fine whine

Right now the date of the previous post just below this is from last year*. I'm not going to make much in the way of excuses for the gap. I've posted enough of those before. Believe me when I say the last several months were not uneventful.

Just before, or soon thereafter, that aforementioned previous post, I was told at work that my position was being moved to another non-downtown location, and my computer, my phone, my chair and me would move with it. At the time I was more than unhappy about that prospect, and everything hasn't yet played out completely, but for the time being I'm pretty happy there with things and people as they are. I just hadn't felt like writing about it. More changes are to come later this year as we are due to move again, so I can't get used to too much yet.

So what else? Why haven't I written? I've still been doing pretty much the same stuff, save for writing about it. I've been watching just as many DVDs as before, playing some video games here and there (I've come to think that the PSP was a great platform that is not too far from being the next Dreamcast for how a system's actual potential turns into how well it does for the market at large) but none of them was so noteworthy as to merit anything more than the odd mention on Twitter.

Oh yes, Twitter. To say I haven't written since August is to ignore all the words I've txted and tweeted to my Twitter status updates several hundred times, up to one hundred and forty characters each. It's no substitute for this site, and at some point I'll probably need to come up with some sort of export/dump so I can grab that chunk of my digital output and shoehorn it in with the rest of this, assuming I have some sort of output in the days and years ahead.

But enough with the melancholy. If I try to fit everything in I'll lose steam on what got me back at the keyboard in the first place. This post isn't very good, but I'm rather a bit out of practice. If you'd bear with me for a couple weeks (assuming I write during them) that'd probably be best for the both of us.

So I just watched a DVD. It was called Who killed the electric car? and it was not a great film, documentary or otherwise. It was too long, too slanted, too unfocused, and too often contrived. I recognized that, even while I was watching it (and really, knew about it going in thanks to most of the less-than-favorable reviews it garnered back in 2006), but it still got to me.

The argument put forward by the film, and I hope I'm not spoiling it in any way because people really should see this movie, is that the Zero Emission Vehicles mandated in California a decade ago, and produced by GM, Toyota, Honda, Ford and probably others not mentioned, were great technology that worked, and deserved far better than to have been swept under the rug, the cars not only forgotten but crushed and/or shredded, and their environmentally-friendly mantle taken up by less-than-worthy successors, and the blame falls upon not only the car companies, but also the government(s) and consumers alike. And a few other "suspects", but I don't want to give everything away.

Shifting gears slightly for a moment, I must admit I have a problem throwing things away that aren't yet broken and useless. The headphones I use daily at my desk only work in one ear. At least two of the digital cameras I use have pieces broken or missing. My iPod, already on its third hard drive, often needs less-than-gentle encouragement (that is, whacking it with my hand repeatedly) to get going. One of our cars, not my daily driver anymore, doesn't have working air conditioning. I'm using reclaimed car speakers for my home theater system. I have piles and heaps and bins of stuff that may turn out to be useful (and many have, though less than a majority of the things I haven't thrown out). So just seeing the stacked GM EV1s (read about them here), crushed and left to rot, bothers me on that level. Never mind the environmental aspects of crushing all those batteries, and metal and plastics that likely won't get recycled.

When those cars were crushed (and likewise the shredded Hondas, etc) with them was crushed a major hope for making things better for today and tomorrow both. Here (and now I'm talking about those EV1s) was a fleet of perfectly adequate, technologically advanced but entirely functional, people moving vehicles that people wanted to own, liked to drive, and loved to talk about. Sure, there are some doubts that switching cars from burning fuel to running batteries charged by burning other fuels, but those concerns could be handled easily if we, as a country, if not as a global society, stopped looking backward and dragging our heels today and looking forward with fear and trepidation, and embraced new and promising technologies for what they could do to get us from always needing to burn things to get what we want.

To oversimplify a related issue, new nuclear power plants could generate a whole lot more, relatively clean and considerably safe, electricity, but they happen to produce some by-products that could be devastatingly useless (read: dangerous and deadly) if they fell into the wrong hands. Fear of terrorism isn't the only thing keeping American reactor technology in the 70s, but from what I've heard, it's one major contributing factor.

Back to the cars, though. It's easy to follow the filmmakers when they point out that barely a month passed between GM's acquisition of the Hummer nameplate, and the shutdown of the EV1's assembly line. Hummers could, and did, make money for GM hand over fist, and they weren't the only oversized peoplemovers on the road, just the most ridiculous. It should be telling that the suburban SUV is an American cliche, this being the land of selfish demand and greed. It's easy to follow their implication that the auto companies wanted nothing to do with the electric cars because it would shut down the whole regular maintenance and repairs and replacement part revenue streams. That there partially explains why so much more support has been thrown behind hydrogen fuel cell cars (untested and as-yet-unavailable technology) and gas-electric hybrids (the benefits of an electric motor along with the regular maintenance of a gas one too!) instead of all-electric ones.

Anyway, I'm losing steam quickly. My rage and sadness are subsiding, somewhat. It's easy to see this whole thing in the same light as the current economic crisis, brought about by unchecked and rampant greed in the housing and mortgage industries. It's all about greed. I'd say I'm all for capitalism, but honestly, if there's a better way to make a better future than sheer profit motive alone, that'd be super. If there's a way to stay in business, and satisfy shareholders, while doing something innovative that can lead some real change (like, say, creating a fleet of working electric cars and pickups and actually letting normal people drive and buy them), companies should want to do it. Even if it means they take a hit on their bottom lines for a while. Hell, right now everybody's taking a hit anyway, and for doing business as usual, not from worthwhile research and trailblazing new technologies.

If I were in charge, I know which I'd want to make a case to do, but then again, I'm not in charge.

I have a daughter, and I'm likely not finished having kids, either (as scary as that thought may be, for you and for me) and I should not, cannot, must not act now without every thought of the consequences to the world I'll leave them. Hell, if I do no better than both of my grandfathers, I've still got sixty years of living here too.

* I'm of divided mind as to what to do with the only other unpublished post I even got around to creating in draft form. Most likely I'll publish and date it that day, instead of backdating it as I had many a time before. And at the rate I'm going, I'll be doing that around Independence day. Hopefully sooner.

This was meant to be a list of accomplishments, but somewhere along the line I got sidetracked*

In 2008, I

• survived a tax audit (well, it was only the city, and they told me I didn't need to make up the difference. I already figured out how much it was and how I'd missed it when I got there).
• stopped playing MMOs, again.
• watched ten Bollywood movies - fifty fewer than 2007. Maybe I got a little burnt out on them after all.

* I'm publishing this in March in an effort to clear up old unpublished material. Why not, I figure, fix up the stuff I started writing and abandoned, rather than trying to create new material from scratch?

I realize I'm a little late to the party in bashing Jumper, but I felt (uncharacteristically as of late) like writing, and hadn't dissed the movie thoroughly enough when last I mentioned it. It's not a good movie.

When I described it to my friend yesterday I detailed the first twenty minutes being passable, if not faithful to the book, and those twenty minutes being let down by the ensuing hour or so of crap.

I should point out that I have not recently read the book sharing a title and a few moments with this movie, but I recall liking it enough to be unhappy this movie is so bad. I can't remember it in enough detail to really criticize the film for accuracy, but from what I do recall, and what reviewers have written, there's not much left of the original idea.

Spoilers abound ahead - for the last few of you who ever intend to watch the movie despite my warnings (Don't watch it!) you may want to look elsewhere*

The movie begins with what is probably a common occurrence for the protagonist, David (played by some kid other than Hayden Christensen): he's trying to give a cute girl a snow globe, and a bully thwarts his plan and humiliates him. The globe gets chucked onto a frozen river, through the ice of which David soon plunges. Panic ensues, but nobody could anticipate what happens next: swept along by the river current under the otherwise intact ice, he doesn't drown but finds himself (and a large puddle) suddenly appearing amidst the stacks of his local library. Several books (shelves worth of them, really) are likely destroyed, in what can only be seen as a literal attack on literature, namely the source novel.

In that one scene (or perhaps the later one where he drops an entire house on said library) pretty much every suspicion I had about what the movie's producers thought should be done with Gould's novel should've been confirmed, but I kept going.

And it only got worse. Sam Jackson appears, stabbing some random flickering kid (another jumper?!) in a jungle somewhere. And he's got white hair, which I could see as an unsubtle nod to the fake albino antagonist of The Da Vinci code, which I have neither seen nor read. Regardless, from that point on the movie is more or less a cliched chase action movie.

Now, there's the element of the chase to the novel, too, but it's surrounded by the story of a kid coming to grips with learning to use his power, and to become a well-rounded, decent human being at the same time.

The movie dispenses with the former in a quick montage, and never gets around to doing the latter. David, as played by Hayden Christensen, is a brooding, spoiled brat who finds fit to steal lots of money, but leave childishly-scrawled IOUs in the vaults, to pay for all the toys with which he fills his massive apartment. Davy in the book preferred a cave out west along with the amenities of his childhood house, but the idea of a lair like that only shows up in the movie when we find Griffin, another jumper (and star of Gould's tie-in prequel) who has apparently taken over a small cavern system based on how much space he seems to have.

Key to several plot points is a new jumping mechanic in the movie: so-called "jump scars", a residue left after a jump that allows other jumpers, and Sam Jackson with advanced technology, to follow the first jumper around. Why the screenwriter found fit to add that, and the whole Paladin/jumper war, and all the rest is beyond me inasmuch as the book was pretty good on its own without any of those elements. Davy in the novel also grows up considerably over the arc of the book, whereas even late in the film David's talking about comic books and whining and overall acting like a petulant toddler.

There was a sequel to the book (Reflex) that tends to get shelved with the grown up books (not in Young Adult as Jumper, and it's a good read. From what I've heard a sequel to the movie is also planned, and as David, after half-befriending, teaming up with, fighting, and abandoning Griffin and marooning Sam Jackson somewhere out west, gets the girl and learns the shocking truth about his mother, stands, girl in arm and wistful gaze in his eyes looking vacant at the end, such is not an impossible thing. But it's going to need to be a lot better for me to consider watching it. And re-casting David wouldn't hurt.

* Which, frankly, is sound advice ("look elsewhere") to those people when faced with the movie, but I suppose I'm repeating myself. Don't watch it!

I've long had something of a mental list of actors whose movies I'd check out more or less just because they were in it, not on any other merit (or at least I'd look for no further motivation). Sometimes such an approach has worked out for me, and sometimes it hasn't*.

Recently, though, I think I'm starting to develop a second list of actors who I don't like, whose movies I check out despite starring or being prominent in them. Top of the list, now that I've watched Jumper would be Hayden Christensen. I have other objections to the movie, but his turn as the main character was definitely not something I liked.

But that's just one movie. It's not like I've watched others he's also starred in recently, right? Except for the otherwise quite good Shattered Glass, again in which I could not stand him. The only way to tell if it was his character or Hayden himself I despised would be to remake the film, but everybody else did so well in it that doing so would be a great disservice to all.

Speaking of disservice to all, a rant about the lackluster acting of Hayden Christensen would not be complete without at least a mention of his take on pre-Darth Vader Anakin Skywalker in the latter two prequels to the Star Wars trilogy, through which he broods, mumbles, smolders and whines, but is greatly overshadowed for awfulness by the films themselves.

So of the four movies mentioned here, a mere one of them was even worth seeing despite him, and then, only just so. So why do I even try?

* Take, for example, John Cusack. Stephen King's 1408 would not probably have been a movie I'd readily check out, other than John (and to an almost insignificant degree, Sam Jackson) is in it. But it was enjoyable enough. Not so, on the other hand, was Identity**, or the overrated Grifters. I'm in the middle of the road on Martian child, and will readily admit to only watching it for Cusack, not the premise. And I won't watch it again, I'd say.

** Which brings to mind another, less prolific (at least, as far as I have seen) actor whose work also would prompt addition to a list of actors I don't like: Pruitt Taylor Vince. Not long ago I watched The Legend of 1900 in which he figures quite prominently, and, well, there's no nice way to say it but to see the guys is distracting. He has a condition called nystagmus which means his eyes move involuntarily. Which means when they show his face in closeup, his eyes are darting all over while he's talking and acting and whatnot. I suppose that says something about my character, to let such an insignificant detail overshadow what could well be some fine acting, but that, and my less-than-great appreciation for jazz, sunk that movie for me. Vince has been in many a film I've seen, some passable (Constantine and Nurse Betty) and others not so great (S1m0ne), but the only other one in which he's at all memorable to me is Identity, in which his nystagmus doesn't really work against him - it's just a bad movie.

1. A pillow
2. A flashlight
3. A chair
4. Firewood and/or kindling
5. Another pillow*

* Seriously, I went camping and didn't take any pillows.Or flashlights, chairs, or firewood. I've heard campers aren't really supposed to bring their own firewood anyway, but the pillows and flashlight would've been handy. Also, my 8' x 6' was supposedly able to fit three sleeping people. For that matter, it's only supposedly 8' wide - it seemed much smaller inside than that.

Yesterday, on a tip from Scott, I checked out the first-ever Twitter-based fiction writing contest. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a combination micro-blogging application and social-networking tool all rolled into one, but the significance is that all updates (dubbed 'tweets') are 140 characters or less. Thus the 140-character (no more, no less) story contest.

I'd written my entry fairly early, but having mulled the idea over some more, I wrote, well, some more*:

I found a time machine that only makes things younger. Spent the afternoon making burgers into veal. And then, well...now I need to grow up.

She was scared. Zombies attacking, and only with a lot of help were the houses made safe. But now mommy said that the neighbors were hungry.

She ran. He ran, pulled a gun, and sprayed bullets at her. She dove into the canal, and he swam after her. Was this a chase, or a triathlon?

Found a lamp in the antique store. Rubbed it, and a genie appeared. I wished I could understand what he was saying. It was "You get 1 wish".

I need to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I'd take lessons or talk to another owner, except the nearest one looks mad I'm stealing his bike.

* Only one entry per person, though. So the rest of these are just for fun. Then again, so's my "official" entry also, since I'm not going to win.