The Little League All-Star tournament started here tonight. My son had a good game.
He pitched a shut-out no hitter, had 10 strike outs, hit a home run, and batted 1.000.
Not a bad day at the park.
(10 strike outs , out of 12 batters faced. The game ended after 4 innings — 10 run rule)
James Lileks might be my favorite writer. He’s always worth reading, he’s funny, sharp, witty, insightful and writes about nearly everything. And he peppers his prose with Simpsons references that give me inordinate joy.
As with most good writers, he has that ability to write about whatever (old noir, matchbook covers, gun ads, Minneapolis, bad interior design) and keep the reader (at least, this reader) nodding and chuckling through every piece. It’s a rare ability, to keep your readers laughing and engaged. To do it on a daily basis is a sign of great talent.
From Tuesday’s Bleat,
I didn’t love America any less in the Clinton years than I did in the Bush years, or vice versa; I don’t conflate my opinions about transitory leaders with my opinion about the nation’s role in history and its exceptional, if occasionally improvised, conflicted, and compromised struggle to do the right thing. I mean, go back in history and find another one of us. (Note: small ethnically coherent Nordic states that can’t project power six feet over the border really don’t count.) But unqualified love of country unnerves some people, as though the lack of qualifications means you don’t recognize qualifying factors. Me, I think they’re obvious; we’re made of humans, after all, and every house we build has beams of crooked timber. But I don’t recall a lot of FDR speeches laying out a litany of American sins in order to bolster the case for why America should fight Hitler, despite all those troubling similarities. After all, we lynched Jews, too, ergo we must face our own demons as well as those abroad. And so on.
The whole post is great. I’d quote more of it, but really, you should just read the whole thing.
The really wonderful thing about Lileks is that there’s so, so, so much more. Really, he’s actually put up a frightening amount of material… check out the Institute of Official Cheer, which is just a taste. It’s all up at www.lileks.com. Except for everything that’s up at Buzz.mn, of course.
Plus, he loves Disney and files wonderful trip reports. What more is there?
We saw Up! on Friday.
It’s a lovely film; funny, endearing, moving, and sweet. What stood out for me, aside from all the tears (I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much during an animated movie) was the audacity of the filmmakers.
Although Up! was developed before Disney bought Pixar, the distribution deal was in place and Pixar knew that Up!, like the rest of its movies, would be marketed as a children’s movie and would be sold by Disney as lighthearted Summer fare. Knowing that, Pixar set about telling the story of an aging retiree dulled by despair and longing.
Yes, there’s adventure and funny birds and talking dogs and jokes and antics aplenty,but at it’s core, Up! is a movie about an old man coming to terms with grief, loss and the shadows of deferred dreams and unfulfilled promises. That it can be all that and still deliver all the laughs and chuckles that the target ten-year old audience expects is, well… it’s incredible.
As in Wall-E, the first twenty minutes are largely silent and serve to anchor the arc of the film in an emotional context. And like Wall-E, the major themes are loneliness, companionship, courage, and love. I liked Wall-E quite a lot, but as with most animation, the emotional core of Wall-E, lovely though it is, is thin and brittle.
Good cartoons succeed by humanizing their characters as much as possible; the movie succeeds to the extent that the audience can identify with Wall-E”s loneliness, Shrek’s alienation, Eric Cartman’s self-absorption, Ariel’s conflict, or Homer’s obliviousness. But cartoons are… cartoonish. Their subjects are characters painted in sharp relief with hard lines and little nuance: they are abstractions drawn to serve narrow purposes. Characters in even the best cartoons have very little depth. That’s OK, because that’s generally the point. The abstraction of a cartoon allows the creators to isolate elements of human nature present a highly stylized and abstract story.
Wall-E is lonely because he’s the only sentient creature on Earth. But Wall-E isn’t troubled by the anger or desperation that plagues Robert Neville. Homer is a buffoon without the added pathos of an actor’s persona that transforms characters like John Belushi’s John Blutarsky or Chris Farley’s Tommy. Shrek is alien and “ugly” in a sterile, simple way that John Merrick is not. Ariel is troubled by her longing for her prince, but is free of the deep sexuality of Daryl Hannah’s Madison.
The abstraction of cartoons lends itself to grand scales and harsh contrasts. Wall-E is alone in a world of trash. Ariel is a fish. Shrek is an ogre. Just as cartoons simplify and abstract human qualities to pare the characters down to simple essences, cartoons tend to exaggerate circumstances and conflicts. These are differences in style that are accentuated by medium. The abstraction of cartoons is not flaw, it’s a feature. Flattening characters and stretching plots allow writers and artists to narrow their focus.
Which is what makes Up! all the more remarkable. Carl Fredrickson is an abstract representation of sapping, eroding despair. He is a character grayed by time and grief. And while he is still certainly a cartoon abstraction, his history is filled and rounded. His grief is compounded and complicated by the little losses and troubles that beset everyone; the petty details of life that derail plans and projects are not embellished or stretched, they simply happen. He does not wallow in his grief, he is not reduced to a caricature or simpleton. Rather he endures, and we feel his longing in the way he places his palm against a mailbox or the way he dusts his mantle.
Carl is simply sad. He’s not sad because the world is dying, or because he will be ripped forever from his homeland by magic. He’s not sad because society shuns and disowns him, and he’s not sad for being a failure. He’s sad because his wife died. He is no less abstract than Wall-E or Shrek or Ariel, but he is much more human. His grief is a human grief, his sorrow is a human sorrow, and while the journey he takes out of sorrow is fantastic, his adventures only serve to highlight his troubles. In the end, he eases his sorrow with as simple an act as can be imagined.
There might be snipes and talking dogs and flying houses, but that’s all mere fantasy; like finding patterns in passing clouds, it’s a diversion and a joy. But the movie, for all its soaring flights is anchored by the simplest of human relationships: a man’s love for his wife, the need of a child for security and safety, the love a dog has for his master.
Up! is the simplest, most grounded, movie that Pixar has made yet and it’s wonderful.
This is so crazy bizarre, it’s probably true.
Cat Parasite Affects Everything We Feel and Do
Research Shows That a Certain Cat Parasite Affects Our Behavior and MoodKevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn’t hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.
The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways.
Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.
I’ll be on the radio today! I’ll be doing a segment on Today FM’s Last Word on the ethics of human cloning. If you want to tune in, I’ll be on at 5:30 pm local time. (12:30 pm Eastern)
In Ireland.
I think it might be possible to listen in here: http://www.todayfm.com/Home.aspx.
It’s been a while since I did a radio interview…. wish me luck!
Update: Well, it was quick. 6 minutes, tops. I had a bunch of sound bites and didn’t get to use any of them. Oh well, I’m kinda rusty.
I added an article I wrote in 2001 to this site. The article is almost surely the piece that got me the interview. It’s gottan a bit of play over the years, and every so often I get asked to talk about it.
If you’re really a glutton for philosophical punishment, there’s more of my older stuff here.
Over on Twitter I’m spending the day quoting P. J. O’Rourke, my all-time favorite irascible curmudgeon. He’s like H. L. Mencken, but with a better hairdo.
I’ve met P. J. at least three times and engaged him in conversation twice. Nothing that he would remember; hell, I don’t even remember the conversations. They were brief and occured either before or after he’d spoken at some function or other… anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Twitter. I like Twitter, but 140 characters is limiting. I’ll put the longer, spillover quotes here. Bibliography at the end.
The quotes:
If we don’t want the world’s wealth to be controlled by people with money then the alternative is to have the world’s wealth controlled by people with guns.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.
The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don’t go there they shoot you.
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
In comparative terms, there’s no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.
Senator Ted Kennedy: “And when the Reagan administration was selling arms to Iran, WHERE WAS GEORGE?” Answer: Dry, sober, and at home with his wife.
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.
Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It’s also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. “Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We’d better double up in the shower.
When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don’t need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
There are a number of mechanical devices that increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
There’s a lot of debate on this subject – about what kind of car handles best. Some say a a front-engined car, some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind.
Selected bibliography:
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
Today was a good day.
Adam had a solo in his all-county choral concert. He sang beautifully.
Patrick and his team won the city basketball league.
Hannah and her team won the county catholic basketball league.
Sometimes I realize just how much of a geek I am. These are photos of wee cities, intricately detailed scale models of urban landscapes.
From an article in Wired,
Chicago is the coolest model:
I think they must be great fun to build (and to play with!). Which, of course, is why I love SimCity so much–and why I really wish Maxis and EA would get off their duffs and release a new version already!
I also realize that this also helps explain why I like Amy Bennet’s work.
For some reason, referrals from image searches on “Jupiter” account for a bunch of traffic here (well, I suppose “bunch” is a relative term…) so, in the spirit of pleasing my readers (and myself) here are some more way cool astronomical shots. (If you got here through a Google search for astronomical imagery, let me know in the comments!)
The Giver of life, mother of us all… no, not TV. The Sun.
The first six images are all from my favorite photo blog, The Big Picture at the Boston Globe.
This is a photo of a sunrise on Mars. How cool is that?
