McCain: Czechoslovakia a Concern

On July 14, 2008

"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern."

- John McCain

In case you missed it, Czechoslovakia stopped existing in 1993.

Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360

Final Fantasy 13 will be released on the Xbox 360 as well as the PS3.

Fred Phelps to douche-up Douche's Funeral

Fred Phelps, leader of Westboro Baptist Church, has announced plans to state a protest at the Funeral of Tony Snow. I am full of conflict. I hate Fred Phelps. I hate Tony Snow. Yet...I don't know, this seem poetic somehow.

Wii MotionPlus

The Wii MotionPlus:

Nintendo's upcoming Wii™ MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote™ controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3-D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player's arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion.

Next up is the Wii MotionPlusPlus followed shortly by the Wii MotionPlusPlusPlus and finally there is a Wii MotionPlusPlusPlusPlus slated for release in 2024.

Bush Lifting Offshore Drilling Ban

Despite the fact that we cannot drill our way out of our current energy crisis President George W. Bush will this afternoon lift the Executive Order ban on offshore drilling. While no drilling can occur unless Congress lifts its own ban this move by President Bush is still frightening and misguided.

Four dollars a gallon is not an unrealistic, exorbitant, unmanageable price for gasoline. Hell, I pay upwards of $60 a gallon for Vodka. Yes, when we were in high school gas was only $.99 a gallon. But if we abandon that historical perspective and rather objectively assess the price within the scope of our present economy? $4 is not a lot of money for a gallon of a necessary liquid. The problem is that we as a species are engaged in a shift in our infrastructure from cheap energy to expensive energy; so we're needlessly pissing ourselves stupid rather than simply adapting. That lack of adaptation is what infuriates me more than anything else.

Somehow humanity has convinced itself that it exists independent of the world in which it lives, that despite our knowledge of the price of gas, its limited nature, and our inability to drill ourselves out of the problem people still buy SUVs and waste their money on needless extravagances. People are still mowing their lawns with gas-powered mowers. Yet we seem willing to destroy the environment and grasp at straws out of that fundamental desire to maintain normalcy.

That's what I do not understand about this whole situation. We want this unending supply of cheap fuel so that we can maintain our current economic philosophy of buying stupid shit simply because we can. We don't want to grapple with discovering a new source of fuel. We'll just buy a hybrid car and use the money we save on other stupid shit. We're simply remaining complacent with what we have and attempting to whine and bitch our way via drilling, ignorance, and half-assed compromises to a continuation of the way things are.

And it doesn't make sense.

The problem is not the environmental issues, the political issues. The problem is not even the idea that we have to drill our way out of this mess. The real problem, the true dilemma, is that we've managed to entrench ourselves in this happy little fabricated view of normalcy as a house and a car and two kids and a dog that we're so addicted to it, so unwilling to compromise and adapt that we're completely unwilling to accept a change in our situation. We would rather dig in, drill in, and cling to this illusion of perpetual gasoline and our Beaver Cleaver idealized little Ziplock existence rather than change.

That's the wholly bizarre aspect of this whole situation. We're not striving for zero emission automobiles or, hell, even abandoning automobiles for something better. We're not striving to embrace far more rational economic policies and, say, stop buying stupid shit. We're not striving for anything. We're merely wallowing in this normalcy of gasoline addiction and middling cars with adequate gas mileage. Hell, at last week's G8 meeting they agreed to halve emissions by 2050. That's not change, not striving, not grasping or engaging. That's foisting the responsibility off on someone else.

I'm not necessarily hoping for an awakening of the proletariat. I'm not envisioning a future in which we stop wasting money on pets and movies and reach a peak of mutual enlightenment; I don't imagine that we'll embrace the reality of our situation and so establish a harmonious existence with the world in which we live.

I just think it would be keen if people who bitch about the price of gas would stop mowing their lawns with gas mowers; I think it would be awesome if we embraced marginal change and adapted rather than dig in and bitch until the last possible moment. And at the very least if we could stop blatantly, wastefully, wrecking the planet with this gluttonous, slothful lurching through our own moronic, lazy addiction that would be just fucking dandy. Let's at least drill efficiently and rationally, in a loose sense of the word, rather than just open up the Outer Continental Shelf out of a hope that doing so will compell the fuckheads to vote for McCain.


Aside: I've looked at Bush 41's Executive Orders and Clinton's Executive Orders but could not find the Offshore Drilling ones.

Hellboy II Pseudo-Review

The Star Wars movies are essentially composed of the following:

1 Fight Scenes
2 Clumsy Romance
3 High-Speed Chases
4 Questionable Acting/Writing
5 Freak Shows
6 Talk of Destiny

Hellboy II unproves on this formula by replacing "high-speed chases" with "relatively-low-speed chases". This isn't to say that Hellboy II is a Star Wars movie, but the comparison was impossible to avoid because it's not very inaccurate.

From the top.

Fight Scenes - there are a lot of them. Essentially, the movie would be about 14 minutes long if all the action was removed, and those 14 minutes would consist almost entirely of Howdy Doody and karaoke. The fights are pretty cool in general, but the number of them make this very much an action movie. No time for charming character moments, no time for build-up or anticipation, no time for much of anything besides killing monsters into pieces.

The original Hellboy, I thought, struck a pretty good balance between action and inaction. There was time for things to happen, and there was time to reflect and exhale and nurture a buddy-movie and an "I like you because you're different like me" romance all while gradually bringing the main story to its climax.

Even Star Wars showed a few minutes of briefing before the Death Star battle to give it some weight. Hellboy II would have played a 5 second sound byte explaining what the objective was as the pilots were already fighting. And there would be no fewer than 2 Death Stars.

Clumsy Romance - The original movie's romance was awkward because its male hero was awkward. To be sure, this film's lover is awkward as a character too, but the real problem is that this film keeps most of his exchanges with his beloved on a telepathic level, hidden from the audience. If the fight sequences followed the same laws as the romance subplot, both combatants would begin with a lingering high-five that would allow them to decide the outcome of the fight without actually showing us anything. We'd just have to take their word that the fight was amazing.

Relatively-Low-Speed Chases - Maybe a subset of the fight scene in that they occur in between them. Not much else to say. People run after each other and they're not in speeder bikes or pod racers.

Questionable Acting/Writing - If Jeffrey Tambor ad-libbed all his lines, then he needs to be more closely scripted, and if he was following a script then god help us. Also, Ron Perlman needs a new fake laugh along with more/better rapport with his enemies. The sense of humor from the first movie was all but absent in this film, and although the acting wasn't perfect in either film, only the second contained scenes that made me want to look away because I was taught not to stare at people who are embarrassing themselves.

Freak Shows - You know when Luke and Obi-Wan enter the cantina and Lucas shows us around the bar so we get a chance to appreciate all the crazy masks ILM made? Not necessarily a bad thing, but when the movie is short on time because of all the fighting, it doesn't make a lot of sense to blow so much footage on a troll market that appears on film more like the Disney Land ride version of a troll market. On the plus side, a lot of the monster designs are pretty rad, and I do dig the freaks that come out of del Toro movies, and some of the freaks even move the plot along rather than drag it to a near halt, but this movie's cantina scene is rather weak.

Talk of Destiny - This is actually a hook that makes me enjoy Hellboy. The nature/nurture experiment that's going on is something I like to see, so I was rather disappointed when it was relegated to a couple of quips (including a god-damned "we are not so different, you and I" from the villain) and a monologue.

In short, Hellboy II spent so much time fighting and looking at monsters that it all but discarded everything that made the first movie funny or charming or interesting. I honestly don't care if I ever see Hellboy II again.

Letterman Reviews Dark Knight