movies
14
Nov 11
“It transpires that the lifeboats are useless”
Gov. Bentley, on the state’s new immigration law.
That’s via The Daily State. (Update: That site later noted the most prominent sponsor of that bill has lost his job as head of the senate rules committee. Sen. Scott Beason has been … less well-measured than the governor.)
Speaking of politics, Newsweek is dropping the best feature they had:
It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.
Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.
Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.
They’re blaming the faster news cycle, because rich, in-depth coverage gets trumped in 140 character increments. But not always.
As indulgent journalism goes, this was good stuff, but the bigger problem for the series is money. Following the campaigns at length is an expensive proposition. Shame, too. I stopped reading Newsweek years ago, but always picked up this election edition, but it will be no more.
There is an alternative.
Politico and Random House have teamed up to produce serialized campaign e-books that will be released in four installments as the presidential race unfolds. The first is due out Nov. 30 and already has a title: “Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back.”
Might be worth checking out.
Speaking of e-books, the Los Angeles Times is publishing their first one, an expanded version of a two-part series, one of their most popular stories of the year. They’ve got several more in the pipeline, which seems a good idea. That might be a nice piece of supplemental content in the near term.
Otherwise your typical Monday, preparing for classes and things. Wrote a current events quiz I decided not to give. Did some more reading. Watched Pirate Radio, marveled at the music and the musical anachronisms. The movie was set in 1966, but a lot of the songs were newer than that. And there was a great Seekers line, but they were never played, as far as I noticed. This wouldn’t fit into the feeling of the film:
The writing was rather witty, the title of this post comes from late in the action, though not much that took place was unexpected. Still, a fine thing to listen to in the background. This was in the movie, but it is from 1968:
Same deal here, two years too young, but a fantastic song:
Cutting edge Australian rock from 1966:
And I could have put Dusty Springfield here, or the Isley Brothers. But a 1962 Otis Redding track is in the movie, and so it really isn’t a consideration:
Wondered where the day went, even as it was full of little things here and there that filled up the afternoon. Today having already slipped into some realm of memory, and tomorrow remaining out there on a horizon of possibility, maybe it is more important to know where tomorrow is going.
I have a pretty good feeling about that.
4
Nov 11
Bullets
Go to Google. Type do a barrel roll. This is important to designers there. Their users opinions? Not so much anymore.
I need a new RSS reader, stat.
Here’s a nice interactive chart from NPR. It examines unemployment across the country, breaking it down demographically with respect to age and education.
Watched Thor. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t as good or as bad as it could have been. I’m detecting the comic book-turned-movie theme, though. The better ones are the movies without love stories. Thus, Iron Man is the best of the comic book movies, as a function of Tony Stark’s character flaws.
This isn’t an anti-romantic movie statement, just a comic book observation. Thor had to love interest in the comics, one an Earth woman and another from his home realm. I’m embarrassed to say I looked that up on Wikipedia just now. But I’m guessing kids didn’t pick up Thor for the love story. They wanted flying and hammers and thunder.
And since director Kenneth Branagh is beyond blame, this can only fall to Natalie Portman.
Oh someone will blame Loki later, but you’ll know better.
A little something different from YouTube Cover Theater this week. Here are three different perspectives on Hey Ya. Makes you think.
This is the most clever video cover I’ve seen so far:
The obligatory ukelele version, with lovely vocal accompaniment:
Goofy songs deserve goofy covers:
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go cook dinner.
2
Nov 11
The toils of history
Late in the summer I was asked to read, and review, the new memoir of Dr. Wayne Flynt. He is a retired history scholar who was educated at Samford, where he would first teach. He’d go on to earn his greatest acclaim during his almost three decades of scholarship and activism while on the faculty at Auburn. Here’s the review, and a brief segment:
For his ground-level view from the center of many critical turning points in the state in the last 30 years Wayne Flynt’s memoir is worth reading.
But you’ve probably read this far to see what Flynt says the power struggles at Auburn. That starts in Chapter 12, which he’s titled In the Eye of the Storm.
Here again Flynt delves deep into Auburn’s long history to establish the setting. A lot of talk over the years, dating back to President Isaac T. Tichenor (1872-1881) has centered on the mission of Auburn University. Flynt — noting that Auburn has a unique history as a Methodist school that taught the classics before the Morrill Act created the land grant institution — almost distills decades of dispute to the mutual identities as an institution with an agricultural and mechanical mission and as an institution of the classics and other liberal arts. Flynt, the history professor in the College of Liberal Arts, acknowledges in his memoir the role and need for both, while portraying board of trustee member Bobby Lowder as a nearly exclusive supporter of the former.
From such divides Flynt recalls the pesky matters with the the SACS investigation and subsequent probation, the NCAA and, of course, coaching changes. Lowder, who wanted Auburn to aspire to be like Clemson, is of course the central figure.
If you’re interested in history, education, religion, the rural post-war South, the modern day political landscape of Alabama or, in particular, Auburn University, this might be a book worth your time.
Elsewhere, class prep, grading things, trying to figure out a new assignment and reading.
I also started The Kennedys. Sometimes Greg Kinnear is John Kennedy. Other times he’s just Greg Kinnear. You can totally buy Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, however.
You can see why Kennedy fans didn’t want this show to get picked up. Early scripts got panned. The final script is apparently different and, still not well liked. The mini-series, which won four Emmy awards and was nominated for three more, was finally aired on something called ReelzChannel. The History Channel passed because, “this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.”
As I write this The History Channel is in an Ancient Aliens marathon.
This is the best quote on the subject, in the New York Times of all places:
There is something wonderfully Kennedyesque about a backroom campaign to discredit a series that claims the Kennedy White House had more than its share of backroom shenanigans.
Also, methamphetamines? You learn something new from television everyday.
Google Reader. I got the update last night and was immediately dismayed. Not the least of all because it removed the thing I was reading at the time. And then I looked at it, and oh, the thing is just dreadful. Best part, you have to actually seek out how many unread items there are. And in Chrome, Google’s own, you can’t see that number across the top of the browser because there is no top to the browser. The design aesthetic is now working against them. A lot of people are complaining of wasted space — I have big screens, so I can only imagine their pain — but I do agree with everyone’s sentiment about the lack of color and the inherent un-usability that comes with this roll out.
There’s a word you don’t see with Google a lot. But, as they say, you get what you pay for.
If you decide to stay, then please do send us your feedback on today’s set of improvements. Google+ is still in its early days, after all, and we’re constantly working on improvements. If, however, you decide that the product is no longer for you, then please do take advantage of Reader’s subscription export feature. Regardless where you go, we want to make sure you can take your data with you.
So you take a product that works and people like. You turn it into something people hate — and apparently near universally judging by Google’s own un-answered message boards — to try and bring it in line with Google+, which is fighting for its own life. You strip the communal Share feature from Reader so you’ll have to do that in Google+, without considering that the user might have or desire different audiences and communities at different places.
Look, I like simplicity — Have you seen the rest of this site? This iteration was designed as an ode to basic code — but Reader has abandoned simplicity for starkness. Two horizontal rows over three columns, and now nothing to differentiate any of it. Stylistically it looks like a step back to 1997 (can the subscription button blink?) built for baud modems in old East Germany and devoid of color, graphics or anything of any kind that might be useful to the eye.
White space because the #FFFFFF pixels are cheaper. (They are not.) Air, as a design element in the print format is a beautiful thing. Air in an ultra-data format, an RSS reader, betrays the point of concisely packing a lot of information on a page. And when you have data, you’re going to need a color or two and a rule here and there to separate the basic elements. Now, it is all gone.
It is a polar bear, walking across an empty ice floe looking for food. Finding none, it has moved on. Also, the javascript is slower. There is no Classic Version reset button. No option. (Though the former lead designer has offered to help fix the thing.) Take it or RSS elsewhere.
So, yeah. Find me an reader that gives me a browser and a phone version that are both tolerable. Allow them to communicate with one another — “He’s read this feed on the computer, the unread items should disappear on the phone.” — and I’ll export and move on.
My only regret is that I would not be giving ad opportunities to Google. Not that their using that trick in the Reader just now.
Oh, and GMail is due a change too. I’m sure that’ll push more stuff to Google+ and allow even more spam through.
26
Oct 11
Grounded to my chair
The bulk of my day today was invested in conference planning. I was elected sometime back as a vice-chair of a division of a conference that we attend each year.
This means that in the summer I send out a call for papers. In the fall the papers role into my inbox. The scholarly work is then submitted to academics who read the papers under blind review, which is to say that the author never knows who the reviewer is and vice versa. The system generally works well, so long as you have enough reviewers. In this case I was fortunate.
So the reviews have come back and now I must determine the order of things for the subsequent conference. These papers go here, these go there and that sort of thing.
All of this being done under Outlook Web App, our new campus email platform, of which I am not a big fan. I’m sure others appreciate it more, but it has bugs — little tiny ants are crawling across my email — and the organization of it isn’t as intuitive to me as other email systems.
The archiving seems solid, and this is an important thing, though finding things at a glance is challenging. But, hey, at least I can use a cupcake theme! There is also a robot theme, cats, varying colors and other things. Microsoft Outlook could work on making the thing work in browsers — it tends to not be responsive to any clicks should it log out and force me to sign in again. That being too much to ask, they’ve offered me a nice leaf theme to run across the top of the page for autumn.
It is the little things.
Anyway, the conference paper scoring is done based on an intricate four point scoring technique. First authors are asked to evaluate the overall paper. Then seven separate criteria are pulled for individual scoring on a seven-point scale. After that comes a comparative evaluation of this paper next to other papers the reviewer has been asked to read. Also, the reviewer is asked for if and how the paper should be accepted into the program.
Doing this several times over for each paper, takes some time. And then each score must be evaluated. Then the numbers and results are triple-checked. After that the surviving submissions must be placed in some cogent order in the program. And then the format of the program must meet specific guidelines. The programmer must also get halfway clever with titles and then ensure that the various specific details are accommodated.
All of these little details take a while, and I was intent on making sure the numbers worked and everything lined up just so, no matter which way you considered the material. This is my first time to do one of these. Now I know why everyone wishes the new guy luck, and inches away if he starts asking too many questions.
That’s not true. People at conferences are generally very helpful. This is a neat little volunteer job because you meet even more people. It is good for me professionally and I read maybe a dozen more papers being submitted to this conference than I would have without the role. So I’ve enjoyed it. Now I can send the finish product off and move on to other projects. If I counted up the time I’ve invested in this particular task it would be close to a week, so far. Time well spent.
So I didn’t even leave my office for much of anything else today. Did see this story though, where we learn BP oil spill money is being spent on correcting a problem not in any way caused by the BP oil spill:
For the first time in a generation, Sand Island Lighthouse lives up to its name.
As of Monday afternoon, the lighthouse once again has an island of sand surrounding its base.
On Tuesday, a trio of bulldozers pushed sand pumping out of a big metal dredge pipe into a hill that rose about 8 feet above the surrounding sea. A team of surveyors staked out the contours of the still growing island, which will continue to increase in size for the next several weeks.
For decades, the lighthouse was a small island unto itself, a forlorn brick pinnacle perched atop a heap of rocks and concrete. Dredging of the Mobile Ship Channel had sliced through the natural sand delivery system that runs along the Alabama coast and prevented new sand from washing onto Sand Island.
Over time, the island — once large enough for the lighthouse keeper to graze a herd of cows — shrank beneath the waves. But now, thanks to $6 million in federal funding awarded in the early days of the BP oil spill, the island is back where it belongs.
This is an erosion issue, and new knowledge of hydrodynamics is supposedly being utilized to help keep the sand from being moved around by the nature currents in that area. But, still, if this manmade island disappears in the next few years — this sort of thing happens on the coast — it would be wasted money.
And, also, this on the ongoing saga of the new Alabama immigration law:
The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Congress Wednesday that her agency is not helping to implement Alabama’s immigration law.
In response to a question from U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., Secretary Janet Napolitano said the agency is instead working with the Justice Department in its legal challenge to the law.
As always on a divisive issue, the comments are especially insightful.
This evening I watched Captain America at the dollar theater. I was hoping for, as Claudia Puig wrote “A jaunty, retro style and stirring World War II story.” What I got was a polite mixture of Chris Barsanti’s “Little more than a dutiful origin story for a superhero” and a slight dash of Owen Gleiberman “Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.”
But, then, I’m more interested here in the contemporary imagining of the 1940s — not enough took place in “New York” but rather in the woods of Austria, which doesn’t really say a lot more than “Trees!” I could care less about Hydra or the Red Skull character. The former has been done better in every incarnation and the latter should have been left in the comic books.
Let’s not even get into the “Look kids, steroids are OK if you’re heart is in the right place” subtext. I don’t care to read that deeply into this, though I’m sure some offended critic has. It doesn’t bother me, I’ve never been that impressionable, but it is in there.
So I’m left with those two bits at the end, the false finish and the post-credits tease. The best things these movies do is promote the next one — which is ingenious, mind you — meaning you’re paying to sit through the movie and wait for the next commercial. Why do we do that?
Also, I’m coming to the conclusion that Nick Fury is Han Solo. I don’t even know that character, as my comic book readings were limited, but I can see that the story without Fury is just OK. Everything seems to mean a little more when he’s in the shot.
Makes me worry about the Thor DVD waiting at home.
