Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dianeofnka's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Saturday, April 21st, 2012
4:52 pm	Jiro Dreams Of Sushi and Being Elmo Darin and I watched Jiro Dreams Of Sushi right before we left for vacation and Being Elmo in the hotel room. (One of the dangerous things about being on vacation: normal TV! New and different shows appearing on the TV screen at all hours!) Both documentaries pursue the same subject: a single individual devoting his life to the pursuit of his art: in one case, being a master sushi chef, and in the other, being a master puppeteer.  Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is about Jiro Ono, a master sushi chef who runs a 10-seat sushi bar in the Ginza subway stop in Tokyo and whose dedication to his art has paid off handsomely with rewards such a three-star Michelin rating. He works with his son, Yoshikazu, every day in the cramped little restaurant — his younger son, Takashi, runs the restaurant’s second location at Roppongi Hills. He is 85 and keeps going, and you can see the determination in his desire to get every aspect of making a piece of sushi right. He is so dedicated to his art he even dreams of new creations.  (Spoiler alert: if you see Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, the last food on Earth you will want to eat afterward is sushi. Because what would be the point? Wherever you go, no matter how good, the food is going to be crap compared to what you’ve just seen in the movie.) Being Elmo is the story of Kevin Clash, the voice behind Elmo, the most wildly successful Muppet since Kermit and Miss Piggy. Clash, a tall and imposing black man (not your typical puppeteer) discovered his love of puppetry early on and threw himself into it so completely that when he graduated high school he went directly to New York City to work professionally, eventually getting to work for his mentor and idol, Jim Henson, and creating one of the most famous characters ever.  Both movies are, in their own unique ways, both inspirational. And both are as depressing as hell.  Here is the story of both movies: a young guy, for whatever reason, discovers his art at a fairly young age. He pursues this, no matter what the consequences. He would rather do this art than just about anything else, and he devotes hours and hours (and days and years) to it. He becomes an expert, worthy of teaching others, none of whom will probably ever reach his level. And no matter how good he gets at his art, he works at it just as hard every day, trying to get that much better at it. First one to the playing field, last one off. Jiro still crisps the nori on the brazier outside of his restaurant, Clash still puts together his Muppets by hand, trying to find new characters to work with. Both stories are very inspirational. If you follow your dream and if you pursue your art and if you put in the hours to become great and if you keep working at it just as hard on Day 5000 as you did on Day 1, you will become a Master. All that spiritual, self-actualization bullshit we’ve always heard? It’s all right here. Like, neither one of these guys started out with any of the variables rolling their way, and neither let their circumstances stand in their way. Jiro’s father abandoned the family, he started work at age 9, and, you know, World War II and all. (Spoiler: doesn’t turn out well for the Japanese.) But still he kept at his passion: getting better at his craft, showing up every day, creating his own restaurant, and eventually creating what most critics agree is the best sushi restaurant in the world.  Clash grew up in a poor family in Baltimore in the 1960s, with few resources at his disposal. He created his first puppet by ripping up the lining of his Dad’s raincoat. In high school the other kids teased him for playing with dolls. And yet he kept putting on shows for kids, eventually getting hired at a local TV station to work on a kid’s show. He sought out the mentorship of Kermit Love, Muppet-builder to Jim Henson, and after high school went to work on Captain Kangaroo and The Great Space Coaster. He moved on to working for Jim Henson, and for Sesame Street. And there, after a master puppeteer named Richard Hunt threw the puppet at Clash and said, “What can you do with this?” Clash created Elmo. He’s now an executive producer at Sesame Street, in addition to a performer and teacher and international celebrity. For working with, you know, dolls.  The dedication and artistry shown are both breathtaking. I mean, like, how hard is it to put a piece of fish on a block of rice, right? But then you see how they check the temperature of the rice until it is perfect. How they stir the egg to make tamago. How Jiro created the masterful sushi dinner he serves to customers, with different movements like a symphony. The meal’s expensive, but Jiro’s clearly not in it for the money: the restaurant’s the size of a closet and he has three MIchelin stars, he could quadruple the size of the place if he wanted to and sell out every night, no problem. But he stays with what works for him.  Here’s the downside of mastery shown by both movies: they show us that our worst fears about pursuing our dreams, about giving 100% to our art and craft can be just as damaging personally as we’ve always suspected it would be. According to both movies, you cannot, in fact, have it all.  Jiro comes off as something of a complete asshole. He’s 85 and he’s crotchety as hell. We know this isn’t because of his success — there’s a segment in which he meets up with school chums from 75 years ago in which they all reminisce about how Jiro was a bully back then, too. He talks about how his sons didn’t see him while they were growing up, because he left first thing in the morning and returned after they were asleep at night. (Mrs. Ono is never referred to — let alone seen — in this movie.) Instead of sending them to college he had his sons come apprentice for him at his restaurant, where of course he was harder on them than he was on the others because they were his sons and he couldn’t be lenient. His son Yoshikazu, who will take over the famed three-star restaurant, has been working for his father for almost 40 years and even though he reportedly is as good a sushi chef as his father (there’s an anecdote about Yoshikazu being the chef for the Michelin committee), everyone expects him to fail after Jiro leaves. Kevin Clash is much different: he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and he seems to have always been that way. Like Jiro Ono, Clash’s personal life isn’t dealt with much in the movie either, other than that he’s divorced and he has a daughter. A couple of times, while doing promotions around the world for rooms full of screaming, enthusiastic children he would realize that his own daughter was the age of these kids and he was with them, not her. There’s a small segment with his daughter’s 16th birthday that makes you realize that Clash isn’t like other fathers: he brings in his daughter’s 16th birthday cake…and there’s a small Elmo on it. What. The. Hell. He is never without Elmo.  It’s clear in the doc that he’s brought as much to Elmo and puppetry as they’ve brought to him, and it’s wonderful to see. On the other hand, his personal life is crap.  § When thinking about these movies I was reminded of a quote I read from Steve Jobs as to why he wanted to do a biography: “I wanted my kids to know me.” Dude, I can think of a much better way to accomplish that than a book created by someone else.  But maybe that’s the lesson. If you want to pursue something single-mindedly, everything else falls away. And are you willing to do this anyhow?  (I won’t even get into “If a woman behaves like that, her partner won’t put up with it and it makes her a bad mommy.” But now that I’ve said that, I’ll let you go there.) Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2012
1:07 pm	Food notes from our recent trip We recently took an abbreviated spring break trip (because Darin had to get back to work today, for a conference) down to Anaheim. This is our third trip to Disneyland since moving back to the Bay Area — four years ago, two years ago, and this year. I think we may be done with Disneyland/California Adventure. If we decide to visit a Magic Kingdom again, we’ll probably go nuts and fly to Orlando. In two or three years. Highlights of theme park visits: We rode the new Star Tours 6 times in order to experience all of the possible sections. (The first two times we got two completely new rides, which led us to think there were hundreds of combinations. But no. Just 54.) This is a great ride. They will probably add new sections to it over time. I don’t need to go on it for quite a while, however. Our visit to Knott’s Berry Farm was overall not great (I think it’s designed more for teenagers wanting to go on big crazy roller-coasters), but it ended with a bang: the stunt show was hilarious. Definitely see it if you’re there. (Also: the chicken dinner. But this is a given.) The World of Color at California Adventure is amazing. Pro-tip: DON’T bother with the fast passes. We had tickets in the Blue section and Simon couldn’t see a damned thing. Actually, I couldn’t see half of it myself, so I could see his point of view. You can get reserved seating if you eat at the Trattoria (no idea if these seats are any good). The second time we went we stood in front of the Ariel’s Underwater Adventure ride, in the corded off section. We could see and hear everything, and we arrived about 5 minutes before the show started. This time we could all see the entire thing, easily. But one of the great things about our trips is the fabulous eating we get to do in other places. § Our favorite restaurant to stop at between here and Anaheim is Artisan in Paso Robles. Who knew Paso Robles was so cute? Who knew it was such an epicenter of foodie-ism? There are apparently several fabulous restaurants there, but the one we stopped at last year on the way to San Diego (and talked about so much that we knew we had to go on this trip) is Artisan. It’s a cross between a French bistro and California cuisine. Everything we’ve had there was fantastic. Whenever we decide to go on a car trip, we will probably try to stop here. § In Santa Barbara, we always stop at McConnell’s Ice Cream for, well, ice cream. I used to go to McConnell’s with my sister when I visited her at college. And they’re still there, and they still have one million flavors, and they’re all insanely tasty. They had orange chocolate when we went! Does Swensen’s still have Swiss orange chip ice cream? Man, that brings back memories. § Since we were staying at the Grand Californian, we of course went to the Napa Rose. I think our memories of the Napa Rose outstripped the reality this time around: it was good, but not break-the-bank good (which it ought to be for those prices). Still, of all the high-end meals we’ve had on the Disney property (Steakhouse 55 last year, an unbelievably AWFUL Japanese restaurant that I am pretty sure is out of business and deserves to be), this is by far and away the best. We didn’t even bother going to other places this time. § On our way to Knott’s Berry Farm, I looked up places to have breakfast and I said, “Oh hey, there’s an Original Pancake House. We should go there.” Good call on my part. This is one of the best entrants in the Original Pancake House chain that either Darin or I have ever been to. He goes to the one in Cupertino a lot, and the 49er Flapjacks at this place in Anaheim were perfect. Simon’s omelet: awesome. My Dutch baby pancake: very yummy. Sophia ordered a bowl of strawberries and got an overflowing bowl of fresh, perfectly sweet berries. If we could have gone to this place again, we totally would have. We just couldn’t fit it into the trip. § Honorable mention (mostly because I didn’t take a photo): Los Agaves, in Santa Barbara: down the street from La Super-rica. Much more comfortable seating than La Super-rica. Delicious food. Definitely recommended. Blue Bayou, New Orleans Square: we went here two years ago and were deeply underwhelmed for the price. This year, we wondered what to do for lunch, decided to risk it again (especially after doing a web search on “best lunch at Disneyland”). This time, I guess we ordered better because everything was awesome. Downside: their vegetarian lunch item is kind of stupid (it was the same thing as two years ago, so I didn’t order it again). Pro-tip: go early to make reservations, and say that you really want to sit by the edge of the water this time. (If you sit near the door, the light streaming in makes sure that you can’t see anything. Very unpleasant.) You will have to arrive at 11:15 for an 11:30 seating, but it’s totally worth it. Much better to sit and watch the Pirates riders go by. Trattoria Something Something, California Adventure: Forgettable. I think I had a salad. While better than many places to eat, it wasn’t that great.     Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
6:01 pm	Mirror, Mirror: the review Hollywood loves competing movie projects. Competing volcanos! Competing end of the world stories! Competing Titanics! (Okay, one was on the small screen.) Competing bug movies! I actually tend to believe that it’s more a case of “something gets into the water” rather than “oh gosh, they have a good idea, let’s get our own.” It’s too hard to make a movie in the first place without someone really being behind it. So here we have Live Action Snow White #1. (#2, Snow White and the Huntsman, is coming this summer.) Mirror, Mirror starts with the conceit that this is the story of the Evil Stepmother, since she’s played by the biggest star in the movie, Julia Roberts. The Queen is evil, a handsome Prince comes to the kingdom, Snow White runs away to avoid Evil Stepmother Queen’s clutches, she gets rescued by seven dwarves, she fights the Prince, she defeats the Evil Stepmother, she rescues the Prince, the kingdom is saved. If this is the Evil Stepmother’s story, you may have noticed a problem midway through my recounting this movie. The movie’s kind of a mess. It doesn’t know who the main character is either. It’s directed by Tarsem Singh, whose main notable attribute is his gift for visuals. Big splashes of colors! Fantastic scenery! If Tarsem Singh and Zach Snyder could just learn what a story was, they would really have something going. A problem both directors suffer from, however, is that they are more interested in the visual on-screen than in what the hell is going on in the story. The movie is definitely geared toward kids most of the time — the Prince gets affected by a magical spell that makes him act very silly indeed — although there were a couple of moments for adults that made me say, “Really? Did you have to put that in there?” The seven dwarves are very amusing — I liked them most of the time they were on screen, and they had the best dialogue. My kids mainly talked about the dwarves after the movie was over, so I’m thinking that was their favorite part too. Lily Collins is Snow White, and she’s very sweet and demure, and Julia Roberts eats as much scenery as she dares. Armie Hammer seems to have a pretty good time, despite spending a third of the movie half-naked. (And as I tweeted yesterday: Seriously, what must it be like to look like that? Does he spend most of his waking hours staring at himself in a mirror? Because if I were a guy and I looked like that, I sure would. I don’t even find that type of guy attractive and I would lose my ability to speak around him.) There’s nothing stunningly original or even funny about this movie though. Maybe if they’d stuck with the Evil-Queen-as-heroine story, or had some other twist in there that would make this original. But mostly it’s a matinee-with-the-kids-’cause-we’ve-seen-everything-else type of movie. We’re all kind of wondering how Snow White and the Huntsman is going to be. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
6:19 pm	Jeff, Who Lives At Home: the review Jeff (Jason Segal) is a pothead who lives in the basement of his mother’s house and does little except smoke pot, watch informercials, and opine on what in his opinion is the greatest movie of all time, Signs. He believes that signs are everywhere, and if we learn to see them, we will discover our true purpose. He gets a mistaken phone call by someone looking for “Kevin”…and Jeff decides that this is instead an extremely significant sign. His brother, Pat (Ed Helms), is a paint salesman whose marriage isn’t going so well and who isn’t helping himself out by taking 5 beer lunches at Hooters. He’s also bought a Porsche not only without the approval of his wife…but he might have killed his marriage by doing so. Their mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), is unhappy because she hates her kids and there’s no spark left in her life. Movies are always about people being in the right place at the right time and benefiting from crazy, impossible coincidences. Jeff, Who Lives At Home out-and-out embraces this conceit. Jeff follows the signs, sometimes with great consequences, sometimes with terrible consequences. Pat doesn’t listen to the signs at all — and comes to believe that maybe Jeff is on to something. And their mom realizes that maybe everyone and everything is exactly where they’re supposed to be in this life. In addition to being philosophical, believe it or not…this movie is very, very funny. Okay, not in the rip-roaring “Did I just laugh at that?” way 21 Jump Street was last week. But it’s a comedy of a couple of very strange, and yet very ordinary, people getting through their day in the way that they’ve become accustomed to, and how in one day everything gets wildly shaken up. When Darin looked up the directors on IMDb and saw that they were the ones who did Cyrus, we both said, “Of course.” Those two movies fit together perfectly. It’s crazy how movies we go to see in the theater really come down to money or art. That’s it. That’s the choice we make every week when we go to see a movie these days. Do yourself a favor and see one that isn’t just about getting the sequel green lighted. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
9:37 am	21 Jump Street: the review Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a good movie. It is, however, freakin’ hilarious. I was in a terrible mood yesterday when we went to the movies — to the point where Darin wasn’t even trying to make conversation with me, I was so monosyllabic — and by the end of 21 Jump Street I was wiping tears from my eyes. (During the previews, I chuckled once, softly, during Men In Black 3 when Josh Brolin evoked Tommy Lee Jones perfectly, and the rest of the time I was like: Wow, what is a bigger waste of time — me trying to cheer up, or these awful, awful, awful looking movies?) I couldn’t believe the good reviews this movie got before I saw it, and now I’m like, Yeah, okay. Channing Tatum is the good-looking, stupid cop who used to pick on nerdy, brainy Jonah Hill in high school. They both go to the Police Academy, where they help one another through. On their first assignment (as bike cops,in the park), they blow it so badly that Nick Offerman assigns them to undercover work at the high school. “You’re going to 37 Jump Street….Wait, that doesn’t sound right.” They’re supposed to break up a drug ring at the high school, and they discover that high school has totally changed since they were there, 7 years ago: now everyone two-straps their backpacks, instead of only using one. The smart kids are now the cool kids! Our cops get assigned to the wrong classes! They throw wild parties! They blow up half the city with quite possibly the worst police work in history…but apparently no one notices! Lots of drug humor. Unbelievably bad language — I think they went out of their way to see how much cursing they could get into this thing. Amazingly, no nudity. Every cliché about bad cop shows and cops working undercover and high school worked in, repeatedly. I had no idea who Channing Tatum was before this but I really liked him: he was hilarious. We had a really good time at this. The comedies they advertised before the movie though: ohmygod, they look awful. Why is anyone still hiring Adam Sandler? Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 26th, 2012
11:39 am	The Hunger Games: the review You already saw The Hunger Games this weekend. You don’t need my opinion of it. Okay: it’s really good, it definitely evokes the spirit of the book, Jennifer Lawrence is clearly a little too old to play Katniss but she’s really good and there are few if any 16 year old actresses who could have done this role. All the movie forgot with the ending was the title card: “Coming next summer: Catching Fire.” You know that movie execs have been prostrate in front of Suzanne Collins all weekend, begging her to add 5 or 15 more books to the Hunger Games trilogy. § The previews before The Hunger Games were interesting for how the audience reacted: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter made the audience laugh. The movie will have to be really good to overcome the audience’s reaction that this idea is too silly for words. The preview is expanded over the initial one, with more explanation of just what in the hell this movie is about. The new Spider-Man reminds us that it’s never too soon for a reboot! In fact, I think the reboot of The Hunger Games should be in theaters this fall. Andrew Garfield looks pretty good as Spidey. I have no idea of who the villains are or why they felt it necessary to bring Spidey back again, but I’ll probably be there. The Avengers preview I’ve just seen one too many times now. I don’t want to see this again before the movie comes out. Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part II… I don’t even know how to gauge the audience reaction on this one. Embarrassed giggles? People talking right through it? Explosive laughter when Kristin Stewart is eyeing the deer as a tasty, tasty snack?   Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
8:51 pm	The Intel Museum I know, right? Who knew Intel had a museum? Welcome Well, they do — it’s at Intel’s headquarters over in Santa Clara, at 2200 Mission Boulevard. It’s a couple of rooms of intro to microprocessors, how chips are made, how computers talk, the Intel story – (Spoiler alert: they invented everything and are the most amazing so phbbbbtttt!!!!) – and that sort of thing. Looking at the photos of Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and Andy Grove I was suddenly reminded of the time I interviewed Andy Grove for the Stanford Daily, a million and a half years ago. The kids were mostly interested and happy. How could they not be? The museum has some real dinosaurs on display! A blast from the Mezozoic That’s an IBM PC, kids. Scary, huh? Wait until your parents tell you how to operate that thing without a mouse. Wait until they describe the floppy disks. The tour guide did have a floppy disk as a visual aid…a three-and-a-half inch floppy disk. I called foul and insisted they bring out the five-and-a-quarter floppy floppy disks. (My first job at Stanford was teaching students at the Graduate School of Business how to use IBM PCs. Good times. Man, seeing that little machine brought back some memories.) Some of the exhibits were not very well focused (“Uh…which part of this is the transistor in relation to the size of a human hair?”), but they had plenty of interactive stuff for kids to play with. They had some exhibits that I liked. Yes. I am a nerd. And some that were just kind of silly. One kid got to dress up in an actual bunny suit. She said it was “hot.” During the part where the kids got to do some hands-on electronics, they built circuits from one of those kits you can buy at toy stores. Simon has a couple of these kits, so he’s really familiar with it. He did try to answer every single question the tour guide gave, but she was fair and made sure other kids got to answer questions too. Well. Sometimes. It’s a popular little museum with fourth graders in this area, because the fourth graders are studying magnetism and electrical conduction, and the museum is completely free, including the hands-on demo area. And you know…this kind of thing is part of our cultural heritage around here. A nice quote to end the day with.   Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
6:01 pm	My new car One day, a few years ago, before we even started the remodel, the four of us were up in San Francisco for the day. After we had a fabulous lunch in the Marina district, we were driving to Fisherman’s Wharf, intent on getting get sundaes at Ghirardelli. On Van Ness Avenue, I said, “I think I’m having a midlife crisis.” “You…wait, what?” Darin said. “I want to buy a convertible.” “Okay, for one thing, that is a not a midlife crisis, that is just…wanting a change of pace. For another thing, don’t call it a midlife crisis, that had me in another conversation entirely. And for another, convertibles are a pain in the ass. Why would you want a convertible?” “Dunno,” I said. “I just suddenly do. I was looking at some cars going by recently and I thought, ‘I’d really like to drive around in a convertible.’” “Well, you’ve had the Odyssey for several years now, maybe it’s time to think about getting a new car.” “I don’t want a new car. The Odyssey is a great car. It’s just that I want a convertible. Everybody I know has had a convertible.” “Yes, and then they all got rid of their convertibles and bought good cars.” “You have a point there.” “Do you know what kind of convertible you want?” “Oh yes,” I said. “I want an SL 500.” From the look on Darin’s face, I could tell he was rethinking the whole “midlife crisis” analysis. “Are you sure about this?” “I don’t want to get one right now. I’m just thinking about it.” Which is part of the reason that after this conversation I didn’t push the issue. I often get weird obsessions about things, and over time they would fade. Probably, most likely, almost certainly, this would happen too. Or, you know… maybe not…   ( Read the rest of this entry » ) Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
11:17 am	John Carter: the review Much has been made in the past week or two about how huge of a bomb the movie John Carter is for Disney. Like anyone here should care except Disney’s accountants. (Seriously: why do people pay so much attention to a company’s financials if they themselves don’t have a horse in the race? I can understand wanting to find out if your favorite company’s going out of business but…if that’s going to happen, a)there will be new companies to enjoy and b)they’ll send a memo around, honest.) Forget the stupid financials. As many people pointed out, John Carter bombed because it had an amazingly sucky ad campaign. This is one of the few times that I think having the wrong ad campaign really strangled a movie in the cradle, because John Carter is a fun, goofy flick that you can take the whole family to. I’m actually really sorry that Darin and I saw it without the kids, because now one of us in two or three weeks is going to have to go see it again (if, of course, any theaters still have it). John Carter is the story of a guy in the American Old West (whose name is…wait for it…John Carter) who finds a portal to Mars. There he discovers all manner of strange and crazy creatures, and he gets involved in the middle of a planet-wide civil war, where he promptly falls in love with Princess Dejah, who has to marry someone else. Huge epic battles! Crazy non-terrestrial machines! Mark Strong as the bad guy! (I know, right? Like that came as a huge surprise — I think he’s contractually obligated to be the bad guy in every picture these days.) The movie isn’t deep. It’s not educational. It was a lot of fun, however. The movie rarely stops to explain anything, figuring the audience will just pick it up as we go along, and since it’s not especially layered or confusing, we do. I really liked Taylor Kitsch as John Carter — he seems like he’s having a great deal of fun, even if he does have to spend most of the movie half-undressed. (Ladies.) The female lead is nothing to write home about, but they so rarely are these days, and that’s a topic for a rant another time. There is a lot of fighting, but all of the blood spilled is a turquoise blue, not red (which doesn’t explain why everyone is clearly red-tinted, not…oh forget about it), so I don’t think kids would be especially grossed out. There are cute alien babies and giant machines and people wearing crazy costumes. It’s a fun weekend serial. I’m just sorry it had such a sucky trailer. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 17th, 2012
2:39 pm	Mike Daisey and why theater is important I watched the unfolding of the Mike Daisey story yesterday with some amusement and some shaking of my head and some outright complete bemusement. In case you don’t know what happened with Mike Daisey, you can read the story here (or here, or here, or…). Basically, it comes down to this: Mike Daisey has a show he calls The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he gives a monologue about how he went to China and discovering the conditions in which Chinese factory workers operate under subhuman conditions and never use the products they make. You can read the monologue here. The popularity of his monologue was one of the factors in increasing questions about and investigations into how Chinese factories make electronic devices. And he was interviewed for a number of pieces on the subject — by the New York Times, and by This American Life on PRI. It turned out that Daisey had not interviewed the workers he said he did, he hadn’t experienced the things he said he had, and sometimes he relied on other journalists’ work and sometimes he just made shit up. Given how many times I’ve seen people quote things Daisey said as gospel truth, this is somewhat problematic. As Theater Fuck you, naysayers. You can do anything in theater. Rock on with your monologue, Mike Daisey. You want to present a theater piece saying the Trilateral Commission is behind everything that happens on the planet? Awesome. Make it thrilling and entertaining and I am there. Want to present a dramatic recreation of how George W. Bush instigated the Iraq War in order to steal the budget surplus and hand out billions to his supporters? Do it do it do it. An eighteen-hour multi-play cycle depicting what life is going to be like after we run out of oil? If you keep down the costs of stage effects and keep speaking roles to a minimum, some theater somewhere will stage that puppy. If audience members turn out to be getting all of their facts about the world at large from the theater, that’s not the theater’s problem. That’s your problem, for being an ill-informed moron. As News Unfortunately, because Daisey presented his monologue as his real-life experiences and he never hedged on that line — he told everyone, “This is what I did” — he set himself up as an authority. And when it turned out that he lied, his reputation — as a truth teller, where it should have, and as a theatrical monologuist, where it should not have — became the story. When in fact the story is our journalists suck. The biggest problem here is how many reputed journalists took Daisey’s stories at face value without apparently doing their own legwork. Reporters said, “Hey, I’ve stood outside of Foxconn and never run into workers saying crap like this…oh well, guess I just talked to the wrong workers. He must be right!” According to Bloomberg, the reporter for Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, who discovered that yeah, Daisey overstepped (or outright lied) on a number of issues found the translator Daisey worked with by typing “Cathy translator Shenzhen” into Google. Which no one else had done. There’s some real investigative journalism right there, people. I could go off on a rant about this whole topic (Quick! Name all the electronics manufacturers who have revealed not only their supply chain but specifically what they’re doing to improve conditions! Okay, I’ll make it easier! You only have to name more than one!) but I won’t. I’ve enjoyed making fun of Daisey over the past day only because he got so much attention for being an authority on a subject he wasn’t. But his theatrical monologue? He isn’t the evening news, people. We don’t want to hear endless stories of “Well, I heard…” or “I read in a paper…” or “You know what it might be?” No, we want to hear what people have done. And that is how Daisey presented it. Jason Grote, a playwright whose work I’ve never seen but whose Twitter feed I enjoy (and whose blog I enjoyed, before he discontinued it), had four really cogent tweets on the subject yesterday: There are different levels to truth crimes: And most especially, let’s keep a little perspective: In case you don’t know who Trayvon Martin is, you can read about his death (and the racism that clearly caused it and lets his murderer go free) here. I’m still of two minds. Anything that gets people thinking and connects with them emotionally (as Daisey clearly did, and as 97% of our entertainment so clearly doesn’t) is awesome. People clearly want what he said to be the gospel truth. A good question is: WHY? Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
12:22 pm	Keeping a diary, 2012 edition Remember back a million years ago when I was all about keeping a journal? I had pages about journals, I wrote Why Web Journals Suck, I maintained the Going and Going page? (In case you don’t remember Going and Going…for a few years I actually maintained by hand via BBEdit a list of people who kept an online journal going for a year. There were no blogs yet. I know, right? And I checked every single entrant by hand…until I came to my senses said, I am so not doing this any more. I’m sure there are automated ways of doing that now, but I wasn’t aware of any of those then, and doing that kind of thing now….muahahahaha, no.) My journal keeping over the past decade has been…spotty, let’s say. At a time when I probably should have been keeping a much more detailed diary (my kids growing up), I’ve had a blank book here, a book there… My handwriting, which used to be so gorgeous, has gone to pot. It’s hard to write by hand when you haven’t been. I actually still prefer writing a journal by hand, because I think using your hand to move across a page physically produces a different relationship with your brain than typing does. Yes, typing goes faster, but faster isn’t always better. Sometimes faster gets you stuck on “Oh, let me rewrite this over and over again” or retype this or whatever. Sometimes faster is just more shoveling of bullshit. But keeping a diary on the computer can be useful, because I can type faster — much faster — than I can write by hand these days. Also useful: a diary on my phone. I kept a diary of all of the hair products I was using, in what combinations and in what amounts, to see what kind of hair day I got out of them. I’ll be out somewhere and want to write about something that’s definitely journal-like, and what do I have on me? I have my iPhone. So, the three types of journals I keep at the moment: Paper, Computer, and iPhone. ( Read the rest of this entry » ) Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 12th, 2012
11:08 am	Interview, Hway-ling Hsu, Sweetdragon Bakery My friend Nina is always waxing rhapsodic about Barefoot Coffee, which is near her house and which has baristas whose sole job in life it is to make coffee. (And they take that responsibility Very Seriously.) Recently a franchise outlet of Barefoot opened near me, so I decided to go check it out as a possible writing spot (upside: very comfy, many wall outlets; downside: farther away than other cafes near my house). More important than what I thought of their coffee, however, was the sweet treat I discovered there: chocolate sea salt cookies. I munched on one and thought, “Wow, this is an awesome cookie.” Then I read the ingredients and I thought, “WOW, THIS IS A TOTALLY AWESOME COOKIE.” Because in addition to being a great balance between chewy and crispy, in addition to being just chocolatey enough, and in addition to being 4 small cookies in a resealable package (making portion control easier)…it was vegan. The kindest way I can put it is this: the vast majority of vegan baked goods I’ve had, both that I’ve made and that I’ve bought commercially, have sucked. Big time. There’s a company that has their products in the checkout aisle of Whole Foods that look delicious and taste like cardboard. So generally it’s a big turnoff for me. These, however, were awesome. Which made me try many other of this company’s treats. And they were all really, really good. I met Nina for a writing date one day at the Barefoot near her house and I discovered the cookies were there too. I bought a pack and stuck one in Nina’s mouth. “Try this,” I said, after the fact. “Dfaj fajgapto.” Then she nodded. “What?” After a quick drink of coffee, she said, “That’s a good cookie.” I was so enamored of the products by this company I tried I contacted the baker via her email and asked if I could talk to her about her business. And maybe I could get that chocolate sea salt cookie recipe from her. We met at Barefoot in Santa Clara. Nina showed up too, because she wanted to meet the baker too. Hway-ling met us and immediately offered us samples of the products she was working on: a vanilla shortbread cookie made without wheat flour, and a pistachio shortbread. One of these was vegan too, which I thought was a neat trick with shortbread, but I honestly couldn’t tell it was. After she finished dropping off her wares and leaving a few samples of new products for the cafe manager, she sat down with us. She is very friendly and funny and chatty. I loved talking to her. She didn’t want her picture taken (I tried, but pictures of hands over a face are not exciting), so sadly I don’t have that to share. § A lot of us have “fans” of our baking, but very few of us decide to make a business out of our baking. How did you decide to go into business?  No one ever actually said that to me. After my youngest didn’t need me at home any more, I thought, What would I like to do? I decided to start this business. (Hway-ling told us that she was a lawyer for many years, both before and after having kids, but she was done with the whole legal thing after the last left her nest. Nina is also a lawyer, and she is always interested in hearing about what other lawyers do after they finish with that.) What does it take to start a small baked-goods business? I assume there’s more to it than just baking a lot of stuff in your kitchen and putting it into plastic bags.  You have to get a Food Safety Certificate. Take a class, take a test, get a certification, get a license. There’s the Environmental Health Certificate, $750/yr. Pay a business tax to city of San Jose. If you form a business as an limited liability corporation (LLC) through Nolo, every year there’s a $800 tax, Before you can rent space, you have to have insurance. The agent said to me, “You have no track record and you have no experience.” And there are things like: Who do I sell to? What do I package in? What are the labeling requirements? I didn’t know about any of that. There are lots of barriers to entry. There’s lots of requirements but it’s not always clear whose requirements they are. Do you bake in your kitchen? If so, did you have to get it certified somehow? If you make your stuff somewhere else, what place do you use and how did you find it? You have to have a business license. You have to cook in a commercial kitchen that’s licensed. I use a rent by the hour commercial kitchen used by caterers, hot dog vendors, all sorts of people. I met a family cooking for their daughter’s shower or some big event.  You could do a sitcom set in one of these commercial kitchens. In New York, where I used to live, you can get your own kitchen checked out and certified. But not here. I also saw in that SF Weekly article that you began with recipes and techniques you found on the internet, but you’ve branched out from there. What do you do to create recipes?  At the kitchen where I rent there were two guys with a food truck. So I asked them, do you need a dessert? They asked for three things I didn’t know how to make. Peanut brittle, pralines, and something else. I got some recipes, I practiced, I gave it to them and they said, “Yeah, we can use this.” From the peanut brittle I experimented with other things.  The stoves at the kitchen are gas and have no marks. You have to eyeball the flame. You have to use different kinds of pots. You have to be aware of the ambient air temperature. In the winter the kitchen can be 50 and in the summers…  To go into a larger production requires more, bigger equipment. (She makes a ton of different kinds of brittle now, some of which she sells through Ourtisan.com. In case you’re wondering about the packaging there, the company name was Snapdragon and is now Sweetdragon.) One of the things I love about these cookies is that they’re vegan. Was this important to you when you started or just came about as part of the recipe you used? I think vegans are hungry.  No, I wasn’t intended to make them vegan. I started with a sandy sable cookie. I didn’t like the texture so I changed it to a soft cookie. Then I said it has no eggs, maybe I could take the butter out. So I experimented with different oils. For these I ended up with coconut oil. What ingredients do you use? I assume you’re not going to Lunardi’s and buying King Arthur Flour from there. I shop everywhere. I get a lot of things from Whole Foods. If you buy a case of something there, you get 10% discount. I shop at Cash and Carry. I order online. How did you pick where to sell? I read about BF in the paper years ago as a high-quality local cafe. I stopped by the Roaster, near my house. I made a note to myself to go by every week with a sample…then I forgot. I made some candy and took it by, and they were ready tobuy. Now I’ve gotten calls from some local places, like a cafe in San Jose and some shops in SF, like Park & Pond — they only sell local vendors within 100 miles. There’s a new candy store in Bernal Heights — Rock Candy Snack Shop. How do you find out about things like shelf life? I test it all myself. Put it in a bag, mark it, put it on a shelf…I put things in the freezer to see what happens. We’re always finding things in the freezer. I also try something of every batch of products I make, just to make sure I didn’t substitute salt for sugar. Do you do all of your baking and experimenting in the test kitchen? I still bake at home. I experiment and my family gets to eat the experiments. I also volunteer at Martha’s Kitchen. There are lots of volunteers there Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and they’re often my guinea pigs. Is there any chance I could get the recipe for your chocolate sea salt cookies? No.   Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 4th, 2012
12:36 pm	The Secret World of Arrietty: the review Arrietty is 14 and about to go on her first “borrowing”: accompanying her father as they go spelunking through the house they live under “borrowing” items such as sugar and tissue. Arrietty and her parents are Borrowers, who are little tiny people who live right underneath the noses of “beans” — the humans who live in the world above. Shawn is a sickly teenaged human boy who needs to rest up before his big heart operation, and he comes to stay in the house Arietty and her family live under — and the second he arrives he notices tiny Arietty. And the cardinal rule of the Borrowers, of course is “Don’t get noticed.” The Secret World of Arrietty comes from Studio Ghibli, which has produced Totoro (still the best…in fact, I could go watch this right now), Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo… The movie was written and produced by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (as I said to Darin, I knew it couldn’t be Miyazaki directing, because the story was too focused and coherent), and it’s really quite good: there’s a lot of tension about what’s going to happen, and there are a lot of very exciting scenes. Trust me, knowing there could be giant rats around any corner waiting to pounce: very, very exciting. The movie’s gorgeous in the typical Ghibli style. Both kids said they enjoyed it, and Darin and I were both entertained. It was Arrietty or The Lorax and we were both deeply thrilled when the kids chose Arrietty. Edited to add: Mike in the comments points out that the movie is based on the Borrowers book series by Mary Norton. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 2nd, 2012
11:01 am	Awake We watched the pilot of Awake last night. (Free download on iTunes!) I follow a number of TV critics on Twitter and all of them have been waxing rhapsodic about this show, so I definitely had to check it out. Having watched it, I know why they really like it. And unless something changes drastically in the next episode — not even the next couple of episodes, but the next episode; welcome to the reality of TV these days — I can also tell you why it’s doomed. Awake is the story of Michael Britten, a homicide detective who was in a car accident with his wife and son. Since the accident, his life has split: he spends one day in a world where his wife lived and his son died; then he goes to sleep at night and wakes up in a world where his son lived and his wife died. You can tell which world he’s in because everything is either tinted very slightly green or very slightly red. There’s no mention of what happens if he takes a nap. That, right there, is why this show is doomed. While watching the show Darin said, “I got it. It’s Life On Mars meets Traffic. And the main character’s the one who actually died, right?” I said, “That’s the most popular theory.” I’m not ruining anything for you there; if you look at Alan Sepinwall’s blog or Ken Tucker’s blog, everyone’s guessing that Michael Britten is the one who died in the car crash. It’s kind of like the trailer for The Sixth Sense: the kid says “I see dead people” as he’s staring at Bruce Willis. “I hope they’ve come up with something better than that then,” Darin said. The viewing audience has seen more hours of narrative storytelling than were available in the entire history of the world up until a few decades ago. If you present the audience with a puzzle, they’re going to try to figure it out, and they’ve had lots of practice. If you make the solution an easy and obvious puzzle, they’re going to say, “Seriously, that’s all it is?” Because one viewer might be stupid, but collectively they’re pretty damn smart. So, at the very least, you have to give them a fun ride until you get to the conclusion. The two most obvious shows to compare this to are Life On Mars and Lost. Both of which dealt with fairly heavy issues (c’mon, a plane crash! these people’s lives were complete messes! how were they gonna survive!) — as I joked when I watched it a number of years ago, Life On Mars really did have the most feel-good ending ever! — and they had puzzling situations that may or may not have resolved to viewers’s satisfaction. But. But. Both of them also had a sense of humor. Which Awake sure as hell did not during the pilot. Oh my God, it was so somber and dreary. Everything was so serious. It was like an entire symphony played in a minor scale. Newsflash: Nobody wants to tune into a show that’s a damn downer in every way every week. I kept thinking about the scene in Lost where things go terribly wrong with the dynamite, and it’s both shocking and sad, because a character we liked got killed. Later, when Hurley says, “You’ve got some Arzt on you,” it’s both tragic and hilarious. We’re not happy the guy is dead, for crying out loud, but that line was funny. A guy sitting in not one but two therapists’ offices (newsflash: therapy sessions are a lot less interesting than writers want everyone to believe) being somber and upset about the fact that he’s either a)living in two universes or b)deeply schizoid without acknowledging the humor of the situation is just a turn-off. There’s got to be something else on TV to watch, and what do you know: the entire oeuvre of drama ever is available to us now. The pilot does give us one intriguing question — both therapists mention something about the accident that Britten knows wholeheartedly is false. So that makes the ride a little more fun. Depending on how we get through the rest of the TV we’ve got stored up, we might watch the second episode. But if it doesn’t give us some emotional tone other than “Wow, complete bummer” and it doesn’t deal with (and dismiss) the idea that maybe the solution is simply that Michael’s dead (because your audience is smart, dammit), I’m not coming back. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
8:47 am	Wanderlust: the review Paul Rudd works in an unspecified business in Manhattan. His wife, Jennifer Aniston, is making hard-hitting documentaries about penguins dying in the Antarctic that she’s trying to sell to HBO. They buy a “micro-loft” (which is real estate code for a single room about 10×10. Then their life falls to pieces (Rudd’s office gets busted by the FBI…but apparently a major federal crime takedown doesn’t affect him at all), they head to Georgia to live with Rudd’s brother, the seriously over-the-top Ken Marino, and they discover a commune in the Georgia countryside with an assortment of wacky characters. And when I say “assortment,” I do mean “one of each.” Like there was a checklist. We saw Wanderlust last night and I remember so little of the movie this morning I’m only writing this to remind myself I saw it. The movie is 98 minutes (feels slighter) of “wacky” stereotypes about 1)Manhattan, 2)hippies, 3)Ken Marino. Manhattanites pick their uber-expensive lofts by location of their favorite coffee joint! Vegans secretly long to eat meat! If you let loose for a while, you’ll find yourself…but not too loose! Because that will cause problems in your most serious relationship! The whole movie was so thin. I think it was an excuse for a bunch of friends to get together and have someone pay them while they do stupid shtick. It probably didn’t help that Jennifer Aniston does nothing for me. She’s so bland and uninteresting on-screen. She has no chemistry with Paul Rudd (their characters are supposed to be…married? really?) and she has no chemistry with her off-screen boyfriend Justin Theroux. This movie also has the most full-frontal nudity (male and female) I’ve seen in a while. In this day and age of the Internet and anything you do on camera lives forever, so why did they do this? Actually, there’s a lot about this movie that makes me feel like it was probably written at least ten years ago. There are long bits with an Atlanta news station. (Spoiler alert) Rudd and Aniston find happiness by becoming small-press publishers in Brooklyn. Except for Paul Rudd’s iPhone and a GPS unit, there’s no technology that didn’t exist at least ten years ago. Feel free to pass on this one. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 27th, 2012
4:42 pm	Visions of the future   You’ve probably heard about the remark presidential candidate Rick Santorum said recently about Barack Obama: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.” Let’s assume Mr. Santorum is quoting Mr. Obama correctly. Mr. Santorum himself has a bachelor’s, law degree, and MBA, for what it’s worth, so it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think a college education is snobbery. This quote tells us a lot about Santorum’s vision of the future. With all the brouhaha of late over the factories in China building our electronic gadgets (almost all of our electronic gadgets, not just the one brand name that we hear over and over again), what seems to get lost a lot of the time is that while these factory jobs are mind-numbingly boring with long hours and living on in corporate dormitories, they are a huge step-up from second-rate factories (which aren’t getting the big inspections and Nightline specials), which are themselves a huge step-up from the backbreaking rural agricultural work that would be most of these workers fate without these factories. This isn’t to say I want to work in this factories or I want you to work in them; just that they are, in fact, relatively better than the alternative. Thirty to forty years ago China was fighting for its right to live in the Middle Ages (no, thank you, Mao and the Gang of Four), and now it’s  pushing forward as fast as possible to live in the future. China doesn’t want to be the land of manufacturing, it wants to be the land of innovation. The Chinese government’s latest five-year plan emphasizes the need for long-term investment in research and development, to shift China from being “factory to the world” to being an innovation-driven, knowledge and service economy. The Chinese understand that being an innovative brand-owner like Apple or Nike is much more profitable than being an original equipment manufacturer. They have Japanese and South Korean examples such as Sony and Samsung to follow. The five-year plan also calls for doubling the percentage of gross domestic product from creative industries. Young people born after the “opening” in 1989 are leading vibrant arts and fashion scenes in the major cities. Their vision of the future is quite different than Santorum’s.   Here in the US, we have lots of types of jobs: we have agriculture (by and large this is all BigAg stuff now; family farmers are a convenient myth), unskilled labor (mostly going overseas), skilled labor, and what Richard Florida calls “the creative class.” The creative class are the people who companies fight over to hire and retain. They’re the innovators, the people who are not just cogs in the machine and who can’t just be replaced by a warm body. In Flight of the Creative Class, Florida analyzes why certain places have attracted more than their fair share of the creative class — and what other places have to do to get them (and keep them). He argues quite strenuously that the US, particularly post-9/11, is going out of its way to discourage innovators and creators from coming here. You may have heard about two British travelers recently denied entry to the US after they tweeted about coming here to “destroy America.” If you have a choice of two relatively equal destinations, and one of them denies entry to people who have made jokes on Twitter, you might just decide to go to the other one. If that happens too often, people who have a choice of places to go to stop coming to ours. In which case, we’re massively screwed, because a huge reason the US has continued to be so successful is because it has welcomed immigrants and innovation. It’s welcomed the strange and offbeat. These days, when other countries ratify gay marriage and our government refuses to recognize those marriages as legal, where do you think those married couples are going to go? (The creative class, by and large, has learned to think around corners, because they put a and b together and get wxyz. If you belong to a minority outside the mainstream, like gays or Jews or ethnic minorities, you learn to think around corners a hell of a lot faster than people who live happily in the middle of the stream and think that’s the only way to be. Which is why it’s important for the creative class to know how we treat our minorities.) I like all of the stuff by Florida I’ve read, by the way, like Who’s Your City, which comes up with a reasonable explanation for why, in the age of the Internet, you still live in Silicon Valley if you want to do computers and you live in Milan if you want to do fashion and you live in New York City if you want to do finance.   InThe Great Reset, Florida compares the current depression to immense economic upheavals of the past — the Great Depression and the Long Depression of the 1800s — and asks if we can’t learn something from those difficult, society-changing experiences and apply it to what we’re going through right now. Each of these economic disasters led to a fundamental shift in how we worked and lived, and he is fairly certain we’re in for this now as well. If we can prepare, we’ll be that far ahead of the game. When Kansas or Texas or (insert name of state here) seriously starts arguing about teaching creationism in schools, I joke that “there’s another state of kids who won’t be competing against my kids for spots in college!” Only it’s not a joke. We can either teach our kids to face the future with an ability to handle complex scientific thoughts, or we can stick our fingers in our ears and chant “La la la” a lot. Everyone who thinks the second one is a great vision of the future, please identify yourselves so we can make sure not to involve you in any of the grownup discussions. When politicians talk, they are telling you about the future they think about. What kind of society they think we should aim for. What kind of people are going to meet the challenges of the post-2008 depression. The general theory behind getting a college education is that the person has learned enough about a variety of subjects — history, math, literature, science — that they can understand what’s going on around them. The object isn’t to burden students with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, even though that’s definitely one of the side effects. I agree wholeheartedly there isn’t anything you can learn in college that you can’t learn elsewhere. But one of the things college is supposed to do is expose you to people and ideas you might not otherwise run into in your own insular little world. So that you can learn to put two or three crazy, unrelated ideas together…and create a new innovation. The future is hard and scary and unknown and nothing is a given. You can dig in and work, or you can give up and pretend it’s all going to work out if we just hunker down over here and don’t let scary foreigners in with their scary ideas. When Rick Santorum refers to a dream of a well-educated populace as snobbery, it tells you something about what he sees.   Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
11:26 am	That pain in my chest Monday morning I was sitting in bed, reading the news on the iPad, when I felt a pain on my left side. Not a sharp pain. Much more like the pains I used to get when I was younger and my chest would constrict and I would have to take very deep breaths to expand the muscle. I ran some errands and then I went to the gym to lift weights. My chest felt fine…except when I lay down to do the chest press. Mind you, actually doing the chest press felt fine — in fact, the pain went away when I did lifted the barbell. When I was just laying there, though, the pain intensified. Weird. I made dinner (fish fillets, cheesy orzo, and salad). We watched Buffy. I went to bed. The pain was worse, but I figured a good night’s sleep would help. At 3am, I woke up with some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I’ve had two babies. A couple of times I actually felt my heart beat arrhythmically (not the first time I’ve felt that — my heart can be a little weird), but combined with the pain it was terrifying. Getting out of the bed was excruciatingly painful. I wondered if I should drive myself to the ER. I decided that wondering if I should go to the ER without waking Darin meant I still thought I had a choice in the matter, so I dug through the medicine cabinet, found some five-year-old Vicodin, and went back to bed. In the morning the doctor’s office told me to come in immediately. The doctor asked if I was having shortness of breath, and I said the problem I was having with breathing was that it hurt to expand my chest, not that my breathing was impeded in any way. Then she asked me if I’d been on a plane recently (“Um…early January?”) or if I’d had a cold recently (“Nope”). The nurse gave me an EKG. The doctor read it and said, “The good news is you haven’t had a heart attack. The bad news is your heart is really angry about something, so I’d like you to get a CT scan.” The nurse scheduled the scan for me at a local MRI/CT place. On the form the doctor had written “Pulmonary embolism?” The question mark did not reduce the anxiety I was having. The top of my list of errands was: go to AAA, tell them I’d bought a new car, ask what rates they were going to offer me. But I didn’t feel much in the mood. I sat in the AAA office and did searches on “embolisms.” After a few minutes I decided that my current insurance would cover the new car until I could work out the messy details and headed home, had some lunch, and waited for my appointment. CT scans are slightly different than MRI machines — you’re not totally encased in a scary coffin (I’m not claustrophobic and the MRI machine scared the crap out of me), but you’re inserted in this giant tube that whirls around you. The technician puts a catheter in your arm to inject you with the fluid that shows up on the scan. You have to hold your breath. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience all around. When I got on the table I told the tech I needed help lying down. He asked me when the last time I ate was, and I said, “About an hour ago.” “You have to fast for this. We can reschedule.” “Can you find out if that’s true?” I asked. “Because I really need this test done today.” The doctor in charge said I could do the test, but I should have a basin nearby in case I tossed my cookies. Then the tech said I needed to raise my arms above my head. I couldn’t do it. Raising my left arm was incredibly painful; letting it drop by my head felt like someone was knifing me in the side. He tucked a pillow under the arm so it wouldn’t have to drop all the way back. We did the test and at the end the tech had to lift me off of the table. Had I really gone to the gym and done my full workout on Monday? I could barely move. I called the doctor’s office an hour after the test. Then an hour and a half later. Still no word. The pain in my chest was much, much worse, possibly because of the whole left-arm-over-the-head thing. The nurse finally called me back at 4:30. “The scan was clear,” she said. “We’ll phone in a prescription for Vicodin.” “Could you ask the doctor to look at it again? Because I am having the worst pain of my entire life.” She said she’d call me back. She did and said the doctor was absolutely certain about the scan. Chances were very high I had a pleurisy (an inflammation of the lungs), the kind of thing you usually get when you have a cold. This pain was much worse than I could remember having from a chest cold. “Is there anything else could it be?” I asked. The nurse said if the pain continued I would have to come in again and run some more tests. Awesome. I went to the pharmacy, where I got my five dollar bottle of Vicodin pills (which might have greater efficacy than the five-year-old kind). The pharmacist had to give me a consult, so she could explain how to use it and what to be cautious of. “Any questions?” she asked. “Yes. Why is this drug considered ‘fun’? I’ve taken it before, I don’t get get why it’s fun.” “Neither do I,” she said. “It just puts me to sleep.” We got Chinese takeout last night and I took my drugs. Generally painkillers don’t work for me (which is why I never think to take them), but I could definitely feel the difference when I took the Vicodin. We watched Buffy and then the series premiere of Angel, and I remembered how much I didn’t like Angel as a character on Buffy, but loved him on his own show. There’s a scene where Doyle explains why he’s there helping Angel, and his speech includes a recap of everything we know about Angel’s life. “Why is Doyle telling Angel stuff he clearly already knows?” I asked the kids. “Because viewers might not know about it,” Sophia said. “That’s what I was going to say!” Simon said. My kids are awesome. After that I went to bed, which was difficult because moving too suddenly brought the pain back. I woke up in the middle of the night and took more Vicodin. This morning the pain has lessened a great deal. If it had felt like this yesterday, I wouldn’t have called the doctor in such a panic. I’ve taken my Aleve (the Vicodin can wait until I’m sure I don’t need to operate a car). And I am really grateful I have access to such great medical care when I need it. Not a few times yesterday I wondered what I would have done if I didn’t have insurance. Or if I’d been afraid of being fired because I was going to miss a day of work. Heck, lots of employed people are experiencing the joy of no health insurance. I’m guessing I would have put off a visit to the ER until I’d been sure I was dying. And if it had been a pulmonary embolism (which you need to deal with immediately), I probably wouldn’t have gotten that far. Our society needs to figure out what our priorities are. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 20th, 2012
11:29 am	Simple rules when using the Internet I know, I’m probably biting off more than I can chew here, but what the hell. 1. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. This goes double if you’re going to post as “Anonymous.” The only possible exception to this: you are whistle-blowing on some egregious, illegal practice that you can’t possibly own up to in real life. In that case: run for the hills, because tracing where a posting originated is as simple as asking Google, “Hey, where did this originate?” (You know Google saves every search made from every IP ever, right?) 2. If you link to it, you own it. If you offer up a link to something on your blog, on your Twitter feed, or as a Facebook status, you are advertising that you agree with the opinions found therein, unless you very specifically call out that you are disagreeing with it. (NB: if you are a professional comedian — i.e., someone would recognize that you are funny consistently and over a long period of time, not necessarily that you’re getting paid — you can get away with “sarcastic agreement” as your disagreement mode. Only professional comedians.) Way back in the early days of the Web (when this blog had already been around for several years, nyuk, nyuk) there was a political blogger named Instapundit. I haven’t heard about him so much any more; don’t know what he’s doing, don’t care. But his shtick was to link to something foul, infantile, or race-baiting and then say Interesting. When called on how he was clearly promoting these things, he would say, “Oh no no, I just thought it was an interesting point of view.” In a word: bullshit. He wanted to link to inflammatory crap without putting his name on it. If you link to it without commentary, you own it. The only possible exception to this: you link to a major media site, such as the New York Times. In which case, we probably know why you’re linking. Be a good Internet citizen and add a little commentary so we know where you are with this, okay? 3. Don’t read comments. Seriously. There’s nothing to be gained from this. There are people who have nothing better to do than sit around all day and argue nonsense from behind a fake name. There are people who are paid to sit around and post garbage. Don’t participate. There are two exceptions to this: Horace Dediu’s blog Asymco. That blog has one of the most respectful and curious set of commenters I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t hurt that Horace is bringing his A-game with every post. You can disagree with him…but the usual Internet set up of “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge!” just looks like the lameness it is on Asymco. My blog. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 17th, 2012
12:32 pm	Women as chattel   Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard to figure out. We have all seen this photo: An all-male panel testifying before Congress on birth control. An all-male panel that doesn’t include one doctor. When Democrats proposed women to be on the panel, they were told the women weren’t “qualified.” § Rick Santorum’s biggest financial backer — and in the world of big-money politics, this means this guy has bucks, which in the US means he has power — “joked” that women should use aspirin as birth control. “You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” Friess said on MSNBC. “The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” Women, mind you, need to be the ones to say no. And if they don’t, well…it’s all their fault, isn’t it? § The Virginia state legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. From the article: “There is no evidence at all that the ultrasound is a medical necessity, and nobody attempted to defend it on those grounds.” No, this is all about women being forcibly penetrated for no medical reason — under Virginia state law, the very definition of rape. During the floor debate on Tuesday, Del. C. Todd Gilbert announced that “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” (He has since apologized.) Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert’s statement “is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue,” recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” (I confirmed with Englin that this quote was accurate.)* They had already made the decision. They made the decision once, and so therefore their bodies are now fair game. Women should only be allowed to make one decision in their entire lives, and then men will tell them what to do from then on. § Senator Scott Brown, apparently trying to prove he’s not really from Massachusetts, cosponsored a bill “would allow employers and insurers to limit specific health care coverage, including contraception, based on religious or moral objections.” And yeah, Obama let the conservatives go to town on that one for a while before knifing it to death, because this election year kabuki is stupid. Lots of people have made jokes about “What happens when an employer decides on Sharia law for their employees?” How about a much easier scenario than that, guys? How about when an employer decides that an unmarried woman who gets pregnant is clearly a whore and refuses to cover her medical bills unless she gets married? § An entry on Alternet asked, “Do Conservatives understand how the female body works?” What the hell? Why are you even bothering to ask? The Republican/conservative mindset is that women are things that exist only to serve male needs. They’re not intelligent enough to know what they are, or what they want, or what’s good for them. Only men know enough about this stuff to testify, right? § Twenty years ago I read that the entire war on abortion was no such thing — it was a war on Griswold v. Connecticut. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s the Supreme Court decision legalizing contraceptives. You know, because there was a time they weren’t legal. And damn if that analysis hasn’t been proved to be correct over and over and over again. We know that conservatives could give a flying fuck about actual pregnancies. They don’t want access to birth control (which, let’s face it, is framed solely as a woman’s problem here), they don’t want to fund medical care for the mothers, they don’t care about the psychological care of mothers who are pregnant unwillingly, they sure as hell don’t care about those kids once they show up in the world. So, if they don’t care about the pregnancies, the mothers, or the kids, why on Earth are they putting so much time and energy into making sure women get pregnant and stay pregnant? Because if women don’t have control over their own bodies, they have no control over their own destinies. Yes, it is that simple. Their actions and words are very clear: They want women to be second-class citizens, dependent on whatever help and ministrations men decide to bestow upon them. Why do they want this? Well, it’s fun to have power over people, I guess. It’s reassuring to know that you’re superior simply because you happened to be born with a penis instead of a vagina. There’s no surprise that religion is strongly featured in a lot of these stories: Christianity and Islam have extremely strong anti-woman components to their theology, and regarding half the human race as, well, subhuman isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. We live in a scary time where nothing is assured, and having control over another person is kind of like having control over your own life, I guess. Who knows where this shit comes from. But this is what they want, and they are saying it OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Listen up. § All of these political moves by conservatives are a lot easier to understand if you follow this simple rule: Whenever you hear the phrase “family values,” substitute the word “patriarchy.” There’s an even better quote I am reminded of when I hear these Republican proposals “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou § One of the main reasons we’re getting this deluge of bullshit now, of course, is that the economy is looking up. The Republicans have nothing — they can’t even wave the banner of gay marriage anymore. So they’re going straight to their book of greatest hits. § And by the way, can we stop making jokes about all-female panels debating men’s health insurance access to Viagra? Women being pregnant and men getting erections are not equivalent. Let’s stop pretending they are. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
10:57 am	Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: the review I had the best history teacher in high school. Her name was Jean Murphy (actually, her name was Mary Jean, but she only ever went by Jean) and she loved teaching European history and music and choir. And the way she taught history was simple: she taught us the version that concentrated on sex. Abelard and Heloise! Henry II! Henry VIII! Christ, most of the Wars of the Roses and the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War and do not even get me started on the House of Habsburgs! Yes. She taught European history-as-sexfest to a bunch of freshman girls at a private all-girls Catholic high school. I have no idea how much of it was true, but man oh man, do I remember a lot of it. There is something to teaching the fun stuff, because you just might interest people enough to find out the other stuff. § A couple of days ago I saw this incredibly hot movie trailer: I remembered seeing the book in the bookstores. (You know, when I still went into them.) It seemed to be the ultimate expression of what Terry Rossio calls “Mental Real Estate” — concepts we all know and are familiar with, turned on their heads just enough to intrigue us. Lincoln! Vampires! Lincoln being fearsome when it comes to vampires! But I liked the trailer (because I am a nut for over-the-top action movies, always hoping they will have a coherent plot line), so I got the book and read it. (Yes, I bought this book and immediately read it. I have hundreds of unread books on my Kindle and iPad that have sat there unread for a long time. Hundreds. I’m not saying that pricing your book at free guarantees I’m not going to pay much attention to it; I’m just saying there’s a strong damn correlation along that way of thinking.) Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith is what I call an “all-in” book — the author took his premise (that Abraham Lincoln was a secret vampire hunter, and that a major force behind American slavery was the needs of vampires) and Grahame-Smith went all-in on it. There is no winking to the audience, there is no “I know this sounds kind of stupid, but just go with it” passages. World War Z by Max Brooks is another “all-in” book — you are either along for that ride, or you give up early on. The conceit is that the author of the book in the present comes across Abraham Lincoln’s secret diaries and decides to write the definitive biography of Lincoln in regards to vampires. That is how the book reads: a deadly serious biography of Lincoln, with descriptions of the time period and excerpts from the diaries, that describe everything from life on Indiana to floating down the Mississippi to butchering the horrible vampires that are preying on the people. No sparkly bits here, people, no really-cute-vampires-with-a-soul. No, these are monsters and Lincoln is going to put them down. There are a couple of serious missteps: I read three passages relatively close together (I read fast) that were all dream sequences. (And that was before we get to the famous “the President has been assassinated” dream Lincoln had.) The difficult thing about this book is the obvious slavery/vampirism metaphor. The obvious way of looking at this is that the entire concept of slavery gets cheapened by making it a vehicle for vampires to thrive. And, I guess that’s true. However. I was reminded of Jean Murphy while reading this book. Two reasons why: 1) It’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s job to teach you history. I’m really sorry if you didn’t know this stuff ahead of time. He wanted to write a fun, crazy novel, and he succeeded, and he managed to get lots of info about the real Abraham Lincoln’s life in there. He does a very good job of making all of the details about the time period feel true (hey, how ’bout that Presidential bodyguard, eh?). So, as a readable history novel: good job, Grahame-Smith. 2) If this book gets one person interested in that time period, whereupon they discover that all this shit is true, it just didn’t involve any fucking vampires, it involved real flesh-and-blood humans doing this to one another then, you know, WINNING. Because that’s actually where the real sense of dread comes in. Yeah, all of the over-the-top let’s-kill-these-fiends stuff is a lot of fun. The bad Photoshop jobs (sorry, they looked terrible on the iPad) are fun. But the descriptions of slave auctions and slave quarters and that half of the country was willing to fight the other half so that they could own people are all true, and you realize: this shit actually happened. And it doesn’t take a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the very name of which makes readers groan) — you can sucker readers in with Vampires! and bitch-slap them across the face with Not Really! LOL! If they don’t get to the point where they realize, OMG, this is all real (except for the vampire parts), well… that’s not going to be fixed by one pop novel. I wonder how many student term papers have talked about the vampire influence on the Confederacy. § You want to know the tidbit that’s really stuck with me from this book? Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas dated the same chick. Okay, it was called “courting” and wasn’t the same thing at all, but… I’m still that high school freshman, apparently. Originally published at Nobody Knows Anything. You can comment here or there. (Comment on this)