Happy Thanksgiving

I had a really nice day. I drove up to Muskegon for dinner with my family (I'm typing this there). The drive went really fast, and my right front tire didn't fall off (they're going to fix the alignment today). I got to meet my little sister's new boyfriend Jim and his son Chris. Chris is six. He has the most energy of any kid I've ever seen. After he tired out my mom's hyperactive Schnauzer, he actually spent about ten minutes just running around in a circle. Then he did jumping jacks. I got tired just watching him.

Part of Thanksgiving tradition is watching football. I don't watch much football, although I'm in a fantasy league where I was in first place until recently. The Lions beating the Packers senseless (tee hee, Shawn) might help me get back into first place.

Present at dinner were my sister, my stepdad, my mom, Jim, Chris, me, and my mom's friend Frenchie. Her real name is Claudine, I think, but everyone calls her Frenchie. She's French, you know. She was raised in Vietnam and I believe her husband owned a plantation of a sort over there until the Vietnam War forced them to flee. I'm sure she would be interesting to talk to about that, but the Lions were on.

After dinner we went bowling (I won) and played pool (I won, mostly). Accompanying us was my friend Moosie, who I haven't seen in a while. Since he probably doesn't read this blog, I can tell you that six-year-old Chris nearly beat him at bowling. It was good seeing him. The entire day was good, which is a happy surprise, because holidays usually end in screaming with my family. There was no screaming at all, except while we were bowling, and that was technically cheering anyway.

The only bad thing was that I left my pie in Chicago. Our office had a charity thing where chefs from fancy restaurants downtown baked pies, and the proceeds went to charity. I bought a pumpkin pie that I am just positive was baked by Emeril himself. It looked good, it smelled good, and so I left it in the refrigerator at work because I was so eager to leave early.

I hope my loyal readers had a good Thanksgiving too. Feel free to fill my comments with amusing or heart-warming anecdotes.

When I Grow Up and I Am Rich

I like it so much when everybody talks to each other in my comments that I thought I'd encourage it with a new category: Deep Questions. I will ask an important question, and you guys can chat about it.

The question: When you were young and dreamed about being rich and famous, what silly things did you plan for yourself?

I was going to have fountains in my house that delivered Mountain Dew instead of water. I was going to have an arcade with Galaga as the prime attraction. I think I wanted a hovercraft to get from building to building. The only thing I planned that I still want and consider feasible was an in-house screening room for movies.

Commence the discussion!

Hollywood's Stupid New Anti-Piracy Plan

I hate Hollywood. In their efforts to reduce the amount of movie piracy (not to be confused with pirate movies), they have done all kinds of stupid things that affect my movie experience. I have to endure ads before the movie, in which a carpenter asks me not to pirate movies because it will affect him, not the bigshot producers. I am going to have to endure an Oscars stacked against independent films: the MPAA banned "screeners" from being sent out, which is often the only way independent films with limited theater appearances get seen by potential voters. Now I have to endure actual diminishing of the quality of the film.

The studios are adding patterns of brown dots to the film surface. They blink on for a second, then they disappear. They appear all over the screen, at a rate of about once every 20 seconds. They appear in threes, fours, and once as a group of six. They show up on the sky, on the wall, and sometimes even on someone's face.

I noticed it during The Matrix Revolutions, but it was much more apparent in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. It was so apparent that, as you can see already, I was distracted from my movie-watching experience wondering what they were, then counting them, then timing them.

Roger Ebert featured a letter from a film projectionist about it here. It's called the Cap Code, or better as the Crap Code. It's another panicky attempt by the studios to punish all of us for the sins of those studio insiders who are likely responsible for 90% of movie piracy. Thanks a lot, Hollywood. You suck.

Amazon's Stupid New Function

I hate Amazon.com's stupid new search function. Now, when you type a keyword into the search field, it looks in the text of books instead of just the titles. So if you search for something like "inconspicuous," you get results like a book called Flipping Properties: Generate Instant Cash Profits from Real Estate, where the word "inconspicuous" shows up on page 128. You get A Mind at a Time, where the word shows up on page 60. You get a novel called The Eight, where the word shows up on page 83. But I'm not looking for those. What I'm looking for doesn't show up until #7 on the list: Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure by Paul Lukas.

What kind of stupid people are in charge at Amazon? I like the idea of an engine that searches text, but only as an option. This is not how we expect search engines to work. We type in keywords that we want to appear in the title, not words we hope to find somewhere in the text. I realize that they're doing this as a marketing ploy, using the search results to push certain books. Try "conspicuous": the first result with that word in the title is #20, but above it are a guide to setting up an Ebay business, a Philip Roth novel recently made into a movie, a popular nonfiction book by Eric Larson. Other results are just weird, like a potboiler published in 1983. How are any of these results helpful? How are they not merely annoying impediments?

Again, I would be all for this function, if it were an option instead of being automatic, or if it separated the results into title matches and text matches. But it doesn't. I admit that it's fun to find out that Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is the most popular novel featuring the phrase "eat a peach." However, when I am looking for a book, I want to find that book as quickly and easily as possible. I'm assured that buy.com's search engine doesn't have this newfangled and ill-advised automatic function. Too bad they don't have as many products.

The Pianist: It's about survival

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20031109.shtml#59629

Columnist Jan Herman, one of my friend Shane's favorite columnists from way back, has a big problem with Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film The Pianist. Basically, the film forgets about Wladyslaw Szpilman's family immediately after they are carted off to the camps, while it lionizes the SS officer played by Thomas Kretschmann, who could have killed him but didn't.

What Herman pointed out is true, but it didn't bother me a bit. In fact, I think that was the whole point of the film. It didn't make the main character into a hero, just a survivor. It dealt with the people who had a direct impact on his survival. His family was forgotten because, my guess is, he forgot about them, except maybe in the abstract, because job #1 was staying alive. The German soldier (whose "heroizing" was historical, not invented, so I don't get Herman's complaint about it) had the final and ultimate impact on the main character's survival: he could have shot him, but he didn't. To the main character and thus from the viewpoint of the movie, he was a big hero. I guess they could have included what happened to the family in the scroll at the end, but we already knew what happened to them: they died in the camps. The scroll was for characters whose fates weren't obvious from watching the movie.

Here's my original review of the movie: http://www.geocities.com/evil_spoon/p2002pianist.htm.

Thanks to Shane for the link.

Whack-a-pol

http://slate.msn.com/id/2090855/

It's the fun new game that helps you choose which presidential candidate to vote for in 2004! It's easy: you just answer the questions, and it eliminates the candidates who don't agree with you.

Sigh. It's depressing as hell. I kept getting the response "Get Real!" after all of the candidates were gone. What do I compromise on? Which values do I ignore to find the right person for the job? Is it the lesser of several evils, or the evil of several lessers? Where have you gone, super candidate? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

Dead Letter Office

http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/11/03/dead_sites/index.html

A study of over 3000 blogs says that 2/3 have not been updated for two months, and a quarter of them have not been updated since day 1.

I will not falter! I will not give up! I will continue to peddle my drivel until the end of time!

Blackhawks 3, Mighty Ducks 1

Another Sunday night, another hockey game. This one was much better attended than the last one, probably because of Anaheim's trip to the Stanley Cup Finals last season. One of Anaheim's best defensemen is Sandis Ozolinsh, who is more of a forward than a defenseman; I don't think he can actually skate backwards. Anyway, he is Latvian, and we had the pleasure of sitting near a small but very vocal and very enthusiastic group of Latvian hockey fans, there to cheer on their countryman. They were a riot. They had two cheers: San-di (I think that's a diminutive of Sandis, although it's possible they wouldn't pronounce the S in Latvian), and "Let's go, O-zo-linsh!" They alternated these cheers at top volume, interrupted by dancing and high-fives. It didn't seem to matter whether Ozolinsh was on the ice or not. They just loved him.

However, the Ugly Americans were out in full force. One drunk Chicago fan stood in front of them screaming "Let's go Blackhawks!" until the veins popped out in his forehead, and when they would respond by shouting "Let's go Ozolinsh!" even louder, he would shake his head exaggeratedly and scream again. This was funny until he apparently pushed one of them, and then he started flipping them off individually and screaming "Fuck you!" at them, also until his veins popped out. The Latvians took this goodnaturedly: they were just having fun, being positive about their countryman, and they weren't in the mood to argue. The Chicago fan went back to his seat for a while, but he and his friends were shouting xenophobic and abusive taunts at them the rest of the game. It didn't stop with them, either. When the Latvians got really drunk, they started cheering in Latvian. A group of college kids sitting near us took issue with this, screaming nonsense words that they thought sounded Latvian, or something. They also shouted abusive taunts and demands that the Latvians shut up. They screamed themselves hoarse. They behaved like complete idiots.

Latvia is a country about the size of West Virginia, and it has a population a little smaller than Chicago. Imagine moving halfway across the world, from a tiny country to one of the largest in the world. You go to a hockey game with your friends to cheer on one of your countrymen who excels at the highest level of competition, and your reward is threats from drunken Americans who have probably never been out of the Midwest. The Latvians weren't even Anaheim fans per se: some of them were wearing Blackhawks shirts. They were just cheering their favorite player. I hope they realize that not everybody feels the way the xenophobic idiots do. I was really ashamed to be a Blackhawks fan, and a little ashamed that those loudmouths might represent majority opinion in the US.