William Gibson, call your office, please.

February 5th, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot about cyberpunk, especially the early work of William Gibson, recently. So I was struck by this tale from the LAT. Apparently, at least according to Microsoft (and we all know how trustworthy Microsoft is) the “La Familia” drug cartel has branched out, and is selling…bootleg copies of Microsoft Office 2007.

The LAT article in turn links to this Microsoft blog post, which in turn quotes the Mexican Attorney General’s claim that “the group’s illegal counterfeiting activities involved a sophisticated distribution network of 180,000 points of sale in stores, markets and kiosks, earning more than $2.2 million dollars in revenue every day.”

I’m more than a little dubious about those numbers, and about the survey also mentioned in the blog post: “More than 38,000 consumers in 20 countries participated in the survey, and a large majority said they want the industry (72 percent) and government (65 percent) to do more to protect them from software piracy.”

Assumin the truth of these stories, this does not strike me as being a wise strategy for the drug cartels. I mean, ticking off the DEA is one thing. But ticking off Microsoft? Not smart, though perhaps not quite as dumb these days as making Google angry.

Posted in Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 4, 2011.

February 4th, 2011

Maria Schneider.

Edited to add: LAT obit. I know this is short, but there’s really nothing I can say without making a tacky joke involving dairy products.

Edited to add 2: Seems it has been a bad couple of days for stars of “adult” films. The Onion A.V. Club is reporting the death of Lena Nyman, star of “I Am Curious (Yellow)”, “I Am Curious (Blue)”, and “Autumn Sonata”. I’ll admit that I’ve kind of wanted to see the “I Am Curious” films ever since reading Joe Bob Briggs’ write-up in Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History; however, Briggs makes the two films sound less erotic and more like documentaries about Swedish radical politics in the late 1960s. Which is kind of a drawback…

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2011.

February 3rd, 2011

Barney Hajiro.

As angry about Pearl Harbor as anybody, many Japanese-Hawaiians were eager to fight. Mr. Hajiro was one of the first to volunteer, in March 1943.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a newly formed unit, would go on to be called the most decorated regiment for its size and length of service: its 14,000 men earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, 8 Presidential Unit Citations and 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, the second-highest individual honor in the Army. Mr. Hajiro received three of those.

He and many of his comrades were decorated for the regiment’s most celebrated operation, known as “the rescue of the Lost Battalion,” in which they saved 211 fellow soldiers trapped in southern France while suffering more than 800 casualties.

Here’s Mr. Hajiro’s Medal of Honor citation:

Private Barney F. Hajiro distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on 19, 22, and October 29, 1944, in the vicinity of Bruyeres and Biffontaine, eastern France. Private Hajiro, while acting as a sentry on top of an embankment on October 19, 1944, in the vicinity of Bruyeres, France, rendered assistance to allied troops attacking a house 200 yards away by exposing himself to enemy fire and directing fire at an enemy strong point. He assisted the unit on his right by firing his automatic rifle and killing or wounding two enemy snipers. On October 22, 1944, he and one comrade took up an outpost security position about 50 yards to the right front of their platoon, concealed themselves, and ambushed an 18-man, heavily armed, enemy patrol, killing two, wounding one, and taking the remainder as prisoners. On October 29, 1944, in a wooded area in the vicinity of Biffontaine, France, Private Hajiro initiated an attack up the slope of a hill referred to as “Suicide Hill” by running forward approximately 100 yards under fire. He then advanced ahead of his comrades about 10 yards, drawing fire and spotting camouflaged machine gun nests. He fearlessly met fire with fire and single-handedly destroyed two machine gun nests and killed two enemy snipers. As a result of Private Hajiro’s heroic actions, the attack was successful. Private Hajiro’s extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon him, his unit, and the United States Army.

Mr. Hajiro was nominated for the Medal of Honor at the time, but did not receive it until 2000, after a Pentagon investigation into why more Asian-Americans had not received the MoH.

Posted in Clippings, Heroism, Obits | Comments Closed

Suffering.

February 2nd, 2011

For some odd reason, I have this song stuck in my head. And I don’t even like it that much. So I’m going to make you guys suffer along with me.

Posted in Music | 3 Comments »

“The Leonard Cohen of drinks”?

February 2nd, 2011

That’s the NYT‘s description of sake: “passionately adored by a small cadre of loyalists, but relegated to the category of ‘mysterious obscurity’ among the masses.”

In spite of this unfortunate metaphor, the actual article, about Japanese restaurants in Las Vegas that serve very high end sake, contains some interesting bits. For example, there’s Frozen Beauty sake, aged for 12 years in cold storage and selling for a mere $2,388 per (720 ml) bottle.

The tale of Watari Bune, meanwhile, seems like something out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The sake is created from a rare strain of rice that is so vulnerable to the nibbling of insects and the pummeling of typhoons that it had nearly lapsed into extinction in Japan. But in the 1980s Takaaki Yamauchi, from a brewery called Huchu Homare, met an old farmer who wistfully told him that the lost rice used to make sake of unsurpassed deliciousness.

A hunt began. In 1989, Mr. Yamauchi managed to acquire 14 grams of Watari Bune seedlings that the Japanese ministry of agriculture had freeze-dried and stored in a gene bank. He planted the seeds, grew the rice and brewed what we might think of as a drinkable time capsule. Thanks to Mr. Sidel and his team, it can now be found around New York at restaurants like Sakagura and Robataya, where it costs $160.

And let us not overlook Divine Droplets, “made by hanging canvas bags of fermenting mash in a handmade ice dome, during the frigid winter in the Hokkaido Prefecture, and patiently letting the sake filter out in a slow, pure drip.” That’s a mere $72 a bottle. (I am assuming that all of these bottles are 720 ml, but I’m not sure; the NYT annoyingly doesn’t specify.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Mixology | Comments Closed

TMQ watch: February 1, 2011.

February 1st, 2011

And so we slog ever closer to the end of another TMQ season. What does Gregg Easterbrook bring us in this, the off week before the Super Bowl? Let’s open up this week’s column and find out after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Geek, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Yahoo Serious Film Festival.

February 1st, 2011

Okay, not really. But Insta had a link up to a list of “memorable movie hitmen“, and that list prompted some discussion with Lawrence.

I’d never heard of “Charley Varrick” until I read that list, and I find myself intrigued; directed by the same guy who directed “Dirty Harry“, and starring both Walter Matthau and Mitchell? This sounds like a must-see. (However, as Lawrence pointed out, this looks like a crappy transfer with a screwed-up aspect ratio.)

Anyway, that got us talking about a potential lineup for a “70s Crime Film Fest”. My rules for this were:

  1. I wanted to pick somewhat less celebrated films. “The French Connection” and the two “Godfather” movies are wonderful, I’m sure, but I was looking for stuff people hadn’t seen before.
  2. One film per director.

Here’s a tentative list we came up with:

  • “Prime Cut“: Gene Hackman? Lee Marvin? Michael Ritchie? I’ve heard good things about this one.
  • “The Friends of Eddie Coyle“: now available from the Criterion Collection, no less.
  • “A New Leaf”: the availability of this on DVD seems somewhat iffy, but I’d like to see it if we could find it. Walter Matthau again, directed by Elaine “Ishtar” May, in an adaptation of a short story by the great mystery writer Jack Ritchie. (If you’ve never heard of Jack Ritchie, well, one, you’re unfortunate, and two, he was basically the Howard Waldrop of mystery writing.) I’m thinking this would be a nice, light, funny film; sort of a sorbet to clean the palate.
  • “Mean Streets“: neither one of us has seen this, and the reasons for including it should be obvious.
  • “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot“: Clint Eastwood! The Dude! Michael Cimino before “Heaven’s Gate“!
  • “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three“: the original one, not the crappy remake. Matthau again; I’m worried this list might have too much Matthau.
  • “The Laughing Policeman“: especially if I include this one, which is a bizarre adaptation of one of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Swedish police procedurals, moved to San Francisco.
  • “Family Plot” or “Frenzy“: I bow to nobody in my love for Hitchcock, but I’d always heard “Family Plot” was…well…not good. Lawrence informs me, however, that Roger Ebert gave it three stars. So how bad could it really be? “Frenzy”, on the other hand, gets four stars from Roger. Plus violence and nudity! But “Family Plot” has Karen Black! Decisions, decisions…

Something I stumbled across while researching this list, and feel a need to mention here, is “Made in U.S.A.“. Wow, this is…odd. Jean-Luc Godard directing an adaptation of one of Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark’s Parker novels. And not the first one, but one from later in the series (“The Jugger“). Except the amoral thief Parker seems to have been replaced by a leftist writer named Paula. And the characters have names like “Richard Widmark”, “Donald Siegel”, “David Goodis”, and “Richard Nixon”. And apparently, Godard adapted Westlake’s novel, but didn’t feel any need to, you know, actually pay Westlake anything for the rights. So Westlake sued (Pay the writer you a–hole!) and had the film suppressed in this country until after his death.

This movie prompted me to ask the question: “What the f–k was Godard smoking?” However, as a 1966 film, it falls outside the scope of our planned 70s crime film festival.

Anyone got any other suggestions for 70s crime films I missed? Leave them in the comments. Those of you who are local and who we know personally, we’ll let you know if we pull this together as a real event.

Edited to add: Lawrence pointed out that I forgot the original “Get Carter” on our list.

Edited to add 2: I think it is required by the Internet police that any reference to Karen Black has to include a link to The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.

Posted in Movies | 4 Comments »

The Flying Dutchman and the Sisters.

February 1st, 2011

Today is cold and wet and gloomy, and I’m pulling a long shift.

So here’s a little story that might brighten your day. Last year, a former employee of Ford passed away. He had no children and no wife, so he left his entire estate to the organization his sister belonged to: the School Sisters of Notre Dame. (The gentleman’s sister was a member of the order; she preceded him in death.)

The heartwarming part of the story is that his estate is estimated to be worth more than $1 million dollars, which will go a long way towards helping the work of the sisters.

But here’s the best part of the story: that estate included an original T206 series Honus Wagner baseball card, which was recently sold for $220,000. (If that seems low for a T206 card, you’re probably right; this one was not in mint condition.)

Here’s a nice bit of detail from the NYT story:

Long before the card was sold, sports were popular at Villa Assumpta, which houses about 75 retired and ill nuns. In the common room, baseball and football games are often shown on the big-screen television. The local teams are the favorites, with some nuns sporting team colors on game days.

Sister Mary Agatho Ford, who died at 100 in 2003, had received a signed photo and baseball from Cal Ripken for her 98th birthday. They are displayed in a glass case next to other cherished items, including chalices that deceased sisters held dear.

My opinion of baseball is well known, but God bless you, Sister Mary. And God bless Cal Ripken, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and the gentleman in question (who is not named in the NYT article).

Posted in Clippings, Sports | Comments Closed

If you are confused, check with the sun.

January 31st, 2011

I’ve kind of wanted to pick up the DVD sets of “Get A Life”. I have fond memories of that series, especially the “Neptune 2000” episode, and I’d like to see if it holds up. (I appear to be one of a very few people who have those fond memories. Lawrence, for example, rolls his eyes in irritation every time I bring it up.)

But cheese louise! $81.59?! $124.99?! For DVD sets of four freaking episodes? This is the kind of thing that drives people to piracy. (Not that I condone piracy, but…)

Actually, that was mostly a transparent excuse to link to this NYT article, which brings us the happy news that Chris Elliot is…working! Also, apparently, the NYT has decided that “filthy whore” is acceptable usage in the Grey Lady. That is, as long as you’re discussing a fishing boat, or a Chris Elliott movie.

Posted in Clippings, TV | Comments Closed

Confucius say, “We’ve lost our lease! Everything must go!”

January 31st, 2011

The Forbidden Gardens in Katy are closing.

Yes, I know. “The what?”

…neither did throngs of tourists, in large part because Forbidden Gardens didn’t employ theme parks’ usual noisy methods of attracting them. There were no billboards, no radio ads, no coupons. The place was as reticent as its owner.

Lisa Gray in the HouChron has a pretty good piece that covers the closing, the history of the Forbidden Gardens, and what little she could find out about Ira Poon, the shadowy millionaire who’s supposedly behind the attraction.

Based on the Chron’s story, I wouldn’t be shocked if they start digging for the Grand Parkway expansion and find a gargantuan underground lair beneath the Forbidden Gardens, complete with death ray and shark tank.

Posted in Clippings, Museums | 2 Comments »

Important safety tip. (#3 in a series)

January 31st, 2011

This has been said many times, in many places, but I think it bears repeating for reasons that I’ll illustrate shortly:

GPS systems are a guide and a tool. They are not absolutely perfect. They are human designed systems that can fail.

Also, no matter how insistent that voice is, and no matter how often it says “Recalculating”, your GPS system is not the boss of you. You are the person in control of the vehicle; you have the option to ignore it, mute it, or even throw it out the window. (I even know one person who took a perverse enjoyment in tormenting their car’s GPS system by driving in circles.)

Several things bring this to mind. Some folks who were attending Saturday’s SDC found that their GPS systems were showing a location for Korean Grill that was quite a bit off from the actual location. (By the way, Korean Grill is a pretty darn spiffy place; I recommend giving it a shot.) On Sunday, we had a similar experience trying to find the Gruene Door; somehow, we ended up in a residential area several hundred feet behind the Gruene Door, and more or less stumbled on the restaurant through pure luck. (Also: the Gruene Door was fantastic. I’d like to go back sometime soon.)

And then there’s this story from the Sacramento Bee:

“It’s what I’m beginning to call death by GPS,” said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan. “People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.”

And then they get stuck in the middle of nowhere in 120 degree heat where there’s no cell phone service and wind up drinking their own urine to survive. Or just simply vanish until someone stumbles across their remains in the desert.

It does seem like there may be a little more to this than just GPS failures. (Why aren’t closed roads better marked? Perhaps with a big sign: “ROAD CLOSED. IF YOU GO PAST THIS POINT YOU WILL DIE.“) But the main problem still seems to be blind trust in a technology that can fail.

(Unfortunately, I can’t find a YouTube clip of the Hill Street Blues episode where Joyce Davenport lectures one of her clients on desert survival techniques. Too bad, because she’s actually got some pretty sound advice to offer.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, GPS, Safety, SDC | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: “Who Cares If You Listen?”

January 30th, 2011

Milton Babbitt, composer.

Mr. Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description.

And:

…although colleagues who worked in atonal music objected when their music was described as cerebral or academic, Mr. Babbitt embraced both terms and came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of the ultrarational extreme in American composition.

That reputation was based in part on an article published by High Fidelity magazine in February 1958 under the title “Who Cares if You Listen?” The headline was often cited as evidence of contemporary composers’ disregard for the public’s sensibilities, and Mr. Babbitt objected that it had been added by an editor, without his permission. But whatever his objections, the article did argue that contemporary composition was a business for specialists, on both the composing and listening end of the transaction, and that the general public’s objections were irrelevant.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Radio, radio.

January 28th, 2011

Dashed off in great haste: this appears to be a good current schedule for Radio Cairo on shortwave.

I still have my shortwave gear, but I haven’t fired it up in a long time and I’m not sure how well it still works. If any of my readers are shortwave listeners and have other schedules from the Middle East, or reception reports on Radio Cairo, I welcome those here.

Posted in Radio | Comments Closed

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

January 28th, 2011

I have a friend who hates blogs.

(That’s not the only thing he hates. Lawrence and I have been discussing the construction of a sentence designed to make his head explode. So far, we’ve got “Prominent blogger Cory Doctrow really likes Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, especially since he released it under a Creative Commons license without DRM.” I think we’re almost there, but we need to work “Rob Enderle” in somehow.)

I don’t want to go into all the reasons my friend hates blogs; I’m not even sure he knows all the reasons himself, or that his reasons are even rational. But one of his major complaints is that blogs don’t do any original reporting; they just link to other people’s work. His question is, “What will the blogs do when they kill off the newspapers, as they keep saying they want to do?”

This certainly is true of some blogs, of course. I’ve pointed out the existence of counter-examples, such as Michael Yon, but my friend really isn’t interested in Yon’s reporting; and, to some extent, his attitude is “If I’m not interested in it, it doesn’t exist, or isn’t worthy of consideration.”

(I know this makes my friend sound like a jerk. He’s really not; he’s a good guy who I’ve known since Jesus was a 2nd lieutenant. He just has very strong opinions.)

I come down more on the side of Clay Shirky. The title quote is from his excellent essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“, about the possible demise of the newspaper and what it means for society. Yes, there may not be many blogs doing original reporting right now, and it is legitimate to wonder what will happen to them when the last newspaper reporter is strangled with the entrails of the last newspaper editor, but…

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Haiti started me thinking some more about what Shirky says here. (Yes, I’ve been working on this post for a long time.) It seems clear that we needed boots on the ground to cover that situation. Those boots needed infrastructure; they needed food and water and communications and power and security and living quarters. In a chaotic environment like Haiti, those things are nearly impossible to provide without a substantial investment of money.

Who has the resources to provide that? The NYT, the WP, the WSJ, and the TV networks. Who doesn’t have the resources to provide that? Individual bloggers.

And now Egypt is burning, and the Internet is cut off.

I think it’s very easy for Shirky to say that people who want to know “what’s next?” want to be lied to. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the people who want to know “what’s next?” think Haiti and Egypt and the next crisis after that are too important to be left to chance.

(Note: I’ve been working on this entry for a long, long time, and I’m still not 100% happy with the way it hangs together. But it seems like the the time to post is now, and I’m not sure picking at it much longer is going to make it any better.)

Posted in Media | Comments Closed

All the old paintings on the tombs, they do the sand dance, don’t you know…

January 28th, 2011

Who says school is useless?

One of the things I picked up last semester in my Modern Revolutions class (this specifically comes from James DeFronzo’s Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements) is that there are five critical factors required for a revolution to be successful.

  1. Frustration among the masses, resulting in unrest and uprisings in the cities or in rural areas. It sure seems to me like we’ve got that in Egypt.
  2. The presence of “elite” political movements in opposition to the ruling powers. By “elite” DeFronzo means that these movements have access to wealth, power, specialized skill sets, or higher levels of education than the average population. This is something I’m not so clear on; are there “elite” political movements in Egypt? If the coverage I’m seeing in places like the CSM is any guide (hattip: Battleswarm), the Egyptian government has been rigging elections; I can see that leading to pent up political opposition which finally has a chance to vent, but I’m not sure that meets DeFronzo’s criteria.
  3. Motivations that serve to unify major classes and that cut across class distinctions. Again, looking at the coverage in the CSM and other places, we’ve got that:

    Political analyst Mustapha Kamel Al Sayyid says the fact that the protests took place across the nation, and were not led by a particular political movement or opposition party, set them apart from demonstrations in the last decade.
    “This time it is really a national movement. It’s quite remarkable that the slogans raised by the demonstrators were not typical of any political party. They were general slogans about democracy, ending the state of emergency, and lowering prices…. The government will not respond favorably so I think the continuation of the protests is almost certain.”

  4. Some sort of severe political situation that paralyzes the administrative authority of the state. Such a crisis allows the revolutionary movement to flourish, free of government repression. At this point, I’m not sure we have that; is the army going to continue to avoid confrontation? Or is cutting off the Internet and cellphones a prelude to Mubarak mobilizing forces and machine-gunning people in the streets? If he gives that order, will the army obey?
  5. The rest of the world has to, if not actively support the revolution, at least not interfere with it. DeFronzo calls this “a permissive or tolerant world context”. At this point, I don’t see the U.S., or the rest of the world, actively trying to interfere in an Egyptian revolution.

I’d welcome thoughts and responses in the comments below.

Edited to add: I think this post from Megan McArdle (obligatory: my favorite CNE) has some bearing here, too. Especially this part:

This insistence on staying in power comes against the backdrop of widespread unemployment, corruption, high levels of poverty, high levels of illiteracy, and failure to provide the basic services–from decent transportation, to clean streets, to workable traffic, to basic education.

Edited to add 2: One thing that I should have mentioned, but forgot to, is that I’m not 100% sure DeFronzo’s criteria are sufficient for a successful revolution. In particular, I think DeFronzo and other revolutionary theorists underplay the role of a charismatic leader in the success of a revolution: Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khomeini…

Edited to add 3: The Scalz doesn’t have much to say, but many of his commenters in this thread do.

Posted in Clippings, Politics, School | 1 Comment »

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