mumpish

I'm watching the making of documentary for The Labyrinth which of course has a lot of voice-over work from Jim Henson ... I had forgotten how close Kermit was to his natural voice. It's weird listening to it, and it's taking me back to my childhood in a strange way.

I'm extremely doubtful about Twitter, but just in case, I grabbed my usual user name. I haven't done anything but register; the account isn't set up or configured, and I haven't twitted, or whatever it's called.

So why are people following me? I've picked up several followers in the past month, and I only know one of them.

I am watching, not without some sadness, George Carlin's final HBO special, It's Bad For Ya!. Carlin has been a regular, welcome presence in my life, from my youngest smuggled cassettes to this latest special. Of all the great entertainers I've been committed to - Watterson, Thompson, Hicks, Pink Floyd, Pratchett, Breathed - Carlin is the only one who has been willing and able to go the distance. His worst work was inventive and amusing; his best was brilliant and penetrating.

Watching this, it's hard to believe he didn't know it was his swan song. He's visibly aged from his last outing, moving much slower, and he's dialed way back on the vitriol of his last outing. He's not coasting; he concludes the show with a penetrating, cynical analysis of what rights are (and why they are fictional). But it's hard to watch this without thinking that he wanted to go out on a softer note and was aware of the importance of the tone of this performance.

Part of what makes me think that is the excellent interview piece in the special features. It's just a one-camera on Carlin, with the interviewer edited out. Carlin talks in depth about his place in culture and entertainment history, what he sees as three significant phases of his career, his writing and performance process and other fascinating details that are more introspective and personally revealing than I've ever seen him before. Intentional or not, it's a fitting capstone performance and an interesting DVD.

So I finally get past the 'temporarily unavailable' authentication server issue on the iPhone 3.0 upgrade (why is it my problem that it's unavailable? Even if it is, how hard is it to hand out 100 million 500-byte keys in a day? Isn't Apple a technology company?) iTunes finally quit bitching, the install finished, the phone reboots, and says it's done.

For a while I thought I had half an install.

iTunes reports that the phone is up to date and running the 3.0 software. I have the new voice memo application, and my email app goes landscape when I ask it to, as does the stock ticker application. But it looked like most of the cool features were missing; it took me quite a while to figure out cut and paste (you have to double tap to invoke it) and search wasn't obvious at all (it's another home screen page to the left of your regular app pages). So far it looks like the only syncing option for notes is Outlook, which is pretty disappointing. It's also *local* outlook, not whatever exchange server you have your email and calendar set to, so again, pretty disappointing.

I'm still trying to find voice controls. It looks like without the new camera hardware, you don't get the better camera controls or video. So, overall, kinda meh.

People have recommended Mary Roach's two pop science works, Stiff and Bonk. I got around to reading Bonk recently, and was honestly a bit disappointed. There's some interesting factoids in it, but she's a bit too cute with the subject to actually teach you much of anything. It was reasonably entertaining, but for the level of effort she put into it, it needed to be about a third smaller.

Burn After Reading: I'm worried about the Coen brothers. This is two in a row - including No Country For Old Men - that have left me cold. Old Men was a serious departure for them, which I respect, I just didn't like it. Burn, on the other hand, is a return to type, but they ... blew it. It's got a fantastic cast, but the story lets them down.

This is Spinal Tap: although I know all the jokes, I'd actually never seen this. It must have been a creature of its times; I wasn't that taken with it.

Really. 26 episodes, next year.

FOX has done this before, with Family Guy. Way to go, FOX, you couldn't have done this for Firefly before Joss killed off Wash and Book?

While pointedview is holding a candle for the Pre, I'm sitting here wondering why Apple bothered with the 3GS at all. From what I can tell from the surprisingly light coverage today, we aren't getting multitasking, which I guess means we aren't getting real IM clients. That's a big disappointment, one of several that all seem to have a common component - except for the still-unconfirmed landscape mode keyboard, there don't seem to be any software upgrades that don't require the 3GS device to work - faster processor, more memory, new camera, compass, etc.

Looking for a bright side, I have no strong urge to foolishly upgrade just five months into my contract, so there's that ...

EDIT: OK, the blogs failed me. Apple's site actually has the detail I was looking for, and it's pretty better news than I was suspecting. Highlights:

- Copy and paste
- Landscape keyboard
- Search
- Voice memos - I have an app for this, and it's decent and free, but this was an easy no-brainer for Apple.
- Note syncing!

Tethering and MMS are still hung up in AT&T hell. I'd love to see some judge hand them a ruling telling them to enable tethering under existing unlimited data plans (judicial activism you can believe in!) but I'm honestly not sure I'd use this very much if I had it. Same with MMS, which I'm sure is hung up because they want to figure out a way to make us pay more for it.

Theresa and I went to see Pixar's new film Up last night; I'd meant to see it earlier but somehow missed that it was out. Once again they've outdone themselves.

I wasn't sure for the first fifteen minutes. It starts with a backstory that includes injury to a child, infertility, unfulfilled dreams, financial difficulty, death, isolation, loneliness, despair, simple assault,and forced relocation. That's all fine with me, but there was a deadly silence in the theater - the kids weren't getting it.

At about that point it turns into the standard high-energy romp the kids were expecting. I don't remember laughing at anything so hard in a long time. The real stroke of genius is the running joke of what a dog would say if you gave it the ability to talk ... it's milked for laughs throughout and it never gets old, especially if you are a dog owner, because it rings true.

I've been on a kick for books that would annoy my grandmother lately. Here are two good ones:

Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: This is an anthology of essentially atheist essays and other artifacts, covering the same ground as Christopher Hitchens' excellent God is Not Great with not quite the same even quality but with better variety. Highlights include a sample of a Neil Gaiman's project to produce literal graphic novel renderings of Bible stories - the ones that aren't usually covered in Sunday school - and the entire 40-page text of a grand jury report on one of the Catholic Church sex abuse investigations ... I had intended to skim this but got drawn into it and like a train wreck, I was unable to look away until I'd read the entire report ... the depth and breadth of the scandal, and the number of persons that had to be complicit in order for it to go on, the length of time it persisted, the stunning number of victims, beggars belief. I knew about the scandal from the news, but I truly had no idea; the press pulled the punch ... if half of it is true a just world would disband the Church and turn them all out on the streets.

Why Evolution Is True: this is an attempt by an evolutionary biologist to lay out the case for evolution in layman's terms, but in much greater detail than is generally delivered in the press or in those oh-so-controversial high school classes. I shied away from biology, preferring chemistry and physics in college, so although I've never doubted the book's premise, I learned a great deal mainly because I'd never really done much deep thinking on the subject. The book will probably not convince a young-Earth Creationist, but it does an outstanding of job of demonstrating to the rest of us the many different disciplines and strains of evidence that all fit together in a way that argues as convincingly as science can in favor of evolution. Particularly good is the recurring demonstration of predictions made within the framework of the theory that have been borne out by later investigation or experiment.

So we were at the Stone Mountain Laser show this weekend. Mostly just corny fun, but there's some fascinating propaganda and spin in there. For example, as near as I was able to tease out the narrative from the little cartoon that animates the carving to the tune of Elvis' "American Trilogy:"

Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis were great heroes who fought bravely against an unspecified and invisible enemy. Despite their great bravery, Lee was horrified by the terrible cost of the war, both in men and materials lost. A man of conscience, Lee broke his sword over his knee to end this terrible war and bring the warring states back into a united country.

The mind boggles. On the plus side, they no longer use the Lee Greenwood song, and surprisingly they make only passing reference to 9/11 in their soldier/police/fire salutary montage.

I still find myself annoyed by the carving - it's an ugly scar. The mountain is beautiful and it's hard to imagine the scope of the engineering project that would be required to restore it to something like its original state.

Yesterday I watched Let the Right One In and as it concluded I didn't understand its 98% fresh rating. I've found myself thinking about it ever since, and I think I get it. The film stays with you; it's quite literally haunting. The atmosphere of despair and longing from most of the characters, echoed by the physical setting, are only just barely tolerable because of the dark humor and quite innocent love story that drives it.

As vampire films go it's minimalist, almost incidental to the story. You don't get anything in the way of justification or vampire mechanics, and no backstory to speak of, but for all that it's fascinating because it's a back-to-basics approach to the creatures that fits perfectly with the other elements of the film. It also features one entirely new idea - a harrowing scene of the consequences of crossing a threshold uninvited. It will stay with me; I bet Joss wishes he'd thought of it ... it's a question that plays much better to gothic horror than to comedy.

So after being somewhat befuddled and not at all sure I like it, 24 hours later I'm mildly lamenting the fact that the structure of the story wouldn't permit a credible sequel; I'd like to see more of this vision of vampires. It's available streamed on Netflix if anyone is interested.

Juno: I was worried that this would be another Superbad; lots of hype that it didn't live up to. I was pleasantly surprised; the writing is outstanding, and Ellen Page really outdid herself, creating a unique take on the manic pixie dream girl. I especially liked the fact that they didn't pull the punch at the end; the pregnancy comes off and the adoption moves forward, but they take the time to show that it wasn't easy, that it has an emotional cost. This one is worth the time, unlike ...

Street Kings: Keanu sleepwalks through yet another role, this time as a corrupt cop pushed beyond his personal limits. I won't unveil the surprise ending, but this film really wastes Forest Whittaker and Hugh Laurie.

Shine a Light: Great premise; Scorsese directs a documentary of the Rolling Stones. If you're a fan, this is a decent watch ... it's fun to get an intimate view of Mick, Kieth, Ron and Charlie performing. It makes me sad, though, that Floyd isn't this energetic.

Mercer County man crashes car while swatting spider

"Allen Ferry ended up smashing the car into a mailbox, a street sign and a utility pole .... No word on the spider."

I remember thinking that the New Enterprise looked a bit large, mainly in a shot where the shuttle bay had room for enough shuttles to bring the entire crew on board, but didn't think much more about it. Apparently it is New Canon:

http://gizmodo.com/5253324/how-big-is-the-new-enterprise-compared-to-galactica

That makes it bigger than an Old Canon Galaxy Class, which strikes me as a bit ridiculous ... are we supposed to believe that the loss of George Kirk's ship drove Starfleet to make massively larger craft 75 years earlier?

// I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me the I-just-happen-to-run-into-the-exact-same-cave-as-Old-Spock coincidence. Did the writers take a day off?

// Still liked it :)