April 26, 2004
itsy bitsy spider
file under: thoughts about things
i was standing by the kitchen sink today and saw a spider sitting near the faucet . a black spider, with a compact body and a small red flourish on his furry back, the kind of spider that jumps when it feels the urge. the kind of spider that makes me uncomfortable.
how he came to be in the kitchen sink, i'm not sure. i think he might have emerged from the recently-deceased cactus (covered with webs) that had been brought into the kitchen for post-mortem inspection.
he moved across the porcelain expanse of the sink in fits and spurts, often in circles. his lack of progress didn't seem to bother him. for all i know, he thought he was making progress. he kept tracing a clockwise circle from the vertical surface of the sink, up over the lip to the flat top, then back down, over and over and over, until someone caught his eye...
at some point, he came upon the faucet's shiny base, a tiny mirror in the spider's world. he was face to face with his twin and was clearly fascinated...he touched it with his front legs, reared up on his back legs, paused, moved back and forth, side to side. he climbed up on the base of the faucet, and suddenly his doppelganger was beneath him, taunting, always just out of reach. he must have stared at himself for a minute or two, month's in spider years.
eventually he lost interest and moved off into the broader universe of the kitchen. maybe he felt that if this other spider had anything to offer besides mimicry, it would follow...
after letting him wander about for 10 minutes, i trapped him in a tupperware dome and transported him to the backyard...another universe to explore. it's the closest i'll ever come to being a deity. i hope he wasn't a house spider, unprepared for the wilds of our backyard.
sometimes i feel like that spider. the world is a mystery. things happen, many of them outside our control, and one has no choice but to just keep spinning webs and looking for flies.
Posted: 04.26.04 at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
April 22, 2004
winged migration
file under: movies
if there is a modern antithesis to alfred hitchcock's the birds, it is winged migration, the french documentary about (you guessed it) migratory birds.
after languishing in a netflix envelope for a few weeks (months?), elaine and i finally got around to watching it. we had heard so many good things, and as avid baraka fans, we were both looking forward to a nature film.
so did it live up to our expectations?
...
yes and no.
first and foremost, it is a visual feast - the photgraphy and cinematography are simply amazing. just as wolfgang petersen's das boot really made you feel the fetid claustrophobia of a German U-boat, winged migration makes you feel the joy and silent wonder of flight. we sat there with our mouths open for the bulk of the movie; "how did they do that?"; "what the heck are those birds doing?".
the questions just kept coming as the images of various birds danced across the screen. i felt like a 4-year-old again: why? why? why? it filled me with awe and wonder and respect for these creatures that spend their lives in endless cycles of flight around the world.
a nature film that inspires wonder has probably done its job. in fact, winged migration inspired so much wonder that i finished my popcorn feeling unfulfilled; i needed a documentary cold shower, as it were - all of the visuals, none of the verbs.
an extremely minimalist voice-over narration jumps in every 10 minutes or so, with some tidbits about how far this species or that flies every year (arctic terns won at 12,000 miles a year...man, my wings get tired just thinking about it). other than that, your wonder is left to sit and spin by itself. no cool party factoids about avian biology, migration patterns, or weird mating rituals to be found here. it's just enough narration to impress upon the viewer the mysterious, instinctive world of birds, and also perhaps the cyclic nature of things.
maybe that's not such a bad thing...and maybe that's what they intended. sometimes, unanswered questions add fuel to the fire of mystery.
so how did they do that?
warning...SPOILERS.
the best thing about seeing this DVD is the extra features, specifically the featurette about the making of the film. it's nearly an hour long, and goes iinto great detail about everything they did to capture these amazing images. clearly, they knew people would be interested.
so how did they do it? special lenses? CG animation? mind control?
bzzzt.
how about this:
- breed all of the species of birds they were interested in
- raise them from chicks
- get them to imprint on biologists (i.e., so that the birds thought the biologists were their parents)
- train them to fly on command
- devise all sorts of crazy flying-filming contraptions to capture the birds once they got them in the air
- spend four years flying around the world staging shots of birds in flight in various native habitats to simulate the process of migration
i sh*t you not.
i can just see the pitch for this movie. " ok...yeah. so we're gonna hatch all of these birds and make them think we're their parents...we'll have these little horns and yellow jackets, and they'll follow us around and we can film them. it'll be amazing! trust me!"
that's exactly what they did. incredible. humane? not really sure about that. they treated the birds with tremendous care and love; of that there's no question. but isn't it a bit manipulative and self-serving? we just kept wondering, what happened to the birds after the film? did they just let them go and hope everything turned out ok?
siskel and ebert summary
1.5 thumbs up, despite some narrative and possibly ethical flaws...check it out and try not to catch flies while your mouth's open.
Posted: 04.22.04 at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
April 15, 2004
response to a critic of my paraphrase of condi rice
file under: thoughts about things
the following is a response to someone who recently criticized some of the writing on this site severely (please see Comment #3 on the entry regarding condoleezza rice's testimony).
if i didn't welcome comments (even harsh, judgmental ones), i would neither write, nor allow comments. however, i seem to have really pushed some buttons lately. while i don't want to be defensive, there are some very interesting parallels and assumptions within the negative criticism i've received. i'd like to try to clarify my own position a bit here, and a bit in another, more extended, entry to come shortly.
if you're interested in reading my response to pete, please continue...
NOTE: the email address that pete gave when posting his remarks was fraudulent (go ahead...try to respond to his comments yourself). i stand by my beliefs enough to not only post them on this web site, but to allow the world to criticize them (and apparently me) directly.
******
...
"Thanks for taking the time to share your opinions. I'll do my best to address some of your points without pontificating or being defensive. I will also try not to attack you personally, despite the fact that neither you, nor the other person who commented on this entry, did the same.
Your whole blog is pontification laced with opinions sorely lacking any shred of factual support. "Our president is a jingoistic neanderthal"--is that a personal attack? I think so. Really effective. Maybe you should get your information from something other than the New York Times and Moveon.org "meet ups".
For what it's worth, I'm neither a follower nor a supporter of MoveOn.org. Why everyone makes this assumption is beyond me. My political views are not easily aligned with any one group or organization, and while reducing me to the stereotype of a far-left-leaning liberal may simplify things, it overlooks a more complex reality.
You don't even know me. How could you make assumptions about the full scope of my political beliefs based on a few politically oriented blog entries?
Regarding "my whole blog" being pontification laced with opinions sorely lacking any shred of factual support...have you read the entirety of my blog? all three years of it? if you feel that my politically oriented entries fail factually, then make that your criticism, and i will accept it. i might even try to back up my opinions with facts (even though i should be free to express my opinions without doing so). please don't criticize the entire body of my writing because a small subset of it offends your sensibilities.
one last point...i am not writing for an academic journal, a newspaper, or any other entity where reference to other material is required. my blog is filled with my opinions, by and large, and i have never claimed otherwise. in fact, i would argue that this is the primary spirit in which blogging was started...
Thank your lucky stars that someone is finally doing something about the Muslim fanatics who want to kill you because Mohammed told them so...give me a break. The only solution is to hit them, before they hit us.
agreed that this is one solution. it is not the only solution. tyranny and violence are things to be stamped out, but there is a whole arsenal of weapons to do so, and not all of them are military. most diplomatic solutions had been exhausted with hussein, but that doesn't mean we should have attacked his country at the time we did, and without the crucial international support that bush senior got in the previous invasion (which was much more clearly justified).
also, to what degree was Hussein a Muslim fanatic? he was a lunatic and a despot and a horrible human being, but his government was predominantly secular. bin laden and other fanatics have profoundly different religious ideology. again, i'm not an expert, but based on everything i've read and heard, this is the case. please feel free to correct me if you think i'm wrong.
there's also an underlying assumption here...that i didn't support removing saddam hussein. i think one of my previous entries clearly indicates my own ambivalence about the subject. it also very clearly states that i can't claim to understand the situation in the middle east better than anyone else.
for reference: the right views
Do you really want suicide bombers showing up at Safeway? Do you want radicals to drive oil tankers into Starbucks while you're sipping soy lattes and articulating your tofu commune ideals? What are you going to do? Negotiate? Hand hold? Ask Madeline Albright how successful that strategy was...
um...no. i never said i did.
where was it that i communicated my 'tofu commune ideals'? you're making unwarranted assumptions about my opinions and some archetypal lifestyle you believe they reflect...i don't even drink lattes, let alone soy lattes.
The problem is much bigger and goes much deeper than what Bush has inherited: the CIA is ineffective, hamstrung by career bureaucrats; the FBI is too bureaucratic hamstrung by bureaucrats concerned only with with covering their own assess instead of doing their job. And previous administrations have done nothing for years.
i agree with this, by and large. i never said otherwise.
JFK (the last Democrat with a spine) said it best: "We don't do things because they are easy, we do them because they are hard"
i'm not sure of the context in which this remark was made, so I can't tell the degree to which it applies here. nonetheless, i'm not averse to doing hard things. fine. make hard decisions. kill people. kill LOTS of people, including women and children. make sacrifices for the greater good of humanity. sometimes, it must be done. but tell the fucking truth about it. that's my big problem with this administration (and with many others, for what it's worth).
i doubt you've even read this far...i hope you have, and i hope my explanations have provided you with the sense that perhaps there's more to me than the liberal leftist stereotype that seems to have been applied. i don't even know what tofu commune ideals are, so don't accuse me of having them. i probably would have been thrown out of the commune for the ham sandwich i had for lunch today.
regards,
rPm"
Posted: 04.15.04 at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
April 14, 2004
our president is a jingoistic neanderthal
file under: thoughts about things
words fail me when it comes to insulting our president. i am so apoplectic over the current state of domestic and foreign affairs that i am becoming almost as illiterate and boorish as he is.
just in case there was ever any question about his ability to construct grammatically correct sentences, please read the text of his speech to the nation last night. not that i never make mistakes myself, but please...
we are not amused.
we hope his flag-waving supporters are not amused, either, and that they begin to question whether or not it would be wise to keep someone in office with the IQ of a neanderthal (no offense meant to our brethren from the past) and with the most irritating self-satisfied smirk on the planet earth.
what a jerk.
my alice-in-wonderland rant at george bush
admit you were wrong. admit you failed the american people. ask for help. admit you have made the most catastrophic foreign policy failure of the last 30 years. step down. resign. go away. go back to texas and live out your life in peace without ruining the world any more than you already have.
or perhaps your inability to speak also prevents you from listening.
oh wait. we already knew that.
Posted: 04.14.04 at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
April 9, 2004
get out your summer parka!
file under: my life
summer arrived in san francisco a couple of days ago. it's still a little early, by chronological accounts, but i realized the cold truth last night when we walked home after dinner, and i had fourth-degree frostbite after sauntering two blocks.
the fog rolls over twin peaks like a soggy blanket, and it becomes progressively harder to drag oneself out of bed. the sun is a mere shadow of its former self; i was getting a tan (such as it is) in the backyard just a few weeks ago, and now i'd probably die of exposure.
it never ceases to amaze me. it happens every year. i tell myself that mark twain was right; summer is colder than either spring or fall here (and probably winter, for that matter). and yet, there's still a part of me, perhaps the long-forgotten southern californian, that thinks, 'hey! it's summer! kowabunga, dude! let's hit the beach.' [ok...even when i lived in SoCal, i never said the k-word]
and so we go to the liberty cafe, and we eat veggie pot pie, drink hot tea, and wait impatiently for indian summer...only 5 more months! tiem to pull out all of those remainders....
ps: for any readers in chicago or other places that are actually cold, i realize quite clearly that i'm whinging unnecessarily. call it me 'getting in touch with my inner californian.' we don't have much else to complain about...oh wait. i forgot about arnold. and traffic. and the really, really insulting price of both real estate and gasoline here.
Posted: 04.09.04 at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
a paraphrase of condoleezza rice's testimony
file under: thoughts about things
the following is a paraphrased excerpt of condoleezza rice's testimony to the national commission on terrorist attacks upon the united states, given this past thursday in washington, dc:
blah blah blah structural problems with interagency communications blah, blah blah blah blah , blah blah; blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. did i mention, serious systemic issues, nyah nyah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah we only had 233 days! blah blah blah we're doing our best, really. blah blah, blah blah nyah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah shaking the trees blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah definite progress is being approximated. blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah legal impediments to anything really getting done blah blah; blah!!! blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah did i mention only 233 days to get this sh*t straightened out? blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah; blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah hey, i'm just covering the collective white house patootie, here, people, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah! blah blah. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah blah it wasn't really a plan, so much as an idea, sort of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah nyah blah nyah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah it's not our fault...we made no mistakes. blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah thank you.
for interested readers, the full text of dr. rice's prepared statement is available as a PDF.
side note: i have never been so ashamed to share a meaningless title with someone.
Posted: 04.09.04 at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
