Happy Wednesday.

I'm not seeing much that's newsworthy this morning.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (318)
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"The Obama Effect": Not a Parody

Okay when I first watched this trailer I thought it was just a fairly lame SNL attempt at parody but nooooo...it's for reals - as in people are actually going to the theater tonight and paying money to see it without men with guns or kidnapped children in vans down by the river being involved.

Charles Dutton wrote and directed this movie where he plays man in his 50's who has a heart attack and then develops a obsessive man-crush on the presidential candidate, Barack Obama. He dedicates his entire life to Obama's campaign but then realizes - thanks to the guidance of Saint Obama - that he's also neglected his family and friends. Luckily thanks again to the 'Obama Effect' he gets his life back on the right path just as Obama sweeps to glorious victory in the 2008 election.

Yep there's 83 more minutes of maudlin agit-prop where this came from. Even Twilight-loving Mrs. Justin Bieber-signature-practicing middle-school fan girls would find this movie just a bit heavy handed. And before you watch the trailer below be sure and read King Shamus' epic take-down of it here.

Oh and the black Republican character is supposed to be an over-the-top caricature but I'm betting that a movie about him would have been a lot more entertaining, interesting and profitable as well.

According to this movie Democrats quit their jobs, have uncontrollable man-crushes on their presidential candidates and annoy their neighbors.  In the meantime, Republicans get to be rich and have a lot of sex.  Was the script written by Ralph Nader? 

Conclusion:  What is the point of "The Obama Effect"?  Seriously, what story is this flick supposed to tell?  I think everybody knows Obama won the 2008 election.  We needed a feature length motion picture to fill us in on that?

...Apparently "The Obama Effect" means people should sacrifice their time, money and livelihood so that their dreamy puppy-dog crush can live in a nice house and rule over us all in an imperious fashion. 

If that's the case, then we've all been living The Obama effect for the last three years, whether we wanted to or not.

Of course as a convicted felon Charles Dutton couldn't actually vote for Obama himself in 2008 so I guess this movie falls under fantasy-prop as well.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:23 PM | Comments (414)
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This would be a follow-up to that anti-semitic article from Tablet.

“High quantitative use was a central link between computer use and stress, sleep disturbances, and depression, described by the young adults,” Thomee said in the study. “It was easy to spend more time than planned at the computer (e.g., working, gaming, or chatting), and this tended to lead to time pressure, neglect of other activities and personal needs (such as social interaction, sleep, physical activity), as well as bad ergonomics, and mental overload.”

The study found a correlation between stress and always being available on the phone.

“Demands for availability originated not only from work and the social network, but also from the individual’s own ambitions or desires. This resulted in disturbances when busy or resting, the feeling of never being free, and difficulties separating work and private life,” Thomee explained in the study. “Unreturned calls or messages led to overload and feelings of guilt.”

Right, I think people have a bad case of that last bit. The "I've Always Got To Be Connected To the Machine" syndrome. (Not me, though! As you can see from my dereliction of duty on weekends.)

On sleep disorder:

I find that the computer screen is inherently stimulating, whether it's the light or the pattern of eye movements when using it. I've found that I personally can't sleep for at least 90 minutes or more after I turn off the computer -- so if I want to go to sleep by 1 am, I'd better turn off the computer by 11:00 or 11:30.

Anyone else find that? When I started shifting to Kindle at night (or TV -- but TV with, get this, no multitasking on the computer), I found it wasn't as hard to fall asleep when I went to bed.

Posted by: Ace at 03:21 PM | Comments (364)
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Sorry to bump out that feel-good video in the down-page post about the armed robbers in the Internet cafe getting shot, but it can't hold a candle to this one.

A New York City bus driver says he was thinking of his own young daughter when he rushed to catch a 7-year-old girl plunging three stories from a Brooklyn building Monday.

"Please let me catch her, please let me catch her," Stephen St. Bernard, 52, recalled thinking. "That's all I could say. Let me catch the little baby."

God bless you, Mr. St. Bernard.

And before anyone goes passing judgment asking "where the f**k were the parents?" let me just say that, as the parent of an autistic child probably not too different than this one, when they get it in their mind to do something they're quick about it.

All you parents out there, imagine having a 7 year-old toddler. For the rest of you, that means a child you have to pay constant attention to who has no innate sense of danger. It's very difficult to do this 24/7/365 year-in, year-out.

On a related note, this seems like a good time to apologize again to the neighbor at the vacation house we were in a couple of weeks ago who sprinted out her back door when she spotted my little guy running across their yard headed to the pool. I had him. I really did.

Also, as a side note to all the Paterno/Penn State apologists out there: this is how decent, honorable people respond when they see a child in danger.
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Posted by: andy at 02:39 PM | Comments (127)
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So, this is on PPV now. I remembered that Kurt Loder had given it a fairly positive review:

Wrath of the Titans stands tall in the pantheon of schlock—it’s schlock with brio, the best kind. And if I were a contemporary lad with no memory of Ray Harryhousen’s stop-motion Sinbads and Argonauts of 50 years ago, I think I might be pretty tickled by this clamorous CGI myth-fest.

So, I gave it a shot.

Given that it's a sequel to a reboot of a movie that was campy crap in the first place, it's pretty good. Bear in mind, every review must begin with the disclaimer: This is a review of Wrath of the Titans, for crying out loud, so what are you expecting?

But it's reasonably decent. First of all, the movie introduces another half-god, Agenor, son of Poseidon, as Perseus' buddy; Agenor is a little different in that he's comic relief, and a rogue.

It's a great character, the sort of character this sort of story desperately needs, and a character which is completely original and completely new to audiences. I mean, I've never seen a humorous half-god thief character team up with a more serious half-god warrior character before, ever, in my life.

That noted, it's still welcome. (I believe all good ideas should be ripped off at least five or six times.) This Agenor fella has a good line:

HELIUS: I've read you were a great disappointment.

AGENOR: That's right, I am great.

It's too bad I couldn't understand most of of his dialogue (or most other character's, either), because the bits and pieces I heard weren't bad at all.

The story's about an evil team-up between Hades (of course) and Ares (also of course). Hades is butthurt that Zeus gets all the glory, and Ares is butthurt that Zeus gives all the glory to his precious Perseus. So they undertake to release the Father of the Gods, Cronus, from Tarterus, the Bad Neighborhood of Hades (Hell, basically) to destroy the world.

And then the heroes have to travel the world and go into a dungeon. There they encounter Monster Manual pages 33 and 123, and Dieties & Demigods pages 88-89.

The special effects are pretty good. Especially Cronus, at the end, presented as a giant made of volcanic magma.

The writing seems to confuse Greek mythology with more recent religions -- ethical montheistic religions, like Christianity -- because it keeps talking about "forgiveness" and other not-so-Greek-mythological concepts, but I don't think anyone's watching this for some kind of accurate depiction of ancient Greek god-myths. I guess they did get the jealousy and spite of the "bad" gods right.

Overall, I gotta say, it did not suck. Expectations might have helped, because I expected it to suck. The first fifteen minutes did, in fact, suck, but then Autolycus, I mean Agenor, is introduced, and it gets better from there.

Two and half stars, just barely worth it, but still, worth it.

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (182)
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Meh. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (190)
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No deaths, but he plugged both of them.

Both men were shot by Williams. Their wounds were not life-threatening. Each was arrested hours later and charged with attempted armed robbery with a firearm and felony criminal mischief.

The .380 he shoots them with doesn't really seem to slow them down at all. They appear uninjured. Just sayin'. I know guns don't really blow people off their feet as in Hollywood movies, but these non-lethal hits just don't seem to do anything to the crooks.

Well, they do make them run like hell.

At the end of the video, the bad guys are literally tripping over each other fleeing out the door. That's the best part.

It appears the guy gives the gunman a warning, a command to drop his weapon, before firing. The criminal reacts before the citizen fires, so I assume he hailed him.

Thanks to @comradearthur.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (413)
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This is a Gawker writer (of course), but writing at Tablet magazine, which is some kind of Jewish arts and culture magazine.

It's a very confusing article, because, I am guessing, it comes from a very confused person.

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror—visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”

I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.

This person is estranged from her father? Partly over ("for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason") what seems to be an incredibly trivial discussion about Terri Schiavo?

I didn't see that one coming.

Next thing and you'll be telling me "She eats to forget."

Somehow the article links a character on a TV show -- who has cancer, and sees his cancer as liberating him to do all sorts of crazy criminal shenanigans -- to Holocaust survivors, and how they use their experience to justify horrors they inflict on others (I imagine she means the Palestinians, but who knows).

All [Walt from Breaking Bad] has is indignation at the memory of his illness and the determination to flip the script: He suffered, now others will suffer. Walt and Breaking Bad express one of our most inherent psychological fallacies: the ability to do any number of consciously reprehensible things while persisting in considering ourselves the protagonist at all times. From world wars to breaking hearts, we cling to the destruction done to us in the past as a justification for the destruction we will cause in the future.

As Adam Carolla might say: Hey, even I'm offended, and I'm an anti-semite.

As I've said so many times: There is a subset of "politics" which isn't politics at all, but some very dark and twisted psychological baggage which would be anti-social to vent, except in a supposedly "political" context. The supposed intellectualization, abstracted nature of the discussion renders what would otherwise be the rantings of the mentally unwell into something fit for polite company.

Except sometimes this doesn't work, and it's all too obvious that We're Not Really Talking About Politics Here Anymore, Are We?

Bent and broken people. They used to rant on typewritten newsletters.

Oh, By The Way: Her Halloween costume?

Anne Frank.

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (252)
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This is so stupid. But Obama has dictated we have to talk about dumb shit like this, so we don't talk about the fact that he is a Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure.

Something has just occurred to me: That Obama is counting on the Bain attack not to reap dividends in and of itself, but to prepare the battlespace for his real attack, Mediscare.

Paint him as a brutalizer of poor, vulnerable folk now so when they bring on the Throw Grandma Down The Stairs attack, the public will be inclined to think the worst.

If this is the case -- and it seems likely to me -- Romney really has to push back against this, and not merely in a tu quoque way against Obama; he has to push the image of a smart, careful custodian of money, whose decisions, while unfathomable to a piker like Obama, were ultimately good for the economy.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (174)
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Two very short videos.

First video: Stimulus had no effect/ actually made things worse, because businesspeople are now profoundly and unusually unwilling to take risks (cough, cough).

I really don't know how best to distill down the second video of Greenspan-speak. Sounds like more of the same. You can see Vicevich's interpretation at the link. Seems rather depressing, anyway.

Posted by: LauraW at 10:25 AM | Comments (73)
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