Cars, Part 2 - Toyota RAV4 and the Canyonero

Last night we took a test drive of the Toyota RAV4 and we really liked it. It felt very car-like, and although it's a somewhat compact-looking car, felt plenty spacious on the inside. The model we drove didn't have the third seat installed, but one can assume that it's best left for children. So, RAV4 is looking like the top choice at this point since we are now pretty committed to getting a car with AWD. I'd like to take another drive of the Kia Sorento, as I think they're very similar, and also so that E has a chance to drive that one.

We also, just for fun, sat in a Toyota Sequoia in the showroom, which is the real-life embodiment of the Canyonero. You could probably fit the RAV4 in the back of a Sequoia (like if you have a huge frame backpack that has a little detachable day-pack, that's the RAV4). Needless to say, we're not getting the Sequoia, even if it does seat 35.

all the joyful people

Today I was walking on Newbury and there was a woman screaming at a guy in a car that she was going to find out his address and kill his wife. Pretty sure they were arguing about a parking spot. Boy that holiday spirit doesn't last long anymore.

My Somewhat Comprehensive Guide to Pretty Much Everything that's Wrong with the Star Wars Prequels

So, I've previously discussed my disillusionment with the Star Wars movies, but because of the grassroots groundswell of lobbying and activism, I've decided to create my list of everything I hate about the Star Wars prequels. Not exactly listed out by movie, but generally so. If you think of others, let me know.

1. Idiotic political "intrigue". Taxation of trade routes? Eh? I'm not sure what little kids thought in 1999 when The Phantom Menace ("TPM") came out. I already had the goodwill from the original trilogy saved up by the time the new ones came out, but even I was starting to get wary when they were re-released in 1997 and Lucas made all those stupid changes. One can only imagine that kids, for whom this was their first exposure to Star Wars, were bored silly by all of the political talk. Lucas had 16 years to write a story in between movies, and TPM is what he came up with? I really wish he had taken Spielberg up on his offer to direct the first one, b/c at least Spielberg might have done some interesting things with the material (on the other hand, based on what I heard about "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", those two together are not quite as magic as they used to be).
2. Offensive ethnic characterizations. I deal more with Jar Jar (Jamaican Sambo stereotype) later, but he fits into this category as well as the Trade Federation (cowardly Asian stereotype), Watto (grimy, haggling middle eastern shop owner), and the Banking Clan (um, they control the money and have big noses, why not show them eating space-bagels too). Apart from finding these incredibly insulting, they seem just so lazy and generally inexplicable. Seriously, couldn't you have just given them all voices that weren't stereotypes? Was George Lucas channeling Archie Bunker?
3. Jar Jar. Apart from the racist, offensive shtick, Jar Jar is possibly one of the most annoying characters ever created. His only function is to be essentially useless and to get himself into "funny" trouble. Wow, way to come up with compelling characters to fill screen time.
4. The Pod Race. I'm sure the race is meant to be exciting, but whenever I have seen the movie I have fast-forwarded through the pod race. Even at fast forward, I find it tedious. I know it's supposed to be there to show what a talented pilot Anakin is even when he's just a kid, but I'm thrown off by the fact that there's a "funny" two-headed announcer, and the scene just goes on too $%^&ing long.
5. Jesus Skywalker. Anakin was the product of a virgin birth. Of all the ham-handed analogies, they just had to go there. Couldn't they have just made Palpatine the father? Apparently he was the result of a high concentration of midi-chlorians (which maybe the mom caught somewhere). Which leads us to.....
6. Insertion of Pseudo-Science. I expect fake science in my Star Trek (dillithium crystals, etc.), but there was something magical about "the force". They didn't need to explain it, it was meant to be understood as an Eastern-religion style concept and worked fine as mysticism. But no. They had to go ahead and insert blood tests, and we learn that being strong with the force is actually something in your hemoglobin or whatever.
7. Anakin. The kid who plays Anakin in TPM is sort of whiny and you don't really get much of a sense for him, and is not much of an actor. But he's 8, so you let it go. Hayden Christiensen, however, gets no excuses (well, he gets one excuse, but we'll get to that later). So, here's what we know about Anakin Skywalker from the original trilogy: (a) Obi Wan considered him a good friend, (b) he was a great pilot, (c) he was corrupted by the dark side. Fine. But then you meet Anakin as a teenager, and he is whiny, petulant, sullen and not particularly likable. Seriously, he sulks like a pathetic emo-boy, not the future Dark Sith Lord that he will become. We're supposed to understand that he was really good before, so we should like him and care about him, and his fall from grace should be a big deal. Problem is, we don't like him that much. We also don't see why Obi Wan likes him at all.
8. "Dialogue". This is the part that's not Hayden Christiansen's fault. The dialogue is just terrible. Seriously, put aside any love you have for the series (I know I've had to work hard at this), and just listen. There's some real clunkers in these movies (the "I hate sand" speech, any time they try to talk politics, any time they talk to the Gungans, etc.). They make even really good actors seem wooden, which of course is not just the dialogue but the direction as well. I don't know what happened to Lucas between the first trilogy and these movies, but he should really go back and look at the original ones. There are some real moments of tension and humor in those movies, and some memorable dialogue.
9. "Special" Effects. I won't say a lot here, as there's a lot of cool effects in these movies. I will note, however, that TPM came out in the Summer of 1999, the same time that the Matrix came out. While I enjoy CGI futuristic cityscapes as much as the next guy, the Matrix was a game-changer, and it's hard to look at not just things like bullet-time, but the whole ethos of TPM and wonder why George Lucas wasn't pushing cinema forward with special effects. Some of the CGI looks fake, as well, and you wonder why Lucas didn't use more models since almost all of the scenes from the original series still hold up, and those used models.
10. Random Stupidity #1. In AOTC, Obi Wan goes to what appears to be a 50's-style diner and an alien they might as well call "Big Al" (who appears to be the owner) talks with him. There's a robot waitress who they might as well name "Flo" . The whole sequence is just terrible, and you're wondering why somebody thought to create a "diner" in the middle of the @#$%ing Star Wars Universe? The alien is sitting there with Obi Wan talking and scratching his ass, which is supposed to be "funny", but the whole sequence takes you out of the movie.
11. Random Stupidity #2. General Grievous has a cough. Seriously. The CGI character has a cough throughout the whole movie. You're just waiting for him to ask one of his droids to bring him a cup of tea . He's supposed to this scary bad-ass, and they give him bronchitis . Why? Who knows. Seriously, did it advance the plot at all? Should he have stopped off somewhere for some Robitussin ?
12. Random Stupidity #3. In ROTS Padme dies because the "lost the will to live". Padme just gave birth to twins, so she could have sustained trauma during child birth. Additionally she sustained a "force" attack by Anakin, so that could have done irreversible damage. But no, even though she was medically perfectly healthy, she died because she lost the will to live? She just had 2 kids! Wouldn't she have had the will to live to raise the kids?
13. Lucas and His Audience. These movies are pitched to 6 year olds. This is particularly true of TPM, less so AOTC and ROTS (that one in particular has some pretty dark stuff). Jar Jar, the scatological humor, the goofy "humor" of the announcers at the pod race. This is stuff which is pitched to little kids, but in the most cloying and heavy-handed way (weirdly though, TPM is the worst about this AND about the boring political intrigue).
14. The Waste of Padme. In Episodes I and II, Natalie Portman does a fine job as Padme, bad dialogue notwithstanding. She's active, she's involved in the fighting, she's resourceful, she bares her midriff - she's what you would expect Luke and Leia's mom to be. But in ROTS, her jobs are basically to get emotional, have babies, and die. That's pretty much it. Serious waste of a character.

Ok, that's it for now. There are probably others, but this is what I've got for the moment. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like in these movies as well (and I will make a list of things I like at some point as well, to be fair), but some of these just can't be forgiven.

March to HDTV/First look at Cars

As an update to the previous post, we've gotten the toddler bed situation going (I mentioned that today), and safely grounded the outlet in the living room. Only 52 more steps to getting a big-ass TV.

On another note, we're starting to look at new cars in case the current one is on the way out (sadly we think it is). Our main criteria (other than wanting a car that is safe, reliable, doesn't get terrible gas mileage and is not gigantic) is that we want three rows of seating. Not that either of us really want to be carpooling kids around (because seriously, who wants extra children around, your own are plenty), but it just make sense to get the extra flexibility. Yesterday I test drove the Hyundai Veracruz and the Kia Sorento. I liked both of them, but I think we're probably going to eliminate the Veracruz b/c it is a little bigger (and we'd like something not too big) and it is also about 5K more expensive. It's a very nice car though, but we want to keep costs down and the Sorento felt slightly more car-like to me, and we don't want something that feels too much like a truck. Those third row seats are not exactly something I'd want to sit in for a 200-mile drive, but them seem serviceable for giving rides to kids, or just for extra flexibility. Next up, the RAV4 (which is absolutely ubiquitous) and the Mazda5 (which is kind of a mini-mini-van), both of which we are expecting to like.

My 2010 Favorites - Movies

Everyone does year-end "best of" lists so I would be remiss not to get into the act. Honestly, I didn't see that many movies in 2010 but I saw some good ones. I think it's hard to say "best" because I don't know what it means when it comes to art, but I'll say my five favorite movies this year were:

1. Inception

2. The Social Network

3. Toy Story 3

4. The Town

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I

The real decision for me as between Social Network and Inception at #1 - the rest of them, I could switch around the order and not have it be a huge deal. I had to go with Inception because for several days afterwards I kept having disturbing thoughts and dreams because of it, and felt like it #$%^ed my mind up, in a good way.

I'm sure there are a ton of good movies I haven't seen, so I know this list is anything but exhaustive.

Needed an electrician for this one

Yesterday morning the day started out pretty badly. We just moved Kid2 into Kid1's room, and it was her first night in a toddler bed (this of course means we did one of the previous things on the list, buy toddler bed). It went ok except that they were so excited about this arrangement that they got up extremely early (4:45 or so) and we're only resting periodically after that.

I had the bright idea (around 6:30) to change the kitchen light bulb which had burnt out. Not our main lamp, but the secondary lamp. Apparently I had never changed this b/c I didn't know how to change it. In the process of trying to open up the lamp to change the light bulb, I pulled the whole lamp out of the ceiling so that it was just dangling by electrical wire. I don't know much about these sorts of thing, but it seemed unsafe to me. So, I scrambled around frantically, woke up the LW (lovely wife), and eventually called 4 electricians. Thankfully one was available. He was not at all impressed with what the previous person had done when installing this lamp, and he secured it to the ceiling in a much better way. Next time, I will know how to take the relevant glass part out w/o pulling the entire fixture out of the ceiling. Even better, next time I will not try to be ambitious before 8 am.

Coming soon, I reveal my list of favorite movies, music and books this year. Also, I discuss my first trip to test drive cars.

Buying a TV

We've decided to finally take the plunge and buy a HDTV. Now all we need to do is:

1. Buy a toddler bed for kid #2 and move it in to kid #1's room (now they will share, we'll see how that goes).

2. Disassemble crib in kid #2's room and either give it away or throw it out.

3. Move desks, computer and table from play room/office/guest room up to what will be the new office

4. Have cable company come and assess whether we can get cable connection in new office upstairs.

5. Assemble train table which was Hanukkah present for the girls and put it into the play room.

6. Get rid of the old entertainment center and TV or theoretically move it to the downstairs play room. If move it to the downstairs play room, find out from cable company how much it costs to add a second cable TV connection.

7. Have electrician come and figure out whether we can safely connect an HDTV to living room non-grounded outlet.

8. Buy new entertainment center for TV.

9. Finally, buy TV.

Seriously, it'll be April before I actually see this TV.

Vote Cuckoo McNutty for Congress!

Hi, I'm Cuckoo McNutty, and I'm running for congress. Let me tell you what I believe.

I think that America needs to cut taxes severely in order to make our country stronger and more fiscally sound, because a government with no revenue, and which can support any government programs, is way stronger. Also, we need to look at cutting waste fraud and abuse. Now, my opponent has said things like "you haven't come up with a single concrete example of an actual program you would cut" - well, that kind of "evidence-based" thinking is just elitist and un-American. Also, I am in favor of fiscal responsiblity - sure I didn't say anything about it when George W. Bush was president, but, completely coincidentially, it became an issue for me on January 20, 2009.

Also, I am strongly in favor of liberty for everyone - well, except for the gays. Also, except where reproductive rights are concerned. I'm also in favor of religious liberty, and want people to be able to exercise their religious liberty in schools and on public property all over the place. Well, I mean, not all people, obviously. People who are the same religion as me. I mean, it's not like the constitution prohibits the government favoring one religion over another, particularly when that religion is the one true religion, right?

Also, no science in the schools. Because the constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom of science. I don't want my children learning that we humans are descended from monkeys. Do you see any half-human, half-monkey people walking around? It's a dangerous road, allowing your children to be exposed to things like "facts" and "evidence".

Also, think of me like a mama grizzly bear. Even though I'm a dude and totally manly. Nobody better get in between me and my grizzly cubs! Now, maybe you're wondering what the practical implications of all this grizzly bear talk is. You might think, "oh, you support programs that have been shown to be a huge benefit to kids like Head Start, and sCHIP, and public safety regulations that protect kids". Nope! I don't support any of that socialist nonsense. I support being able to protect my kids from all kinds of socialism and liberalism. Liberalism and progressive thinking are the biggest threat to liberty since, well, since ever!

Also, I hate the elites. Like doctors and scientists, who think they understand medicine or science better than you and I do just because they spent years studying in those fields and have earned advanced degrees. Well, I study too, at the feet of Professors Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Palin. They tell me everything I need to know. I take my advice from them, not from some group of wealthy, unelected commentators.

Also, I support free speech. But I hate the liberal media because they're always picking on me and askuing me questions I don't know the answer to.

Also, I hate tyranny, in all it's forms. Like that ObamaCare - wow, is that tyrannical! Seriously, there's no difference between ObamaCare and the gas chambers. After all, both are government programs, right? And all government programs are inherently tyrannical. Therefore, the president and all liberals are actually Nazis. Now some people say, where was your concern about "tyranny" when George W. Bush was president, with things like warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition, and detention of US citizens without habeas corpus". Now, I don't know what any of that means, but it sure sounds like more liberal lies to me.

My 25 all-time favorite science fiction movies (at the moment)

I was listening to an episode of "On Point" yesterday, and the topic was "greatest science fiction movies of all time." After listening to the podcast, which was a lot of fun, I said - "I accept your challenge!" I thought the world would benefit from knowing my all-time favorite science fiction movies.

I am very deliberately not calling this list "greatest movies" because these lists are inherently subjective and I'm just listing my own personal favorites. A few notes:

• I am keeping out movies based on comic books. While most of these would qualify as science fiction, I see them as their own category (and a list for me to work on for another day).
• I am singling out individual movies, not just series (which makes it more challenging in a good way) - so I will not just say "The Star Wars movies"
• These are my own personal favorites. There are many movies out there that are regarded as "great" that I haven't seen, or was not so impressed by; this list is only meant to cover my personal preferences.
• I can't just do top 10 because it ignores too many movies.
• If a movie falls into another genre but is also clearly science fiction, I am including it.
• It has been so long since I last saw Blade Runner, I suspect that once I re-watch it, my list will change
• If given another day, or two days or a week, I could probably monkey around with the order of the movies on the list (other than the top 5), so other than those, the order only reflects what I felt at the moment I hit "Publish Post".
• I have not included animated films. If I did, Wall-E would probably make the list somewhere.
• I have a suspicion I'm really going to enjoy District 9, but haven't seen it yet
• About Star Wars Episodes I and II, each of those movies has a lot that I enjoy, (for example, the light saber duel at the end of Episode I is my favorite in the entire series of movies) and it is hard to separate out all of the affection I have for them as Star Wars movies, but I felt that overall, they were not good enough to make the list.
• Avatar - one of the most visually stunning things I ever seen. Doesn't make the list. At least not today. I'm not sure how much I actually liked the movie, apart from the 3-D visual spectacle of it.

With that in mind, my list is as follows:

1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Star Wars
3. The Matrix
4. Back to the Future
5. Terminator 2
6. Return of the Jedi
7. Dune
8. Star Trek: First Contact
9. Minority Report
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
11. Children of Men
12. Star Trek (2009)
13. Galaxy Quest
14. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
15. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
16. Twelve Monkeys
17. Gattaca
18. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
19. E.T.
20. Donnie Darko
21. Starship Troopers
22. THX 1138
23. Inception
24. Brazil
25. Robocop

Miscellaneous Sports Thoughts

1. I was reading about Ben Roethlisberger recently (NYT had a good piece on him) earlier this week, and just disgusted with the guy. I know he wasn't charged with what he allegedly did to a woman in Georgia, but the evidence seems pretty clear that he at least tried to rape her. This is also not his first time doing something like that. I just want to say I have a hard time relating to the mindset of the entitled athlete. Who goes around thinking they can treat other people like property? All because they can play a children's game, and do a good job throwing or catching a ball? Ridiculous.

2. Bud Selig seems reasonably intelligent, at least some of the time. If that's the case, then why the opposition to instant replay in baseball? I don't understand it at all. Isn't it kind of a no-brainer that getting the right outcome should be the most important thing? I'm not sure why that isn't important for everybody.

3. I totally agree with the Sports Guy in his most recent column about not caring as much about the Sox as I used to. For me though, 2 reasons are paramount (2 of the ones that he also reflects on):

a. They won in 2004 and 2007. I was no fan of the "curse" bullshit (and I would love to banish the phrase "Red Sox Nation" forever), but it does feel like the urgency and drama are gone. I just assume that they will be competitive and probably win again at some point.

b. I'm a parent now. This has reordered a bunch of my priorities. There are plenty of things I cared about pre-parenthood that I still care about, but sports in not as much one of them.

I still follow the teams, still care about how they're doing, but it's just not as important anymore. I'm not sure if that is sad, or inevitable, or if it doesn't really matter.

4. I wish I could go to a world where I don't hear about LeBron for a while.

Toy Story 3

Saw Toy Story 3 Saturday. So great. I'm not sure what it is in the water that they drink at Pixar that makes all of their films so fantastic, but I surely hope they keep drinking it and would love to have some myself. They make such wonderful movies. Pretty sure my favorite Pixar movie is still (not surprisingly) "The Incredibles", but "Wall-E" is up there as well, as is the original "Toy Story". This one was terrific as well. I still haven't seen "Up" but understand that is great as well. Oh, right, I know what it is - actual storytelling. Right. When the people responsible for writing a story actually, you know, write a story, as opposed to layering one pop-cultural reference on top of another. Don't get me wrong, I love pop-cultural references as much as anyone, it is a currency I trade in heavily, but I believe they must be earned and well timed. Just making references to the Godfather does not make your movie funny. If I want Godfather references I'll just watch the Godfather (which I have done approximately 250 times, give or take a few).

Now you may have also heard that the end of the movie was making some grown men weepy. I wouldn't know anything about that, I just happened to get something in my eye at the end of the movie. Complete coincidence.

Can you have schadenfreude towards your own kids?

Just to go ahead and state the completely obvious, dealing with kids can be challenging. One little interaction - Kid #2 has a habit of throwing/putting food on the floor. It would be one thing if she were 8 months old, but she's almost 2 1/2, and so throwing/dropping of food is not nearly as funny/cute. We had been frustrated recently, but have deleloped a new system for dealing with this. The first time she does it, we pull her away from the table for a minute or so as a warning. The second time she does it, she's done eating that meal and doesn't get anything else. It's a little harsh, but we're trying to get her to understand "consequences".

Anyway, this morning she put some cheerios on the floor so I pulled her away from the table. After a minute I brought her back, and a few minutes after that she proceeded to take her entire cup of water and quite deliberately dump it out on the floor. She seemed quite please with herself, but I was pissed. I took her out of her chair, handed her a towel and told her to clean it up (just a side note, I didn't actually expect her to clean it all up, my point was to teach her that we clean up our own messes). She started to clean it up, and quickly lost interest, and then decided it would be more fun to jump up and down and splash in the puddles on the floor. In the non-suprise of the year, she slipped and fell and landed on her ass.

Now, there is something of a balancing act that you need to do when this sort of things happens, and I'm not totally sure how well I balanced it. I comforted her because she was crying and in pain, but some part of me was thinking that this was an excellent "teachable moment" for her - you pour the water on the floor, you jumped in it instead of cleaning it up, and then you get hurt - all in all, that's a lesson I can live with her learning, particularly where she was not seruiously hurt.

Of course, there was another part of me that wanted to point at her and go "ha ha" like Nelson from the Simpsons, but I kept that to myself.

Comic Book Review - Batman: The Long Halloween, and Marvels (also some Marvel vs. DC discussion)

After I got finished reading Batman: The Long Halloween I proclaimed that it was one of the best superhero books I had read all year - it's suspenseful, entertaining, the art is wonderful, and it gives you a real sense into how Batman goes about his work as the "world's greatest detective" (even though he doesn't necessarily live up to that title in this story). Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are a terrific writer/artist team, and they've done some other wonderful work which I haven't reviewed but really loved (I HIGHLY recommend Superman for All Seasons, which covers the early years of Superman and was apparently some of the basis for the Smallville TV show which is one of my favorites - it's engaging, good-hearted and totally easy for the casual fan to follow). Anyway, back to Batman.

Let me digress for a minute. I was never a DC guy growing up. I mean, I loved the Christopher Reeve Superman movies (the first 2 at least), I loved the terribly wonderfully cheesy Super Friends cartoon with the DC characters, but actually reading DC comics on an ongoing basis was never interesting to me. I was always (and this really applied to almost everyone I knew who read comics growing up) a Marvel guy. Superman and Batman may have been some of the most amazing, iconic characters ever created, but I think they didn't feel cool to us - not nearly as cool as Spider-Man and certainly not as cool as the X-Men. If you wanted to read something that was cool and totally awesome in the early to mid 80's, it was definitely all about the X-Men. They were misfits, they were outlaws, and they battled frickin' giant sentinel robots! Spider-Man was also a character that a young kid could relate to. First off, while he does have super powers, he's not godlike like Superman or Thor (probably why Thor never held any interest for em - he was just too powerful and in his case he was an ACTUAL Norse God!). If a character has the ability to destroy a planet or something, there's not so much you can do with them. Spider-Man, by contrast, was an incredibly human character. He fought bad guys on a relatively modest scale, he was really funny, and seemed to live a much more real life than other characters. Plus Mary Jane was hot. Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying that in recent years, as I have gotten into reading more DC Comics, I have had to play a lot of catch-up. I'm getting a sense of who the players are and what the dynamics are between the various characters. DC has been a around a lot longer, and they seem to have a lot more characters just sort of hanging around. Frankly, a lot of their characters are not that interesting to me. Elongated Man? The Question? Eh, not so much (except perhaps as Question is one of the bases for Rorschach. Still, there's a whole huge universe and it's been a major undertaking trying to catch up.

Back to my review. This is a great story, and I appreciate that Batman really is a detective and is trying to solve crimes. The takeaways on this story are that the art is wonderful - hyper-realistic and occasionally excessive, but portraying the true essence of each character. The writing is terrific, and as a huge Godfather fan I appreciate that the story is chock full of references to that movie. Very clever stuff. I highly recommend.

If my takeaway from The Long Halloween is that it's a great story, then Marvels is an absolute masterpiece. Here's what makes it so special. It takes events that have occurred through the history of the Marvel universe and retells those events from the eyes of a newspaper photographer, so you see and experience what he (and other regular people) were experiencing when these events happened - like, the first appearance of Captain America (who battles the Nazis), or the notoriety of the Fantastic Four, or the appearance (and societal backlash) against mutants like the X-Men. By itself, the story is brilliant. It was exhaustively researched and coordinated by Kurt Busiek to fit perfectly within the Marvel timeline. If that was enough, it would be fantastic. But it is taken to even higher levels of greatness by the artwork of Alex Ross.

Ahh, Alex Ross. Of all the comic artists I have seen, he is far and away my favorite, because his style is so unique and different in the comic books world. He is a painter, and his artwork has the appearance of being painted. See for yourself what I mean. His work is absolutely beautiful and iconic, particularly his work on Superman (and in Kingdom Come which I should talk about some time). Anyway, I definitely have an art-crush on him. I also wish he was illustrating actual books these days. I know he is busy doing covers for different books, but I'd love to see him do a whole book again.

The artwork is amazing and so incredibly life-like, you feel almost like you're reading about real events. The whole thing is an absolute wonder, full of hidden treasures. I've spoken in previous posts about my love for Astro City, and it's clear that the team of Busiek and Ross first developed the idea of telling stories about a universe full of superheroes from doing Marvels. It's a wonderful idea, and here in Marvels they give you a sense of the wonder and danger and conflicting attitudes you might have, living in a world where people exist who can do such extraordinary things.

This one gets my super-duper extra special good highest recommendation. A real treasure.

Gee, Joe, I feel really bad for you

The quote in this link from Conservative talk show host (and former Republican congressman) Joe Scarborough is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Um, should we feel bad for them?

On the other hand, the hateful, scary stuff people are yelling at McCain/Palin rallies reminds me a little too much of a lynch mob, or some third world country with coups, dictators and "militias" roaming the streets.

Update

Good news on the technology front - I got an A/B splitter and it solved the problem with the new DVD player. $16.99 well spent at Radio Shack.

In other news, I'm probably not going to be posting as frequently because I'm taking a writing class and with 2 little kids at home and work as well, there's only so much time in the day for writing. I'll try to post stuff when I can.

I'm so surprised by this finding

Apparently, Tim Donaghy was the only bad actor. Well, whaddya know.

I think Obama will actually win big - you can blame me if it turns out differently

Maybe I am being unrealistic, but I think that recent weeks (the financial crisis in particular) have corrected reality to how I thought it was going to be, which is a big win for Obama in November. I actually don't think it's going to be that close. Here's some evidence.

My day in sales (an old story)

This is an old story about something that happened to me a long time ago, when I was out of work and in between jobs. Actually, it was in the Spring of 2003. Funny (at least to me) experience, so I want to write about it.



I'm a lawyer by profession, but was in between jobs back in 2003 and was considering whether maybe I should be looking at jobs outside the legal profession. I thought about what might be interesting areas to me, and because I think of myself as a reasonably creative guy, I considered jobs in advertising and marketing. So, I looked up job listings and found this one position in a city just outside of Boston. I don't want to give too much detail but I will say that there's a lively discussion here and here of the business and its pitfalls, and here's another very comprehensive overview of what I had gotten myself into. I'm just going to cover my own experience.

The first tip-off that this was going to be weird was that they responded to quickly to my resume. You know that old saying by Groucho Marx that he wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would let him in? That was the initial sense I got. But, I was desperate, and needed to work.

I went to the interview which was pretty weird. It was in this really bare-bones office with a bunch of boxes, and I had a really short interview with this guy that was the owner of the business. He was a young guy, who claimed to be educated at an Ivy League school. I remember sitting in the office beforehand, listening to the receptionist take call after call after call to set up interviews. I thought, "wow, that's a lot of interviews - pretty weird". Anyway, the interview was short, but long enough for me to figure out that this was a business, the foundation of which was door-to-door sales. Yikes. Not exactly what I went to college and law school for, but again, I was desperate.

I was told that I did well and they wanted me to come back for a "day of observation" so I could see what it was like to work as a part of this business. So, I came back two days later for what I was told would be a whole-day experience. Definitely an experience.

I arrived early in the morning as each "team" was getting ready to head out for a day of sales. I was in a car with a guy, let's call him Jock, who claimed to have formerly been a pitcher for a major league baseball team. I later saw his name somewhere on the web and it seems that he may have in fact had a cup of coffee in the bigs, but that was about it. One can only assume that had he done better, he would have been in this particular racket. Anyway, with me and Jock was another guy, let's call him Schlemiel. Schlemiel had already joined the company as a salesperson and was a few weeks in to his formal training. He was really not very good at it, which I'll get to later.

So we drove to a particular neighborhood in a town directly north of Boston, and our job was to canvas that area with booklets for a particular neighborhood car wash. We were to greet each house here by saying something along the lines of:

Salesperson: "Nothing serious here, folks, just going around the neighborhood for ------ car wash."

Homeowner: "ok."

Salesperson: "Do you have a car?"

Homeowner: "Sure."

Salesperson: "Do you like to keep it clean?"

Homeowner: "Sure, I guess."

Salesperson: "Well here, check it out."

At "check it out" the goal was to get the coupon book into the hands of the customer. Apparently at this point they're more likely to want to buy it since it actually seemed like a pretty good deal. Anyway, we walked around the neighborhood for a while, with Jock leading the way, and giving Schlemiel the chance to try, and he was TERRIBLE at it. He would get tongue-tied, and couldn't remember the script. After about 15 minutes I had memorized the script. I felt sort of out of place with these folks, and pretty shitty overall about my life at this point. I remember I used some word (don't remember what) and they characterized me as "Mr. Dictionary" or some other moniker denoting my usage of "big" words.

All the while, Jock was also quizzing me on these certain points tat I'm supposed to learn and remember for a quiz at the end of the day. If you check the links above, you'll see some of these key points, but I remember it being weird, like "what makes a successful person" and my answers were not correct, there were certain correct answers I was supposed to give them.

Anyway, we did this for pretty much the whole day until we had essentially canvassed the whole neighborhood trying to peddle these coupon books for the car wash. We sold a few of these books, but all the while I was walking around I was trying to do the math and come up with some scenario where selling these little books could possibly be profitable. I couldn't come up with one.

At the end of the day we all went back to the offices and this was a social gathering time. As each team came back to the office, there was this incredibly weird ritual where if someone sold a certain number of these booklets (say 5) they got to ring a little bell. If they sold a bigger number (maybe 10) they got to ring the bigger bell. Everyone yelled and cheered for them as this was happening. I looked around, not quite sure I was really experiencing what I seemed to be experiencing.

After the bell-ringing ceremony, there was some socializing where I got a chance to meet some of the other sales people. Everyone was REALLY friendly, but they all asked the same question:

Sales people: "So what do you like to do for fun?"

Me: "Well, I enjoy reading, creative writing, spending time with my wife, being active in my Synagogue, etc."

Well, as you can guess, I got these sort of quizzical looks. I think the answer they were looking for was more "I like to work hard, and play hard!!!" or something to that effect.

At the end of the night after I had taken my quiz, Jock came to me and told me that they had a good feeling about me and wanted to bring me in the the business. I really agonized about it for a little while (which in retrospect seems ridiculous) but at the time I was pretty desperate to be working. As I took the T home, I really had to think about it. It became more and more clear though that I felt like it was kind of a scam, and that I'd have to work too hard for not much money, and that, to be honest, it felt beneath me (I know it's a snobby thing to think, but I really didn't feel like I spent 4 years in college and 3 years in law school to be a door-to-door salesman). Additionally, it required having a car, and we only had one car, so that was a problem too.

Thankfully for me, the legal work picked up after that, I had some good temp work for a while and a few months later got a permanent position at a firm. I'll always look back fondly though at my day in sales. I wonder what Jock and Schlemiel are doing now? I hope he's gotten his script down by now.

Complaints about technology

For a change of pace, I'm going to go ahead and vent about technology issues for a little while.

So back in December our old VCR broke. We thought, "no problem, we can just buy a new one". Turns out (not so surprisingly) that no one makes VCR's anymore. So, we decided to buy a combo VCR/DVD player (even though we had an existing, perfectly good Toshiba DVD player) since that was the only way we could get a VCR. Why buy a VCR, you might ask? We have a bunch of videos for our kids to watch, and it didn't seem like it would be a problem. So, we bought a very nice LG DVR/VCR with a built-in digital tuner and 1080i upconverting. This worked for a while until it started having an incredibly annoying problem of refusing to recognize the existence of the discs you had to put inside it. Problematic, no?

So, I went about figuring out how I was supposed to get it back to LG to fix. They explained to me that all I need to do was send them the original receipt (ha!) and put the DVD player in the original box (ha ha!) and send it back to them along with $69 for labor. So, I spent a ton of time searching all over the place for the receipt (basically ransacked our house) and couldn't find it, but then I got in touch with Best Buy and they explained that they can just send me a duplicate receipt. So that was great, and then I sent it to the UPS store to have it wrapped up, and sent it off to LG.

In the interim I decided to hook up the old DVD player to the TV. Unfortunately I just couldn't get it to work. The configuration was different. Back when we used this old DVD player we had it connected through the VCR. Now it was different and for some reason I couldn't get it to work.

No matter - just a few weeks later I got back a box with what appeared to be a brand new DVD player. I realized that it actually was a brand new one. In fact, it was an upgrade over my previous one. Whereas my old one only had 1080i upconverting, this one had full 1080p upconverting. So, very exciting, everyone loves a free upgrade. Unfortunately, not so great. I hooked up the DVD player as I normally would (I have done this sort of thing several times before, and am reasonably good at figuring this stuff out), but it just wouldn't work. So, I called a friend of mine who is more tech-savvy than I am and asked for his help. He was stumped, until we eventually discovered that this new DVD player is not designed to work with our old TV (perfectly good CRT television, 9 years old). So, now we have 2 perfectly good DVD players, neither of which can work with our television set.

My friend suggested a number of possible options: (i) buy an A/B switcher box to go back and forth; (ii) buy a receiver and run everything through the receiver; or (iii) buy a new TV.

Now, I like options (ii) and (iii) because our current stereo is a boombox-style Aiwa stereo that I bought in 1994 when was in college and it has been a complete POS ever since I bought it (the tape deck hasn't worked in years, and the CD player doesn't work either, at this point it's just a large radio). I have been holding out on replacing it because I didn't want to replace it with another POS, I wanted to actually get a good stereo system. I also like the idea of getting an LCD flat-panel TV.

Mostly, I am annoyed and a little bitter. We actually have 3 DVD players in the house, if you count the one that is a part of our computer but that has weird problems whenever you try to watch a DVD. So, 3 DVD players in the house, and none of them work. No pithy conclusion, I'm just sort of frustrated.

Comic Book Reviews - Y:The Last Man, Ex Machina

I just finished reading the final book of Y:The Last Man and I am comfortable saying that reading the series is some of the most fun I have had reading anything, ever. Brian Vaughan writes mainstream action/adventure comics better than almost anyone I've read. His comics (both Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina) are compulsively readable. Once I've started a book I absolutely cannot put it down until I am finished. He draws you in that quickly. He's sort of like Stephen King in that way - being able to write mainstream, exciting, fun works.

I'm not sure if "Y" is supposed to be about bigger issues, I think maybe it is, but the chief fun of the series is finding out what's going to happen next. It's possible that Vaughan wanted the series to be at a "higher level" and in that regard I'm not sure it succeeds. I mean, I was definitely interested in finding out what was happening, and what caused all of the men to disappear, and I also was fascinated with what he had to say about a world where all of the men are gone, but don't be worried - it's not high-level reading. It's extremely accessible, but it may not necessarily be great literature. That being said, it's just about as much fun as you can have reading a comic book, and I think Vaughan should be writing in Hollywood. I hear they are going to make a movie of this eventually. I think that's great, as it's a terrific story. I just don't want them to use Shia Leboeuf. I find that kid annoying, and am not sure why Hollywood is so fascinated with him.

I have recently finished reading the fourth book of Ex Machina. If it's at all possible, I think that Ex Machina is an even better series than Y: The Last Man. The artwork is a little more sophisticated (but still totally accessible), the narrative is slightly more complex (he jumps around a lot more from one time period to another), and the series reaches more of those high-level issues that think Y is going for but doesn't quite achieve. Plus, it's really entertaining. How could you not love a series about an ex-superhero who becomes mayor of New York? You can see some similarity between Mitchell Hundred/The Great Machine, and Yorick Brown (the lead character from Y), but each is his own character and both are very compelling. Again, this series would make a fantastic series of movies. Again, hopefully not starring that Leboeuf kid.