front wheel drive car, so this had zero effect…yet, the car makes a hideous cracking noise and in what could only be described as super-slow motion, I watch as the door keeps going up, the car starts to go down and the front license plate of my car is tossed into the air, spinning like a playing card tossed from a deck and lands upside down on the driver side of the windshield. There I am, alive, staring at the word CURED…
I get out of the car…the girl is running towards me, asking if I was ok…and I said:
I guess you don't need to wait a week to give this to your Father….
If that is not a concrete example of surrealism, I doubt I shall ever be the wiser….
Currently
listening
:
Persistence of Time
By
Anthrax
Release date: 07 August, 1990
Have I displeased you, you feckless thug?
Current mood: virginal
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
Have I displeased you, you feckless thug?
-------------------------------------
Many of you probably tire of hearing me go on and on about the genius that is Aaron Sorkin. Deal with it. Sports Night will always be the best half-hour comedy television will every know. Not because it was the funniest show, but because it was comedy with a mind and a heart. It was the instant that I learned that Sorkin had cut Sports Night loose to do The West Wing that I decided to boycott his new work, which was hard to do since I was such a fan. Even without Sports Night, A Few Good Men was enough to grab me. It took over 7 years for me to give up that boycott...and not a moment too soon.
This scene is from the final episode of Season 2. To be sure, there are many, many solid moments in the episodes leading up to this one that I could have led with. I chose this one because I think it is one of the most powerful scenes to ever grace the small screen...and I am not alone.
This scene has been hailed by many as being the best scene of this episode and this episode has been voted by many to be the best episode of the series. Trust me; I do not easily fall into evocativity. This one ripped my soul out through that Aeon Flux hole in my navel.
The scene takes place just after the President (Martin Sheen) has buried his long time confidant and secretary Mrs. Landingham. In case you didn't follow the show over the first 2 seasons (or forgot) let me sum up what he is so pissed about. Mrs. Landingham had been with him since prep school (40 to 50 years…even longer than his wife). She was on her way back to the White House after buying her first new car (she was in her 70's) and was killed by a drunk driver. When he asks God if Josh Lyman was a "warning shot" he is referring to a senior staffer at the White House who was shot in an assassination attempt. The staffer survived after a touchy 18-hour surgery and months of rehabilitation and PTSD symptoms over the whole 2nd season. He also mentions a tropical storm that is bigger than any they have seen since the one that took a tender ship the year before. This was in reference to a show in the first season where a group of Navy ships had been evacuated to sea during a major hurricane only to find that the storm changed course without notice and sunk a tender ship while the President was on the radio with a sailor on the doomed ship. 68 dead because of his decision to move the fleet.
He admits to God, in his church, that he did lie to the American people by not mentioning that he had Multiple sclerosis while he was running for president and that he was sorry for lying. He then moves into listing all of the things that he has been able to accomplish as a result of that lie while being President to protect the young, the innocent and the powerless, as he felt God had commanded him to do. He then unleashes a tirade in Latin.
It might be of tremendous importance to know that when Josiah Edward "Jed" Bartlet entered undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame, he did so with the intention of becoming a Roman Catholic priest. He only left that vocation because he fell in love with his future wife. There is considerable weight added (in my opinion, perhaps) that he is speaking to his creator in a language that only he and his creator would understand in this day and age since Latin has become relegated to the High Mass and Biology classes.
** a translation of the Latin in the clip **
Gratias tibi ago, domine Thank you, Lord. (meant sarcastically, as in "thanks a lot, buddy) Haec credam a deo pio? a deo justo? a deo scito? Am I to believe these things from a righteous God? A just God? A wise God? Cruciatus in crucem To Hell with your punishments tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui; officium perfeci I was your servant, your messenger on the earth, I did my duty. Cruciatus in crucem (with a dismissive wave of the hand) eas in crucem The Hell with your punishments! And to Hell with you! (literally, "may you go to a cross"
Obviously he is not abandoning his God at that moment. He was a man pushed to his breaking point by the weight of his position in the world. To me, the beauty and power in the scene comes from the understanding that no matter who is the President of the United States, no matter what we each might think of them as a person or how much we might disagree with their decisions they are just human beings with all the failings we each have…except few of us will ever know the strains of being the commander in chief of a nation most certainly under attack from both inside and out every moment of every day. To be forced into making life and death decisions at the drop of a hat that might end up taking the lives of 68 sailors and then turn right around and have to broker a peace accord between two rival nations with nukes pointed at each other while worrying if the fact that you only get 3 hours a sleep a night is affecting your judgment.
I guess that is why I am just a lowly tax preparer. I enjoy my sanity too much. To think, a 24/7 tax season that lasts 1461 straight days where the price for being wrong is not measured in dollars, but in lives lost. No thank you.
Bartlet: You're a son of a bitch, you know that? She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What? Was that supposed to be funny? "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene. I don't know who's ass he was kissing there 'cause I think you're just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman? A warning shot? That was my son. What did I ever do to yours except praise his glory and praise his name? There's a tropical storm that's gaining speed and power. They say we haven't had a storm this bad since you took out that tender ship of mine in the North Atlantic last year, 68 crew. You know what a tender ship does? It fixes the other ships. It doesn't even carry guns. It just goes around and fixes the other ships and delivers the mail. That's all it can do. Gratias tibi ago, domine. Yes, I lied. It was a sin. I've committed many sins. Have I displeased you, you feckless thug? 3.8 million new jobs, that wasn't good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. Thirty million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We're not fighting a war. I've raised three children. That's not enough to buy me out of the doghouse? Haec credam a deo pio? A deo iusto, a deo scito? Cruciatus in crucem. Tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui. Officium perfeci. Cruciatus in crucem. Eas in crucem!
Why do the sweatshops exist?
Current mood: contemplative
Why do the sweatshops exist? The answer for this is the same reason why Carl's Jr's 8000 calorie cheeseburger and cigarettes exist. What is healthy or noble does not trump what is desired. There is a demand for these products so someone will fill that demand by supplying the product. In this case, its low cost labor as opposed to high calorie foods or carcinogens.
There is a yearly report published by The Economist (best economics magazine on the planet) called the Big Mac Index. It strips out all the eggheady methodology of purchase parity theory to simply show what a "Big Mac" costs in each location. When one talks about the low pay in sweatshops they typically use the term in relation to the amount of pay they expect, not what the workers in the local economy expect. As Ph.D economist Benjamin Powell pointed out, in the countries that Wal-Mart used to exploit low cost production, 9 of the 11 countries showed that the sweatshops paid as much if not more than other jobs in that economy and in some cases, much more. He says:
"Sure it's bad, but compared to what?"
For most, the choice between working long hours indoors sewing clothing or making shoes is better than the same hours in agriculture or infrastructure where digging trenches by hand or farming without appropriate machinery is much more difficult for the same pay, or in a lot of cases, LOWER pay. In these countries, children work not to afford a new pair of $200 Nikes, but because to not work means to not eat. Ban them from Sweatshops will only send them back into fields or mines.
No one in the USA should be forced to work in a shop that pays $0.13 per hour. But, to compare the USA to say, Bangladesh (where they did pay $0.13 per hour based on the 2003 data) would be wrong. Hence, the Big Mac Index. The Big Mac Index is a decent tool for measuring Purchase Power Parity (PPP) since the price is easy to find and the inputs are a great cross-cut of the economy: labor, vegetables, grains, meat, spice, rent and so forth.
Consider the USA and Costa Rica. Per the 2003 data (all in USD):
Hourly rate, labor - USA: $5.15 per hour Hourly rate, labor - Costa Rica: $2.38 per hour (bad compared to the USA) Cost of Big Mac, USA: $3.22 Cost of Big Mac, Costa Rica: $2.18 (good compared to the USA)
Cost of Big Mac in terms of hours of labor:
USA: 0.625 hours labor per Big Mac Costa Rica: 0.916 hours labor per Big Mac
Good or bad? Based on a 60 minute hour, it takes a USA worker 37.5 minutes to "earn" a Big Mac while a Costa Rican works 54.9 minutes to "earn" the same Big Mac. All things considered, that's not a huge difference in time.
Back to the underlying theme of economics (utilitarianism), you have to consider the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people, not just one specific "worker". One of the most basic assumptions of the market is that the price is determined between "willing" buyers and sellers. If the buyers are "willing" to buy a Big Mac at $2.18 and McDonald's is "willing" to sell a Big Mac at $2.18, the sale happens (CP). So, if you all of the sudden forced Costa Rican sweatshops to pay US level wages, what do you think happens? Just double the CR rate to $4.76 for sweatshop labor. Now your Costa Rican is spending 0.46 hours per Big Mac or 27.5 minutes of labor. Still compared to the US at 37.5 minutes is not that big of deal...right?
Not even close. By giving this small group twice the income, you've also doubled their ability to "willingly" consume a Big Mac, so they demand more. As they demand more, the price goes up (again, CP). So, now, you've begun to price the rest of that economy out of the market for Big Mac's since their purchase power is much lower than it was before the change. Before long, these sweatshop workers will have scooped up all of the superior goods and left the rest of the economy with the leftovers. All because the ONLY change was to pay Costa Ricans "as if" they were in the USA.
Here is a .pdf link for a study that Dr. Powell published about the use of sweatshop labor. It will be quite surprising reading to anyone who has the courage to approach it with an open mind.
One last thing. Many pundits also point to outsourcing in customer service to India as being a horrendous "condition". Times are a changing. Pre-outsource, large patches of the Indian economy were in peril. Way too many workers and too few jobs pushed wages down. Call centers open and immediately offer a wage far above the prevailing rates in order to entice Indian workers to not only work overnights, but also to put up with anti-Indian sentiment with the Americans who call Indian sweatshop call centers. Then something happened that the pundits don't seem to mention, although to an economist, was not shocking at all. To lure talent back from the overnight call centers, ALL employers had to raise their wages to attracted workers with talent. Now, most of the employers are paying very competitive wages and the educated Indians are leaving call centers en masse to work during daylight hours without the harassment. It's not 100% rising tide, but it is very, very close. As the costs of the labor increase, the demand decreases. Now, US companies have to pay much closer attention to how the cost of labor gains are retreating while public perception against Indian call centers is still a major issue. Soon, the call centers will move to another place where English speaking people will be happy to work these jobs.
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
{Scott's Note: I don't typically suggest causes for the simple reason that there are millions of ways to spread Philanthropy throughout the world and what seems important to me today will surely fade with every new challenge and need that arises. This one though, I can fully endorse for two reasons. One, this is not charity, this is not a gift. This is an investment in humanity. No one understands how best to serve the needs of a community than the people who live in that community. By providing financing for local people to develop their local economy you will help every member of that community to raise their standards of living. Two, I have a master's degree in corporate finance so the concept of "microfinance" has interested me for many years. Simply put: It works.
Will you get your money back? Maybe, maybe not. But at amounts as low as $25, you can skip dinner and a movie one night in your life to give these people a chance at a better life. I do know that most people who back businesses that "make it" and see their money repaid hardly ever pull it out of the program. They pick another potential business and start over again. This is a wonderful group and a wonderful program.}
Currently
listening
:
On a Clear Night
By
Missy Higgins
Release date: 07 May, 2007
Did Al Gore and the IPCC deserve to win the Nobel Peace prize?
Current mood: bouncy
Category: News and Politics
This question was posed recently as to wether or not Al Gore and the IPPC were deserving winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace prize for their work in publiczing the issue of climate change. My quick anwer quickly became a non-quick answer and one that rather suprised me. My answer didn't change, but the reason for my answer did change and I think it made for a much more defensible retort.
I said no. I personally cannot find justification to award a Peace prize to a global warming advocate. If the theories on global warming are solid and important then let them compete in the scientific categories, either physics or chemistry (or, better still, both).
I think is it a shame that there are far more deserving peace advocates out there that were passed over for the award.
According to Alfred Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "...the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
Here is just a short list of more deserving candidates:
1) Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and many other human rights leaders fighting a very difficult battle in Zimbabwe.
Morgan Tsvangirai is a trade unionist, human rights activist, democrat and President and founding member of the mainstream Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition party in Zimbabwe. In 1988 he became the Secretary-General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, the umbrella trade union organization in the country. He is the founding chairperson of the National Constitutional Assembly, a group that advocates for a new constitution for Zimbabwe.
Tsvangirai lost the March 2002 presidential election to Robert Mugabe of the ruling Zanu-PF party. The election provoked widespread allegations that Mugabe had rigged the election, through the use of violence, media bias, and manipulation of the voter's roll, leading to abnormally high pro-Mugabe turnout in some areas. On 11 March 2007, a day after his 55th birthday, Tsvangirai was arrested on his way to a prayer rally in the Harare township of Highfield. His wife was allowed to see him in prison, after which she reported that he had been heavily tortured by a crack commando unit, resulting in deep gashes on his head and a badly swollen eye. The event garnered an international outcry and was considered particularly brutal and extreme, even for a regime as nefarious as Mugabe's.
Arthur Guseni Oliver Mutambara has been the President of a faction of the Movement for Democratic Change since February 2006. Mutambara was a noted leader of the student movement within Zimbabwe in 1988 and 1989, leading anti-government protests at the University of Zimbabwe which led to his arrest and imprisonment. Mutambara criticized government ministers for abusing Zimbabwe's land reform program, engaging in: "monopolistic politics of domination, corruption, and petty bourgeois accumulation."
2) The Burmese Monks and activists in Myanmar: Stories related to Amnesty International speak of the brutal repression suffered by anti-government protesters in the country. A series of interviews with prominent activists, including Mie Mie, Htay Kywe and Nay Tin Myint, have exposed government tactics of ongoing night raids, arbitrary arrests and appalling detention conditions.
3) Father Nguyen Van Ly is a Roman Catholic priest and prominent Vietnamese dissident involved in many pro-democracy movements, for which he was imprisoned for a total of almost 15 years. For his ongoing imprisonment and continuous non-violent protest, Amnesty International has adopted Nguyen Van Ly in December, 1983 as a Prisoner of conscience. Most recently, his support for the Bloc 8406 manifesto has led to his sentence on March 30, 2007 for an additional eight years in prison.
4) Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet-Gonzalez is a pro-democracy activist in Cuba. who has been imprisoned for most of the last 8 years. He has suffered police torture through beating, kicking, stripping, and burning. He is currently being held at Combinado del Este Prison in Havana, Cuba, where he is generally not allowed outside visitors, including medical practitioners and clergy, under conditions described as "wretched". The conditions in which he is serving his 25 year prison term - imposed after an unfair trial in 2003 for his non-violent advocacy of human rights - are deteriorating. Prison officials recently informed his family members that they are punishing him for his peaceful protest of prison conditions and threatened that those conditions could get worse. Dr. Biscet is one of 75 human rights activists and independent journalists sentenced in the spring of 2003 to prison terms of up to 28 years in Cuba. Throughout much of his time in prison, Dr. Biscet has been held in sub-standard punishment cells, often in solitary confinement or with violent criminals. For long periods of time, he has been deprived of any outside communication, visits or vital medications sent by his family. He is currently being held in a windowless cell which lacks adequate water and from which he is infrequently taken outside. Dr. Biscet's harsh prison conditions have further aggravated his poor health and at one point last year, he was reported to have lost more than 60 pounds.
5) Nazanin Afshin-Jam is Miss Canada 2003 and runner-up Miss World. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and Political Science, fluent in three languages: Persian, English and French, and also knows conversational Spanish. She has studied at both the Science Po in Paris and Herstmonceux Castle in England. Nazanin is also a pilot and is licensed to fly both powered aircraft and gliders and has achieved the highest rank in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets -- Warrant Officer First Class. She's beautiful, smart, talented.
...oh yeah, and almost single handedly forced the Iranian government to stop the execution of a 17-year-old girl who's crime was causing the death of a man who was trying to rape her. Since then, Nazanin Afshin-Jam has started a new movement to ban all childhood executions in Iran, where it is currently legal to execute girls as young as 9. NINE!!! In a time when the beauty queens of the USA can't seem to find a clue in a catalog of Milton Bradley games, Miss Canada, Nazanin Afshin-Jam is a class act. We could use more beauty queens like her.
...and what the heck, here is the song too. Not exactly Enya, but what can you do? She's Canadian...Persian. Persanadian!!!
-----------------------------------------
I know a lot of people look on the Nobel Peace prize as an award very much tainted by its own history. Not only have ruthless killers like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin been successfully nominated in the past, but even some of the former winners like Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat have had their legacies as Peace bringers called into serious question. Not to be outdone, some of the greatest advocates of peace during the time of the award managed to be skipped over entirely. Mahatma Gandhi, César Chávez and Pope John XXIII, all of whom should have won, never did.
As such, maybe it shouldn't be as heartbreaking that the clear winner this year didn't win. Irena Sendler, the retired Polish Roman Catholic social worker, who during World War II was an activist of Polish Underground and Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw organized the smuggling of approximately 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She would carry them out, provide them with false documents and then placed them with either Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Catholic convents such as the Sisters Little Servants of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mary. She kept lists of the names, hidden in jars, in order to keep track of original and new identities. Arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo, she was severely tortured and sentenced to death. The Council for Aid to Jews saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to her execution. Officially, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. Even in hiding, she continued her work for the Jewish children.
So, yes, global warming is important, but it belongs where it belongs: Judged on scientific merit against other scientific theories and other scientists. Not as a peace initiative. Not when there are so many better choices for bringing peace to our planet to choose from.
Currently
listening
:
Scar
By
Missy Higgins
Release date: 10 January, 2006
1. Seven – Late September 1995 2. The Usual Suspects – January 1995
...and if you haven't seen Seven or The Usual Suspects, spoilers included…can't be helped.
By the time Seven arrived at the theaters in late September of 1995, Kevin Spacey had already began to ring bells with the mainstream audience. Through his very high profile supporting roles in such films as Outbreak, Swimming with Sharks, The Ref, and Glengarry Glen Ross (best cast ever assembled), he attracted attention. It was, however, his role as Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects that the world finally took notice of his acting ability and rightly so, awarded him his first Oscar for the part. Yes, he was genius in the role of Verbal Kint, nailed the two-bit penny con with a heart of gold and a catchy name (Verbal, they say I talk too much) and a noticeable deformity (who's the gimp?) which caused Verbal Kint to limp from place to place. Funny thing though, between Outbreak (March 1995) and Usual Suspects (January 1995), not only was his face known, but his voice too.
When he was cast in the role of John Doe, the mysterious serial killer, in Seven, there was an understanding between the producers and the studio that they would use Kevin Spacey's rising star power to market the film. Spacey, to his credit, said hell no. You have Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman to drive all the star power you need and it's always best to leave the killer "unknown" until the story dictates his revelation, especially a killer as cunning and sadistic as John Doe. If you see Spacey in lights and not in the movie after the first hour has past, anyone will clue in to the killer and "subtly", as a cinematic technique, is out of the question. They saw his point, and out goes the Spacey name from all marketing materials AND the opening credits.
Now, as the movie progresses, John Doe is seen, but never in a way that would tip the audience as to who he was (i.e. Kevin Spacey). All camera angles cut away as they get closer to his face and he uses an accent to throw off the audience when he speaks. More importantly, in all of these early scenes, you don't know that person is the criminal, so you don't do any of the heavy lifting at that time.
Eventually, the detectives stumble on to John Doe's pad and find a receipt for something John Doe purchased. They go to that store, a custom leather shop, to see if the employees remembered the person who made the purchase. The only kat there took a look and said sure. He remembered. He said: "John Doe, easy name to remember, he had a limp."
Still, no one has seen a good picture of John Doe at this point and the only non-accented voice from John Doe (normal Spacey voice) was a short telephone call. By the time the audience is let in on who John Doe is, when he walks into the police station and announces his arrival, it's well after Leather-shop man spilled the beans…as it were.
In the Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint, the overly talkative physically challenged small time petty thief who walked with a limp, turns out to be the master of all international crime magnets, Keyser Soze. Keyser Soze is the boogeyman that scares the other boogeymen. The literal force of criminal evil personified. So recognizable is the name that criminals use it to scare their own children into not ratting out their pops. So easy to remember that AlbanianHungarian criminals on their deathbeds scream his name as if he was the devil himself.
And the clerk said: "John Doe, easy name to remember, he had a limp."
Two characters, John Doe and Verbal Kint.
One limp
A name that is easy to remember
......John Doe........Verbal Kint......
Yes, I AM telling you
Make no mistake about it...
None
John Doe, mastermind serial killer, is without ANY question in my mind:
KEYSER SOZE!!!!
Do you think the sequel to "Seven" will be called "Eight"?
betrayed
adventurous
aroused
recumbent
virginal
contemplative
determined
bouncy
