Uggghhh. What a disaster. GOP slime everywhere in the friendly confines of my hometown. The only good thing about this is that it will finally signal the end of a dark eight years. 

The New York Review of Books had a long review of Cheney’s life and history. It is really depressing. His entire life has led up to this moment: stripping power from everyone not in the executive office, starting needless wars because it fits his ancient cold war mentality, marking dissent from extremist policies as traitorous. It all extends from his living in Madison (yes, Mad-town again) during the Vietnam-era revolts against abusive power, and his disgust at it. He is quoted as saying something to the effect that he was the only person who wore a suit around town at the time. And somehow that is where his world view extends. Anyone who doesn’t agree with him is just another non-suit wearing Madisonian hippie. A very long way of saying the only thing I will be celebrating having legions of mindless, flag-waving idiots descending on this town, is that Cheney’s reign will soon be over.

Which I suppose is all to say this to fellow Twin Citians (apologies to those outside the metro): September 1-4, 2008 — time to plan that extended vacation to Canada or time to polish off the old protest signs? Will friendly old St. Paul become a military-style town a la Miami or New York? Probably so, and I’m not sure I could bare to see it.

This has been making the email rounds here, but I think it’s time for it to break into the international scene.

A Kannada movie clip from the 70s (I think- there’s not much to be sure about)

What can I say? I was going to offer up some analysis, but instead I’ll just post the link. Please watch it with audio.

Musical Goodness

Because if we needed an Ordinary People for the new millennium, it wouldn’t be a pretentious indie that even Sigourney Weaver couldn’t save.

First, this study by some Princeton IT folk on the ease of tampering with electronic voting machines is pretty depressing. If the US media had any shred of hope of still being the protectorate of the public interest, this would be discussed widely. Especially since here in Minnesota (and in many other states) the entire voting process is going entirely to electronic voting.

Which is why it is important to bury your head in the sand and live in a virtual world (mostly kidding on that one, I have been trying to raise this issue with local media members, but it is important to have distraction in your life when the basic framework of your so-called democracy is slowly dissolving…). And on that note, two things come to mind from the previous post: Oblivion and the online poker handle theory.

First, I think Oblivion is one of the most wonderful and simultaneously evil games that has ever been created. Never mind not going to work to play it. If I found a drug where I would never have to sleep again AND somebody paid me during the day to play this game, I think I could attempt to accomplish all the tasks etc. in the game in 20 years. I mean any game where you can step into a stocked library with all different books AND read them all(?!) is a little over-the-top in terms of level of detail. But I support any and all attempts to find a system of pay for playing this game. Please hire me when you find it Aakaash.

Which brings me to a game that does (occasionally) pay when you play it. Online poker. In addition to all the standard poker advice that you can find out there — play your position, be willing to fold a big hand, make others make tough decisions, be patient etc. I have devised a new poker theory system that only works online, the poker handle theory.

The handle theory is really pretty simple, and should be combined with solid play, but can help out in tough decision moments. First, some categorization…I would break online poker handles down into six major cateogories: 1) the brash and annoying reference to male anatomy, i.e. MyCoksHuge, Ihavthenuts etc.; 2) the pop culture reference, i.e. ArtVandelay, ChiefWiggim etc.; 3) the nonsensical, i.e. ltm568, g-flon58; 4) the self-referential, i.e. LarrySmith, MarieS; 5) the poker reference, i.e. acesfull, AKplayer, bluffnwin; and finally, 6) the animal reference, i.e. Crocteeth, viperman.

Within those categories, I would say I notice these kinds of trends:

1. Male anatomy handles are brash and aggressive. As their name so obviously suggests, they are trying to compensate for something. This is the easiest group to call with marginal hands because they are uber-aggressive, and just try to buy pots. Remember their handle suggests something is missing, so it’s likely not in the cards either….

2. Pop-culture or humorous handles are tight players. They are there to have fun, as their name suggests, and would rather not have to quit playing. Aggressive bets against them will often get them to fold superior hands.

3. The nonsensical handles: fear these players. This is someone who gave no thought to their handle, they just wanted to play poker. And they are probably pretty serious about it and probably play a lot. If they have a chip lead over you and you start getting into a raising war, it may be time to consider exiting the hand unless you know you can win.

4. The self-referential handle in my experience is often a beginning player. After all, who would use their first and last name as their handle? This is someone who saw an ad in a magazine or watched poker on TV once and thought it would be fun to play online and then signed up with their name. When they make a large bet, you should consider calling, not because they are bluffing, but because they actually think they have a good hand with a king-3.

5. The poker reference is a mixed bag, and the hardest to classify in terms of style of play. Some are quite good and some quite horrific, which is why they should be watched closely and evaluated. Don’t get into major early standoffs with them — see where they go with other players, identify the strong and weak ones and play accordingly.

6. The animal or animate reference, often with violent suggestions, is interestingly, in my experience the tightest of players. Their handle suggests someone who will lash out at any moment, and it is clever that way. They want you think that so that when they raise, you will call them. This type of player won’t bluff very often, so when they raise, you better have something pretty good or get out of the way.   

Hope that helps you video game and poker players out there distract yourself to ignore the fact that democracy as you know it is crumbling around you and no one seems to care…

A couple of days ago, I completed a year at my job. Unremarkable, perhaps, but for two facts taken in tandem – I am now 29 years old, and this is my first real job. Oh sure, I have been paid a stipend for teaching in grad school, I washed dishes in a cafeteria for minimum wage, taught kids at summer camp, even made a few bucks my freshman year fixing people’s computers. And I got myself through my last summer in the United States by playing poker (nothing on the level of some on this site, though). But this is my first salaried-with-benefits, qualification-based, full-time job. I started it a month after I moved back to India, which makes a month ago the anniversary of my return, and it’s an occasion. 

Or is it? I never thought that I wouldn’t get through a year. Perhaps it more a celebration of staying in one place for a year than having a job, perhaps the occasion is the validation of my commitment. But I love my job, it pays me handsomely, I get two-day weekends (very rare in India). I would have been a fool to leave. 

What, then, makes it something I (or people around me) need to make a note of? Anniversaries are nice, whatever the reason, because they give us another mark on the life-chart I am sure we all keep; we collect dates and durations as, perhaps arbitrary, indications of progress. Still, I don’t think that’s what it is. I get the feeling that it is linked to my larger, trans-continental, move; it is symbolic of a level of “success” in satisfyingly transitioning not only from one culture to another but also from debauched student to proper adult. And as soon as I type that, I laugh out loud. 

Most of my money has gone toward a tricked-out PC, 50-odd DVDS (The Criterion Brazil kicks some serious ass), 20-odd video games (Oblivion kicks some serious ass), eating out, beer, assorted electronics, and around 300 cheap books (I’m talking 90 per cent off list price). I’m not boasting – I just think, for me, that’s the whole point of having a job: being completely immersed in what I want and being able to get it. I’m swimming in materialism, indulging my desires, and dying of glee. 

Oh I believe in what I do; I believe in education, publishing, editorial responsibility and all that. But at the end of the day, I am yet to move completely into the realm of “responsibility” as seen by the world I live in – being unmarried, kid-less, mortgage-free allows me to extend my student sensibilities and aesthetics into a sphere where I can always get the things I want. 

Shameful? Definitely. Perhaps one day soon this will change. For now, I am happy with the thought that what society (specially Indian society) demarcates as desirable and what satisfies my hedonism can, actually, be reconciled with such little effort. 

Now if only this fucking job would give me the time to play Oblivion.

I often take the #17 bus home from work. It goes down Nicollet, turns right on 24th at the McDonald’s, and over to Hennepin. I don’t know what kind of SuperSized drinks they serve at the McDonald’s on the corner, but this Tuesday made the third time an Extrememly Drunk Guy got on the bus from that particular spot.

There’s no guesswork here — All three, I’m talking weaving down the aisle, shouting, stinking of gin, etc. The 5:30 in the afternoon kind of drunk.

Last time, a Really Drunk Guy sat down between me and another guy, put his arm around him, and struck up a conversation. I was a little miffed. The object of his affections was more traditionally handsome, I suppose, but I have a lot to offer conversation-wise.

Tuesday, a different Extremely Drunk Guy sort of made himself a spot between two women at the very back of the bus by plopping down in between and immediately saying “You’re pretty,” to one of them. The other one got up and walked down the aisle. The pretty woman said “Thank you.” Then he said that he was tired of “all this gangster shit.” The pretty woman said “I’ve had a long day,” and decided to stand the rest of the way home.

“Mother,” he kind of warbled. “I just killed a man.”

Whoa! Me and the people in the back shifted in our seats nervously and shared wide-eyed glances.

“Put a gun up to his head, pulled the trigger, now he’s dead,” he sang.

Wait a minute . . . was that Queen?

“Cause nothing really matters . . . anyone can see . . . nothing reeeaaaly matters . . . to me.”

Definitely singing. Sort of. Definitely “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Everybody likes “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the back of the bus, we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

The back row he was sitting in was wide open. A woman newcomer with some shopping bags plopped down beside him and looked him over. He was swaying a little bit. She turned to the guy in front of her:

New Woman: I wondered why nobody was sitting back here!

Guy in front: You’ll find out in a minute.

EDG: I’m a king, I’m a king, I’m a motherfuckin’ king.

If only he had stuck with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” By the time he got to “scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango” he would have had us all caught up in a giant bus-shaking singalong, Wayne’s World style.

Come up with a caption for this picture I took while driving around Minneapolis:

Today, September 19, is Talk Like a Pirate Day! This will make some people very happy. Arrr. If you go with it, this could bring you pleasant distraction for at least 3 minutes. To help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. I just plugged in that last sentence and got “Aye, t’ help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. Gar.” but I’m disappointed because pirates don’t say “facilitate.” Oh well. See what results you get.

Ahoy and walk the plank.

For the first time in human history, around the world, overweight people outnumber the undernourished. In BBC News online last week, it was reported somewhat ominously:

[University of North Carolina Professor Barry Popkin] said the “burden of obesity”, with its related illnesses, was also shifting from the rich to the poor, not only in urban but in rural areas around the world.

“The burden of obesity”? Like most white, middle-class Americans, I’ve never not had enough to eat. The most hunger I’ve experienced is between a skipped breakfast and a late lunch. No other class of folk could be so disturbed by a few extra pounds. Ask the rural poor aroud the world: “Will you accept the burden of obesity?” You may be surprised by the answer.

I don’t intend to belittle health problems associated with being overweight. Diabetes is a debilitating, chronic disease and a growing international problem (including, according to the NYT, “developing” and populous nations like India and China). I’ve seen a little of the dangerous, painful effects of diabetes from watching my grandfather, who suffered from it for 40+ years.

But that does indicate something important — unlike starvation, diabetes is a manageable disease. And if more people are dying from chronic diseases, like diabetes, than from communicable ones (as the NYT also reports), then give a shout-out to penicillin, clean water, mosquito netting, and sanitation, that might help you live long enough to die of a heart attack.

Yes, as professor Popkin suggests in the BBC online article, let’s subsidize fruits and vegetables in the U.S. But first throw a party. There is less hunger, and more people around the world have enough to eat.

(If you need another reason to celebrate, consider that a top fashion show in Madrid just enacted the first-ever ban on unhealthily thin models, in an effort to stop promoting heroin chic as the ideal to women around the world who have ever seen a magazine cover. Woo-hoo!)

My first thought as I watched Good Night, and Good Luck was:  Did George Clooney just quit smoking?  I know people loved their cigarettes in the 1950s, and I had read many comments on the amount of smoking in the movie, but those little cancer sticks kept stealing the stage.  There’s a loving shot of a lighter.  There’s an ad for Kent.  Even the black-and-white hues suggest exhaled blue clouds.

Eventually it hit me:  Clooney uses cigarettes to make a point.  You see, back in the 1950s, people didn’t know that cigarettes caused cancer.  Or, more accurately, smokers didn’t know.  Big Tobacco knew.  But rather than acknowledging that their products killed, thereby sacrificing profits, Big Tobacco companies concealed the harmful health effects of cigarettes and instead funded biased studies claiming that cigarettes weren’t hazardous to health.  They did this in order to keep consumers smoking, and their own pockets lined with money.

If you read that paragraph and said, “Wow!  Powerful people can’t be trusted!”, then Good Night, and Good Luck is the movie for you.  If, however, you said, “Uh…I took American History, too,” then you’re probably on my page.  As a movie, Clooney’s directorial debut is a piece of political propaganda, and an irritating one at that.

Before my liberal card gets revoked, I should say that I went in with high expectations and a good feeling.  I like black-and-white.  I like politics.  I don’t like George Clooney (he can’t act), but I agree with his politics, and I liked that he didn’t take a star turn in his directorial debut.  It was good to see David Strathairn and Reed Edward Diamond, both of whom I’ve liked since I first saw them 15 years ago (…wow) in Memphis Belle.  I’ve heard good things about Patricia Clarkson, and Robert Downey was a lot of fun in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

But this is really Clooney’s movie—in addition to directing and taking a supporting role, he co-wrote the script—and he reveals that behind the camera, he’s serviceable.  That’s not a compliment.  His ear for dialogue is not natural, and his sense of pacing is not effective.  In a few scenes, he goes for a Robert Altman overlapping-dialogue feel, but he forgets to point the camera at anything interesting as people talk.  His one unconventional idea is to feature Joseph McCarthy as himself, using the wonders of archival footage.  Though it’s an interesting move, I actually think it hurts the movie:  since the primary antagonist is nothing more than a talking head, it’s hard for Clooney to create the climate of fear and destruction that ultimately leads one character to commit suicide.  I know it’s there, but I’m not feeling it.

If Clooney weren’t involved, Good Night, and Good Luck would have aired as a TV movie.  It’s at that level of quality.  And it’s also at that level of analysis.  That’s what frustrates me the most.  As David Strathairn, playing Edward R. Murrow, opens a banquet in his honor with a speech about the dangers of media (and citizen) passivity, I got a queasy feeling.  I finally identified it as arthurmilleritis.  There’s no point so obvious that Clooney doesn’t underscore it with a clunky line of dialogue.  (Clarkson gets most of these lines, and fails to pull them off.)  There aren’t any subtle points at all.  You see, when Big Tobacco went unquestioned, they managed to profit off a fatal product.  When McCarthy went unquestioned, he ruined innocent people with his fearmongering tactics.  Could it be that, when George W. Bush went unquestioned, he unconstitutionally spied on Americans while simultaneously torturing alleged terrorists in secret prisons around the world?

It’s not that I think the movie is wrong.  It’s that I think it’s a bumper sticker.  And as valuable as bumper stickers are, they don’t make good cinema.  Neither does George Clooney.